Brattleboro

Brattleboro and the Revolution: A Frontier Town at the Crossroads of Independence

Long before the first shots of the American Revolution echoed across Lexington Green, the land around Brattleboro was already contested ground. The town's Revolutionary story does not begin in 1775 but reaches back more than half a century earlier, to a time when the Connecticut River Valley was the outer edge of English settlement in North America. In 1723, the colony of Massachusetts constructed Fort Dummer on the western bank of the Connecticut River, just south of present-day Brattleboro village, making it the first permanent European settlement in what would eventually become Vermont. Fort Dummer was established in 1724 by Lt. Governor William Dummer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and was built by the militia of the Province of Massachusetts Bay under the command of Lieutenant Timothy Dwight. It consisted of a 180-square foot wooden stockade with 12 guns manned by 55 men — 43 Massachusetts militiamen and 12 Mohawk warriors. The fort was built to protect the northern frontier of Massachusetts from raids during the period of intermittent warfare between English colonists and the Abenaki and their French allies. The site of Fort Dummer was located at a strategic confluence of travel routes: it was on the point just north of British settlement after which a number of rivers joined the Connecticut to flow south to the sea. For decades, Fort Dummer served as a garrison, a trading post, and a symbol of colonial authority in a landscape that defied easy governance. Built to defend the colony against Abenaki and French attacks, it was a trading post from 1728 to 1750 while still manned by troops against skirmishes. Fort Dummer was garrisoned through the French and Indian War but abandoned in 1763 and dismantled by 1771. A granite monument was set to mark the original site of Fort Dummer in 1901, but it was removed seven years later to the intersection of Vernon Street and Cotton Mill Hill Road before the 1909 completion of the Vernon Dam on the Connecticut River, which flooded the area. That early history of jurisdictional ambiguity — was this Massachusetts territory? New Hampshire's? New York's? — would become the defining tension of Brattleboro's Revolutionary experience and, indeed, the origin story of Vermont itself. From New Hampshire's perspective, Fort Dummer provided evidence that the colony had land rights in what is now Vermont — the fort had been built by Massachusetts but was afterward supported at the joint expense of both provinces, and all three parties (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the Crown) viewed the outpost as standing on New Hampshire soil.

The confusion deepened dramatically in 1749, when New Hampshire's royal governor, Benning Wentworth, began issuing land grants west of the Connecticut River, including the charter for the town of Brattleboro (originally spelled "Brattleborough"), granted in 1753. The town was named for the first grantee, Colonel William Brattle, Jr. of Boston — a man who, in one of history's deeper ironies, never set foot in his namesake town. Major General William Brattle was an American politician, lawyer, and militia officer who during the early years of the American Revolution had gradually shifted to the Loyalist camp. In 1774, Brattle unwittingly sparked the Powder Alarm, leading to a riot in which armed mobs forced him to flee to Boston. When the British evacuated the city in 1776, Brattle went with them to Nova Scotia, where he died several months later. Thus the very man for whom the town was named became one of the Revolution's most prominent Loyalists — an irony that foreshadowed the deep divisions that would soon tear through Brattleboro itself.

The first town meeting of which there is any record was held in Brattleboro in 1768 , when the freeholders of the town of Brattleborough in the county of Cumberland elected their first town officers, choosing John Arms, Esq. as moderator and Samuel Wells, Esq. as supervisor. By 1764, the British Crown had ruled in New York's favor in the boundary dispute, placing the New Hampshire Grants — including Brattleboro — under New York's jurisdiction. Cumberland County, which encompassed Brattleboro and the southeastern Grants towns, was created from Albany County in 1766, reverted in 1767, and re-created in 1768. Brattleboro's leading men held their offices under New York authority, and many of Brattleboro's earliest settlers were Loyalists who favored Great Britain's King, or Yorkers who preferred New York's form of government.

The first blood of the Revolutionary crisis in the region was shed not at Lexington or Concord, but just up the Connecticut River from Brattleboro, at the Cumberland County courthouse in Westminster. The Westminster Massacre occurred on March 13, 1775 — more than a month before Lexington and Concord — when a sheriff's posse killed two men, William French and Daniel Houghton, after a crowd occupied the courthouse to protest the evictions of several poor farmers by New York court officials. Brattleboro men were deeply entangled on both sides of the affair. Samuel Knight, the only lawyer in town, Samuel Gale (son-in-law of prominent Loyalist Samuel Wells), and Benjamin Butterfield, the clerk of the court, were three Brattleboro men who arrived in Westminster with their weapons as part of the sheriff's posse.

Twenty-one-year-old William French was hit five times by bullets unleashed from the guns of Brattleboro men.

Butterfield, Brattleboro's first tax assessor and a Tory at the time, was shot — likely by friendly fire — and taken prisoner; he would soon reexamine his allegiances and fought with the Green Mountain Boys in 1777.

Samuel Knight immediately left town after his role in defending the crown during the Westminster Massacre. The aftermath sent shockwaves through the region. Green Mountain Boys vandalized the homes of prominent Yorkers in Brattleboro and chased an attorney from the town.

The events at Westminster radicalized much of the Grants population, but Brattleboro remained stubbornly divided. Some people, like Samuel Wells — the town's most powerful landowner, who had built Brattleboro's first sawmill on the Whetstone Brook — were loyal to the King of England and wanted the colonies to remain a part of Great Britain. Others supported the colonial rebels who wanted to break free. When fighting broke out at Lexington, Stephen Greenleaf, owner of Brattleboro's first store, promised to send 20 bushels of wheat from his grist mill to help feed the rebels of Massachusetts.

Young Stephen Greenleaf Jr. reported that approximately twenty Brattleboro men served on the American side during the Revolution.

The local militia was attached to the Continental Army and commanded first by Colonel Rensselaer and later Colonel Morgan; Greenleaf reported that he served with "several other Green Mountain Boys — the draft was made in Dummerston as well as in Brattleboro." The local militia remained through the surrender of British General Burgoyne in mid-October 1777.

On his way back from Saratoga, young Greenleaf claimed to have walked through the Bennington Battlefield in New York, where he picked up a few small cannon balls that are now in the Brattleboro Historical Society collection.

Though southeastern Vermont lay outside the main theater of military operations, it was not beyond British strategic ambitions. General Burgoyne ordered Colonel Baum to "proceed from Batten Kill to Arlington…and then proceed to Manchester,…you will proceed by the road over the mountains to Rockingham…you are afterwards to descend the river to Brattleburg (Brattleborough)." Baum's column, of course, never reached Brattleboro