Every Name on the Monument Was Someone's Neighbor

The Groton Monument is 134 feet tall, and you can climb it. There are 166 steps to the top, and from the observation deck you can see across the Thames River to New London, where the companion raid burned the town on the same day. The geography makes the twin attacks immediately comprehensible: Arnold hit both sides of the river at once.

But the monument's most important feature is not the view. It is the names carved into the stone at the base. Approximately 85 names, each one representing a man from this community who died on September 6, 1781 — many of them after the fighting was over.

What visitors often do not immediately grasp is the scale of loss relative to the community's size. Groton was a small town. Losing 85 men in a single afternoon was devastating in a way that larger communities might have absorbed more easily. Nearly every family was affected. The wives, children, and parents of the dead lived in the surrounding countryside, and the grief was not abstract — it was personal and comprehensive.

Jordan Freeman's name is on the monument. He was a free Black man who fought alongside his white neighbors and died defending the same ground. His presence on the monument — in 1830, three decades before the Civil War — is significant. Whatever the racial attitudes of the era, the people of Groton included Freeman among the honored dead because he had earned that place with his life.

The hardest part of interpretation here is the massacre itself. We have to tell visitors that these men were killed after they surrendered. The conventions of warfare were violated. Colonel Ledyard was stabbed with his own sword. Wounded men were put on a cart and sent careening down the hill. These are facts, documented by multiple sources, and they are difficult to present without either sanitizing or sensationalizing them.

We try to let the monument speak. The names are there. The stones are there. The earthworks are there. The view across the river to the ruins of what Arnold burned is there. Sometimes the most powerful interpretation is the simplest: stand on this ground, read these names, and understand what happened here.