This past summer, Jean-Pierre Mouraux closed his poster gallery in California's Wine Country so that he could reopen it as a free museum devoted to Uncle Sam. He doesn't generally answer the phone at the museum because he doesn't like to lose his rhythm when he's talking about the real Uncle Sam, Samuel Wilson, an early government meat-supplier whom Mouraux reverentially calls "an American hero, an American patriot."

But on the last Thursday in July, the phone at the Uncle Sam Original Poster Museum in Sonoma, Calif., rang with a determined frequency, so Mouraux broke character and answered the line. It was big news from his wife, Cecile: Someone just sent an anonymous fax alerting them that Uncle Sam's boyhood home in Mason was going on the market.

Jean-Pierre Mouraux stands in front of Samuel Wilson’s old home in Mason. Mouraux plans to live there and make it into a museum. (Photo by ERIC MOSKOWITZ / Monitor staff) Zoom Purchase Photos Online

Though he'd first learned of Uncle Sam less than a year earlier, Mouraux knew instantly what he had to do - drop everything and fly to Mason, before he could lose the chance to own the house, live there and turn it into a museum.

"I am almost heart attack,"said Mouraux, whose command of English becomes a bit less precise when he gets excited, which is often. "I close my museum. I take a taxi. I rush to Oakland Airport. Monday night I take plane. Tuesday morning I am in Boston. Eight o'clock, I am in Mason."

A few minutes after meeting the real estate agent, Mouraux made a successful offer to buy the house, a 230-year-old Cape on four acres, for just under $400,000.

"It's a dream," said Mouraux, who plans to live in the house and turn the barn into a museum for his collection, which stands, at the moment, as a cache of 350 original posters, 150 pieces of sheet music and various other Uncle Sam-themed knickknacks. "Uncle Sam is the most important symbol. To have that, it's incredible."

A historical marker stands outside the home. (Photo by ERIC MOSKOWITZ / Monitor staff) Zoom Purchase Photos Online

Yes, there was a real UncleSam, and he lived in New Hampshire as a teenager during the salad days of the republic.

Believe it or not, he was even related by marriage to another real person whose legacy is shrouded in myth -"one of the most famous American guys. It's Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman," Mouraux said, on a visit to Mason the other day. "It's incredible."

The man behind the myth

Samuel Wilson was born in 1766 in what is now Arlington, Mass. His father was active in the Sons of Liberty and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he was wounded, according to research Mouraux has compiled. On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere crossed the Wilson property on horseback during his famous ride to Concord, Mass., to warn of the British advance.

At 14, Wilson and his family moved to Mason, in southern New Hampshire, settling in what was then a hundred-acre farm. A year later, Wilson joined the Revolutionary Army, tending livestock and mending fences. His family home sat - and still sits - a quarter-mile from Captain Benjamin Mann's house, a handsome colonial that today houses the municipal offices, police station, public library and historical society for modern-day Mason, a town of about 1,100. Mann was a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill and a prominent resident. The young Wilson favored Mann's daughter, Betsey, but needed to make his fortune first. In 1789, he left on foot for Troy, N.Y., with his brother, Ebenezer. After establishing a successful brick factory and meat-packing business, Wilson returned to Mason and married Betsey Mann in front of the hearth at her father's home, in 1797.

Birth of a legend

Back in Troy, the Wilson brothers grew their meatpacking business along the Hudson River. During the War of 1812, they provided 2,000 barrels of salt pork and 300 barrels of beef to a government contractor named Elbert Anderson who supplied American troops. Wilson had become a prominent businessman and was known affectionately as Uncle Sam. As the story goes, on or about Oct. 1, 1812, a group of officials from Albany, including New York governor Daniel Tompkins, toured the Wilson plant. One of the visitors inquired about the initials "E.A.-U.S." stamped on the barrels. Instead of Elbert Anderson and United States, a worker said the U.S. stood for Uncle Sam, and a legend was born. Soon enough, it became shorthand for the government.

The personification of the government was nothing new, dating back to characters like Yankee Doodle and Brother Jonathan. But the popular image of Uncle Sam that would evolve had little to do with the real Samuel Wilson. The bearded, top-hat-wearing Uncle Sam was first drawn by the cartoonist Thomas Nast later in the 19th century. In World War I, the image was cemented into the consciousness by James Montgomery Flagg's now iconic "I want you" Army recruitment poster.

In 1961, Congress passed a resolution saluting the "strength and idealism that characterized the life of Samuel Wilson" and recognizing Wilson as the official inspiration for Uncle Sam. Later, Massachusetts and New York issued similar proclamations. In 1988, President Reagan declared Sept. 13, Samuel Wilson's birthday, to be national Uncle Sam Day. By then, the New Hampshire-reared businessman and patriot had been dead more than a century, having succumbed to old age at 88 in 1854.

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