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. 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.

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 a Loyalist exile — a fitting emblem of Brattleboro's divided loyalties during the Revolution.

Settlers poured in under New Hampshire titles, cleared farms, built homes, and organized towns. But in 1764, King George III issued a ruling that placed the western boundary of New Hampshire at the Connecticut River, effectively transferring the entire region — already known as the New Hampshire Grants — under the jurisdiction of New York. The consequences were immediate and deeply felt in Brattleboro and neighboring towns along the river. New York refused to recognize the New Hampshire land titles, demanding that settlers either repurchase their land under New York patents or face dispossession. For families who had spent years breaking rocky soil and building communities, this was not an abstract legal dispute; it was a direct threat to their livelihoods and their futures. The resentment that built across the Grants during the 1760s and 1770s would become the political fuel for revolution — not only against Britain, but against the authority of neighboring colonies.

Brattleboro, as one of the oldest and most established towns in the southeastern Grants, occupied a pivotal position in this struggle. It was the seat of Cumberland County, a governmental unit created by New York to administer the region. Although a few towns with New York land titles, notably Brattleboro on the Connecticut River, supported the change, the vast majority of the settlers in the sparsely populated frontier region rejected the authority of New York. The county courthouse at nearby Westminster became a flashpoint. New York-appointed officials held court there, enforcing laws and jurisdictions that many Grants settlers regarded as illegitimate.

Colonel Samuel Wells, a prominent Brattleboro militia officer, stood at the center of this volatile world. He was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on September 9, 1730, married Hannah Sheldon there in 1751, and settled in Brattleboro in 1762 — a journey of just twenty-five miles north into the frontier.

By the time the war came, Samuel had lived in Brattleboro, on his 600-acre farm, for fifteen years. He was said to have been the "principal officer" of the local militia, where he earned the rank of Colonel. He had been a Justice of the Peace and a judge of what was called the "Court of Common Pleas."

From 1773 until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Samuel was the Representative for Cumberland County at the colonial assembly for New York Province. Wells was deeply entwined with New York authority, and in 1774 Wells helped the New York Assembly draft the "Bloody Acts," legislation that offered a reward to anyone who would kill or capture leaders of the Green Mountain Boys.

The mounting tensions between New York authority and local settlers erupted violently on the night of March 13, 1775, at the Westminster Courthouse in an event that would become known as the "Westminster Massacre." The courthouse was the site of a bloody confrontation between a New York sheriff's posse and roughly 100 area men who were trying to prevent foreclosure proceedings against local farmers.

The occupiers were ordered to leave the courthouse by Sheriff William Patterson, who, when the rioters refused to disperse, rode to the town of Brattleboro, a Yorker stronghold, and recruited "25 residents for the purpose of 'keeping the peace'."

Many of the sheriff's posse were armed. Among the men were some of the most prominent of Brattleborough. Samuel Knight, the only lawyer in town, Samuel Gale, the son-in-law of Samuel Wells, and Benjamin Butterfield, the clerk of the court, were three Brattleborough men who arrived in Westminster with their weapons. The confrontation turned deadly when the posse opened fire on the courthouse occupiers. William French, who was a 21-year-old farmer from Brattleboro, was killed — born in 1753, he died eight days shy of his 22nd birthday.

A second man, Daniel Houghton of Dummerston, also died from his wounds.

The New England Historical and Genealogical Register of 1923 states that French "has been claimed by some as the first martyr to the cause of American Independence."

The massacre's aftershocks rippled directly through Brattleboro. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys pounced on the incident for political advantage. Their power base was in southwestern Vermont, around Bennington, and they had long clashed with settlers in the Brattleboro area.