The Battle of Bennington: The American Revolution’s Unsung Pivot

Monuments to frontier chutzpah in Ye Olde Vermont

T he American Revolution was far more than the Declaration of Independence, of course. In 1777, in southwestern Vermont, my little, rural postage stamp of a home, shots not exactly heard round the world were fired. The Battle of Bennington unfolded on August 16 about 20 minutes from my house. There, an impromptu Patriot militia, farmers, teens, craftsmen, and adventurers, discrepant in character, whipped General Burgoyne’s army and threw the Brits into a tizzy. They lost at Saratoga weeks later largely because they lost at Bennington.

Burgoyne was fresh from recapturing Fort Ticonderoga from the Patriots, who’d seized it in 1775, led by Ethan Allen, his corps the Green Mountain Boys, and the skunk-to-be Benedict Arnold. Around 1770, Allen had formed the local militia, initially called the Bennington Mob, to harass New Yorkers challenging Vermont land titles. By 1777, Allen and his crew were back home. Ticonderoga fell to the British with barely a fight.

After their Ticonderoga win, Burgoyne and his troops — British, Loyalists, Natives, and hired Hessians — marched south. Having already occupied New York City in 1776, the British hoped to seize Albany. Once Albany fell, the stretch from the Hudson River Valley to what is now Westchester was a sitting duck. New England, the revolt’s ground zero, would be split from its confrères.

Controlling wee Bennington was essential. Though newly settled and having only 500 people, it sat on the intersection of what’s now Route 7, running the western length of New England, and Route 9, running west to Albany. Bennington also was a massive supply hub from which Burgoyne’s forces desperately needed to draw. The local Patriots — and the command of the Continental Army from Washington down — knew that battle for Albany was on everyone’s dance card. The question was where. “It was the grain, pork chops, and grapeshot, stupid.”

In a ferocious 18-hour fight aimed at taking Bennington, Burgoyne lost nearly 1,000 men, the rebels a tenth of that. It cost him a month as his army needed to regroup. The win turbocharged Patriot morale. It also gave the rebels time to assemble the army that beat Burgoyne weeks later at Saratoga. The French, sensing a cause with legs, took our side, as some wag might have said.

The British war minister called the Patriots’ Bennington victory “fatal.”

Vermont’s not known for art, but, when it comes to the Battle of Bennington, there are a few things worth a look. The battle monument, handsome and pure Vermont, is the obvious place to start, since, at 300 feet, the thick, rusticated obelisk is visible for miles. It’s craggy and spartan, isolated and autonomous, as are most Vermonters. It occupies the site of the victuals and ammo depot that Burgoyne wanted so badly. Its blue-gray limestone complements Vermont’s basic palette — green in summer, red in fall, white in winter, and mud-brown in spring. It’s got the look of authority. It’s also the second-tallest unreinforced masonry building in the world. Only the Washington Monument is taller.

President Benjamin Harrison dedicated the monument on August 19, 1891. A crowd said to be in the tens of thousands joined him, among them Calvin Coolidge, on his way to his freshman year at Amherst. Coolidge’s birthday, by the by, is today. He’s the only president born on July 4.

A gala 13-course dinner in honor of Harrison was held at the elegant Bennington home of John McCullough, a former Vermont governor. The place is now a nice house museum. Today, the dining room is set to look like it did that night. The hardscrabble hamlet Bennington was no more. It had become a prosperous mill town, market town, and county seat. McCullough himself had made a fortune in the Gold Rush. His house, today called the Park-McCullough House, evokes Gilded Age luxe, country-style.

Two full-length portrait sculptures stand by the monument. General John Stark (1728–1822) commanded the Patriots. What a man. As a teenager, he was kidnapped by the Wabanaki Natives and dragged to Canada. He was a hero in the French and Indian War and, in the Revolution, at the Battles of Bunker Hill, Trenton, and Princeton. He later sent Major André to the gallows for espionage. Of all the Revolutionary War generals, Stark was the purest of Cincinnati. After the war, he went home to his plow and stayed there.

In 1809, Stark was invited to a reunion of Bennington battle vets, but he was too old and infirm to go. “Live free or die. . . . Death is not the worst of evils,” he wrote at the end of his RSVP. The best-known state motto — now New Hampshire’s — was thus born. His sculpture shows Stark rallying the troops to charge and, in the process, immortalizing his wife, Molly, home in New Hampshire with their eleven kids. “These are your enemies, the Redcoats and the Tories,” he thundered. “Tonight our flag floats above yonder hills, or Molly Stark sleeps a widow.” In New Hampshire, the line’s more famous than the battle.

Though a general and the strategic visionary behind the Bennington triumph, Stark has his sculpture — a recent addition that was unveiled in 1999 — tucked behind the obelisk monument. In front of the monument, rising impressively on a ten-foot plinth, is a larger-than-life, full-length bronze sculpture of Colonel Seth Warner (1743–1784), Stark’s subordinate. Warner was, like most pioneers in this part of Vermont, from Connecticut, migrated due north in the 1760s for more and cheaper land. He was a farmer, road surveyor, and, with an uncanny ken for medicinal plants, a doctor, of sorts. He’d fought in the 1775 siege of Ticonderoga.

A local, Warner knew the lay of the land and was a tactical genius. He and Stark recruited the 2,000 Patriot men who fought in the Battle of Bennington, drawing mostly from what’s now New Hampshire, Vermont, and northwestern Massachusetts. On the battlefield, Warner and his men made bratwurst of the Hessians.

Vermont has many calling cards. We’re the Green Mountain State, of course. Billboards are illegal, an aesthetics triumph. We’re the maple-syrup capital of America. Beetlejuice was filmed here. There’s Bernie, a phenomenon inscrutable to me. Ben & Jerry’s, which boycotts Israel, is here. Their latest flavor, I’m told, is Hezbollah Honey, joining Bolshie Berry and Trotsky Tart.

We don’t like New Hampshire, for lots of reasons, and the Bennington Battle monument was a Vermont proposition. New Hampshire’s opinion wasn’t asked, so Stark, surprise, surprise, was without credit for decades. The Warner sculpture has been in front of the obelisk since 1910. Vermonters like New York even less. The very words “New Jersey” are a pejorative, but that’s another story. Bennington, Shaftsbury, and Arlington are the Vermont towns most implicated in the Battle of Bennington, and all border on rural New York towns, so they’re our neighbors. We even like the tourists from the city and its suburbs.

Our problem is New York of yore. New York once claimed what’s now Vermont, and so had New Hampshire. In early 1777, Vermonters declared their independence from both. New Hampshire was fine with it. New York got pork-faced. Things were sorted, but not definitively until Vermont was about to become a state — the 14th — in 1791.

Old resentments do linger. The Saratoga battle memorial, also an obelisk, is about 30 miles northwest of Old Bennington. Saratoga’s came first, its capstone installed in 1882. It’s Gothic Revival, and it looks like a fancy Episcopal church in Manhattan with a steeple run amok. Packed with an Egyptian touch here and there, bronze plaques, stained glass, and mosaics, it’s very Gilded Age. I can’t help looking at the Bennington Monument as the Bennington Mob’s parting shot — a stick in New York’s eye. Our obelisk is twice as tall. It’s elegant and simple. It evokes tenacity, gravity, and self-control. All were virtues of the new republic. The memorial at Saratoga is, well, too Tory.

Here’s some info that’s not top secret, but I’ll confess: The Battle of Bennington is Vermont’s claim to Revolutionary fame, but it actually happened in New York, in Hoosick, right across what is now the state line of New York and five short miles from the Bennington Monument. In 1777, there was not much “there” in Hoosick, and, anyway, New York tried to steal all of Vermont once, so the least we in Vermont can do is steal one of its laurels. The battle site in Hoosick, owned by the State of New York, is open to the public and gives a good blow-by-blow look at the big event.

Stark headquartered at Fay’s Tavern, a few hundred feet from the monument. The building burned in 1871. There, also, Ethan Allen planned the assault on Ticonderoga in 1775. Vermont’s council on safety, its rudimentary war government, met there in the late 1770s, its workings lubricated by rum. A bronze sculpture of a catamount — a now extinct local panther — stands on a seven-foot granite base near where the tavern stood. A catamount? Why? Tavern keeper Stephen Fay is said to have shot a catamount in the early 1770s, stuffed it, and placed it above the tavern sign, facing west as a “do not trespass” warning to rapacious New Yorkers.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison stayed at the Walloomsac Inn in 1791 when they came to town for a battle reunion. Local Elijah Dewey built it in anticipation of a boom in southwestern Vermont, which eventually happened, but he didn’t realize that he’d post his first “no vacancy” sign when Hessian and Tory prisoners stuffed the place in 1777. It has been expanded a few times and was a resort hotel in the days when southwestern Vermont, in the mountains, first attracted summer people. It was a motel when I was a child.

With sagging porches and balconies, a façade that cries “paint me,” and an overgrown yard, it’s now murder-mystery scary. The writer Shirley Jackson lived and worked in North Bennington, home of Bennington College. The Walloomsac might have given her sleepless nights and juicy ideas.

The First Congregational Church wasn’t built until 1805, but Bennington’s Congos are the oldest Christian denomination in Vermont. The church is exquisite, a serene, gossamer shoe box. It’s New England Palladian with plenty of windows and no Baby Jesuses allowed. Windows and light signaled Protestant transparency. It’s one of the purest, finest Federal-style churches in northern New England. Congregationalists descended from the Puritans, who tended not to like either kings or Anglicans. They provided the spiritual horsepower for the Patriot cause.

The old cemetery hugs the church’s north and east sides. It’s called Vermont’s sacred acre for its abundance of memorials to local grandees, 75 Patriot soldiers, and a mass grave for dead Tories — from 1777, not from today’s election in the U.K. Lots of open space here in Vermont, but not that much! Five Vermont governors, all early ones, found their forever home here. Nothing in Vermont is flashy. The cemetery is mostly a sea of white marble gravestones, many carved with small heads meant to be souls, stylized trees and birds, and simple garlands.

In back of the cemetery — gravestones nearly abut it — is the Bennington Museum, my local museum, with its trove of Vermont art, archives, and material culture. The museum excels in displaying and interpreting all things Vermont. One gallery is devoted to the Battle of Bennington. A cannon the Hessians left behind is there, as are guns, letters, powder horns, and much else. A twelve-foot-wide mural by Leroy Williams displays a parade of prisoners in front of the Walloomsac Inn as Stark and Warner inspect. Williams painted it in 1938 for the WPA. It’s a child’s delight — blood and gore — with, for the adults, good, clear interpretation of events before, during, and after the battle.

The museum notes that the commitment to the Patriot cause was far from universal. Ye olde Arlington, where I live and two towns north of Bennington, was mostly Tory. The Battle of Bennington brought the revolution close to home. An intensified mood of defiance forced Loyalists to repudiate king and country or else. “Or else” meant confiscation of homes, land, and animals and a swift boot to Canada. War stinks, but you do what it takes to win.

So there’s much on my turf — lefty Vermont — from which a contemporary patriot can draw pride and inspiration. Happy Fourth of July. In 1777, for we Vermonters, the fight for freedom turned personal, but all of us, today, are still in the fight. May the spirit of 1777 be with us!