USA > Vermont > Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont > Part 8
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99 | Part 100 | Part 101 | Part 102 | Part 103 | Part 104 | Part 105 | Part 106 | Part 107 | Part 108 | Part 109 | Part 110 | Part 111 | Part 112 | Part 113 | Part 114 | Part 115 | Part 116 | Part 117 | Part 118 | Part 119 | Part 120 | Part 121 | Part 122 | Part 123 | Part 124 | Part 125
It was while in England watching his lit- igation that he wrote his History of Vermont, which contains much valuable matter, though it is marred by some striking errors, due to the fact that he wrote almost entirely from memory.
Our state seal is among the things credited to Allen, and quite a story is told of it by Henry Stevens, who got it from an aged member of Governor Chittenden's guard. The design was engraved on one of the Gov- ernor's horn drinking-cups, made from the horn of an ox, bottomed with wood, and done by a British lieutenant who used to come secretly to the Governor's house in Arlington, bringing him letters from Canada during the progress of the Haldimand intrigue, and who also improved the opportunity to "spark " a hired girl in the Governor's family. While once staying there several days, he happened to look out of the west window of the resi- dence on a wheat field of some two acres, in the distance, beyond which was a knoll with a solitary pine on the top, and he drew the scene on the cup. This cup attracted Allen's attention and he adopted it for a state seal, except that he brought a cow from over the fence into the wheat.
Ira Allen loved Vermont and in that fact is the secret alike of his achievements and his offences, if such they were, and the message that he sends down to us is in the words he penned after he had experienced much of the wrong and ingratitude that shadowed his later years :
" I have travelled through some of the finest countries in Europe and paused with rapture on some of the most picturesque views, and I do not hesitate to say that Ver- mont vies with any of them."
HERRICK, COL. SAMUEL .- One of the romantic figures of the Revolution and the few years before, and that is all we know of him. He came to Bennington about 1768,
rce ed
en d ed
d
n
d
10
1 1
d
50
BRIAKINKIOGL.
FAY.
and soon after the Revolution moved to Springfield, N. V., but prior to and after that time his career is a blank to written history. lle was a captain in the Ticonderoga ex- pedition and was detailed by Allen with a party of thirty men to capture Skeenesbor- ough (now Whitehall ) and take into custody Major Skeene and his party. He succeeded completely, secured the young man and a schooner and several bateaux with which they hastened to Ticonderoga and which gave Arnold the material for his victory at St. Johns. In the summer of 1777 he was made colonel of a regiment of rangers which the council of safety ordered raised to help meet Burgoyne's invasion. He and his ran- gers bothered Burgoyne a great deal, ob- structed his advance by felling trees over the roads and rolling stones in his path so that Burgoyne was compelled to cross Fort Ann Mountain with his heavy train of artillery by a road that was almost impassable. They harassed his rear, cut off his supplies, and in a thousand ways did the work of genuine " rangers " to increase the difficulties of the British descent. It was a work which contri- buted materially to the final ruin of the in- vasion, and for it the credit is due the council of safety which ordered him to keep it up, while Schuyler was continually order- ing him to abandon it and join the defen- sive army in the front of Burgoyne. He was at the battle of Bennington with such of this regiment as had then been enlisted and a body of local militia as a separate detach- ment, making a body of 300 men with which he led the attack on the rear of Raum's right simultaneously with the assaults of Colonels Nichols, Hubbard and Stickney on other parts of the line, and he did his part of that glorious day's work skillfully and gal- lantly.
In September of the same year he and the Rangers with Colonel Brown's regiment gained the command of Lake George, drove the British from Mounts Independence, Defiance and Hope, and forced their evacu- ation of Ticonderoga. He was afterwards in command of the southwestern regiment of the state militia and did active service on several occasions. The council in February, I 778, ordered a batallion of six companies to be raised under command of Herrick to aid a proposed attack of Lafayette on St. Johns, but the enterprise was given up.
Herrick had a special letter of thanks from Gates and from the Vermont council for his part in the Lake George expedition.
BREAKENRIDGE, JAMES, whose house was the scene of the opening struggle with the Yorkers, and who was sent to Eng- land with Capt. Jehial Hawley of Arlington, as agent for the settlers in 1772, was a
native of Massachusetts, and of Scotch-Irish descent. He came to Bennington, and as his farm was right on the border of the Grants up against the twenty-mile line from the Hudson river, it was naturally the first point of attack. His name appears in the New York riot act of 1774, but he was a quiet and inoffensive man who never en- gaged in riots, was in fact a man of the most exemplary habits in every way. Ile was a lieutenant of the militia company formed in Bennington in 1764. He died there, April 16, 1783, at the age of sixty-two.
FAY, DR. JONAS .- One of the most act- ive, level-headed, and industrious of the men who laid the foundations of Vermont, the craftsman of the Declaration of Independ- ence, and the man from whom we get nearly all of the early records. His service covers a wider field than that of any of the other fathers. He was prominent among the early settlers, coming to Bennington in 1766 and practicing medicine there, except for his calls to public duty, for thirty-five years. Being a man of education and pen and ink training, he was secretary for most of the meetings of the committee of safety and conventions until after the formation of the state government, keeping his records in account books or on slips of paper, some of which have been lost. He and his father, Stephen Fay, the landlord of the famous Catamount Tavern, were appointed delegates from Bennington and neighboring towns to appear before Governor Tryon in 1772 in response to his invitation for a statement of grievances, and to urge him to discontinue violent proceedings. He was clerk of the convention of settlers in March, 1 774, which resolved to defend their cause and leaders by force, when Allen, Warner, and the others were threatened by New York with outlawry and death. In January, 1776, he was clerk of the Dorset convention, that petitioned Congress to be allowed to serve the common cause independent of New York. He, and Chittenden, Reuben Jones, Jacob Bayley, and Heman Allen were appointed delegates to prepare and present to Congress the declaration and petition of independence, and he was its draftsman. He was secretary of the convention of July, 1777, that framed the constitution, and he was one of the coun- cil of safety to administer the affairs of the state during that summer of storm and diffi- culty. He was four times, between 1777 and 1 782, an agent of the state to the Continental Congress. As soon as the state government was launched he was elected a member of the Governor's council, and held the position for seven years to 1785. In the necessity because of the scarcity of lawyers, as well as the disposition of the times to make judges
51
BAKER.
FAV.
of men who had not been "learned in the law," he was elected judge of the Supreme Court in 1782. He was also judge of pro- bate for the five years following, until 1787.
Dr. Fay was a native of Hardwick, Mass., where he was born, Jan. 17, 1737. At the age of nineteen he served in the French war, in 1756 at Fort Edward and Lake George as clerk in Capt. Sam Robinson's company of Massachusetts troops. He accompanied Allen's expedition to Ticonderoga as surgeon and continued in that capacity until the Green Mountain Boys were relieved by the arrival of Colonel Elmore's regiment from Connecticut. He was then appointed by the Massachusetts committee of safety to muster in troops as they arrived for the defense of that post. He was also for a time surgeon of Warner's regiment organized later in the season for the invasion of Canada.
After he had helped launch the new state on her career of independence and pros- perity he returned to the practice of his pro- fession at Bennington, until 1800, when he moved to Charlotte, then a few years later to Pawlet, and then back again to Bennington, where he died March 6, 1818, at the age of eighty-two, after one of the most useful careers to his fellow-kind that it is given any man to fill.
Professionally, history says little of him, for a physician's labors, though most beneficent to the generations that follow, are little known about even by the next generation. But he was a man of extensive information, well di- gested for mental strengthening, and bold and determined in opinion and action. Evidently he was also a most likeable man personally, for he was on intimate terms with all the Ver- mont leaders and nowhere do we find any expression of jealousy of him or any feeling but one of confidence in his fidelity and capacity.
Dr. Fay was twice married and left numer- ous descendants.
FAY, COL. JOSEPH, brother of Dr. Jonas, and son of the tavern keeper Stephen Fay, was born at Hardwick, Mass., in 1752, and came to Bennington in 1766. He was secretary of the council of safety from September, 1777, to March, 1778, and of the Governor's council from March, 1778, to 1794. He was also secretary of state for three years after the resignation of Thomas Chandler, Jr., in the latter part of 1778, until 1781. He was Ira Allen's assistant in most of the Haldimand negotiations and did some skillful work in fooling the British. It took him over two weeks, on his trip of July, 1781, to overcome their suspicions, but he finally did it, and he and Allen managed to shift the risk and responsibility of the first public proposal of a treaty on to Haldi-
mand, and then got him to put it off. The latter reluctantly consented to proceed by proclamation to the recovery of Vermont. He had the form of the proclamation all prepared when the news of the surrender of Cornwallis saved Allen and Fay the necessity of concocting further excuses for delay, which seemed to be about exhausted.
Colonel Fay moved to New York City in 1794 and died there of yellow fever in 1803.
BAKER, REMEMBER .- A cousin of the Allens, and, by marriage, of Seth Warner, one of the men for whose head New York offered a reward, was among the most influential and useful of the early leaders and was fast grow- ing towards a larger fame when his life was cut off at the age of thirty-five.
He was a native of Woodbury, Conn., born about 1740. In early youth he lost his father, who was shot by a neighbor while out hunt- ing, and he was apprenticed to a joiner, where he learned to read and write and acquired the habits of prudence, energy and self-reliance that served him so well in after years.
At the age of eighteen he served in the ex- pedition against Canada in the French war and saw much service about Lakes George and Champlain, and in this way acquired much knowledge of Vermont lands and their attractiveness. He was present at Ticon- deroga when Abercrombie fell. He rose to be an officer before the war closed, and gained much distinction by his bravery and discretion. He came to Vermont with the first wave of immigration to the west side, in 1763, at the age of twenty-three, and spent much time exploring lands and hunting, and a year later he settled in Arlington, where he built the first grist mill on the grants north of Bennington, which attracted many settlers to that vicinity, and identified himself unre- servedly with the cause of the settlers when the trouble with New York arose. He is de- scribed as cool and temperate in council, but resolute and determined in action. He usu- ally wished to inflict severer penalties on the Yorkers than his companions. Perhaps his own tough experience afforded some reason, for, stimulated by the reward offered, an at- tempt was made in March, 1772, to capture him, by a dozen partisans of New York under the lead of one John Monroe. They broke into his house in the dawn of a Monday morning, pounded and maltreated his chil- dren, attempted to slash his wife with a sword, and even to fire the building after plundering it. Baker at first attempted to defend himself in his chamber, but to draw the attention of his assailants from his family burst a board from the end of the house, es- caped and ran. Then, according to the story written by Ethan Allen for the Hartford Courant, they set a large dog upon him,
,
d 1
tal ent of
e IT
S
5 =
WAL.BRIDGI ..
COCHRAN.
overtook him, pinioned him, refused to allow him to dress for he was just as he arose from the bed threw him into a carriage where they clubbed and ent and slashed him unmercifully until blood streamed from va rious parts of the body, and then drove rapidly towards Albany. Three men who pursued were fired upon by Monroe's party, and robbed of all their effects to the amount of $to. But another rescuing party was formed at Arlington as soon as the news of the kid- napping spread, and pursued with such vigor that it came up with Monroe's gang at Hud- son's Ferry, just opposite Albany, drove the captors off, and took Baker back in triumph to Arlington.
Baker was with Allen as a captain at Ticon- deroga, and also with the regiment of Green Mountain Boys when the invasion of Canada was begun in the fall following. When Schuyler took command of the northern de- partment he sent Baker ahead to reconnoiter the enemy's position and obtain information of the military situation in Canada, and it was while out on this duty that he was shot by the Indians in the vicinity of St. Johns.
He was not only a brave and capable offi- cer and a progressive business man, but he was a kind neighbor and he relieved the dis- tress of many a family.
He left five children, one of whom, also named Remember, became a lawyer of some note in New York state.
WALBRIDGE, EBENEZER .- Prominent as both a military man and civilian, and one of the few, after the original eight, admitted to the secret of the Haldimand corres- pondence, was born at Norwich, Conn., Jan. I, 1738, came to Bennington about '65, and died there October, 1819.
The family was a brave and brainy one, tracing back to Sir William de Walbridge of Suffolk county, Eng., who distinguished him- self in the Fourth Crusade, under Richard Cœur de Lion. One of General Wal- bridge's grandsons, Hiram Walbridge, was a member of Congress from New York in 1853-'55, a granddaughter was the wife of Gov. Washington Hunt of New York, and David S. Walbridge, congressman from Michigan, 1854-'59, born in Bennington in 1802, was probably a relative.
Ebenezer Walbridge was a lieutenant in the regiment of Green Mountain Boys before Quebec in 1775, and was adjutant of the regiment, and he fought at Bennington where his brother Henry was killed.
He was in this campaign sent by General Lincoln with five hundred troops to Skeens- borough, Fort Ann and Fort Edward to alarm and divide the British forces, and this diversion had an important bearing on the campaign and was another important factor
in the ruin of Burgoyne. He was lieuten- ant-colonel in 1778, and in 1780 succeeded Herrick in command of the Bennington regiment, and he also commanded a regi- ment of militia in that vicinity in 1781, and in October of that year was at Castleton to meet a threatened invasion by St. Leger. In December of that year when New York was threatening to make war on the state, he was in command of the troops before which the New York militia fled. He was subsequently elected brigadier-general. He twice represented his town and was a mem- ber of the Governor's council 1780-'88. Hc was an enterprising business man, and in 1784 built and operated at Bennington the first paper mill in Vermont. Personally he is described as a man of most kindly and winning qualities.
COCHRAN, ROBERT .- Who was honored as one of the eight outlawed by New York in 1774, and who was one of the recognized leaders in the "beech seal" days, came from Coleraine, Mass., to Bennington about 1768, but soon moved to Rupert. He was a captain among the Green Mountain Boys before the Revolution, and after the Westminster massacre, appeared within forty-eight hours at the head of forty men to fight the cause of the people against the "Court party." With a file of twenty-five he assisted in conveying the prisoners taken the next day to the jail at Northampton. He was a captain in the Ticonderoga ex- pedition in the May following, and assisted Warner in the capture of Crown Point. He afterwards joined Colonel Elmore's regi- ment, where he held a commision as cap- tain until July 29, '76, when he was pro- moted to be major by resolution of Con- gress. The next October we find him on the frontier in Tryon County, N. Y., com- manding at Fort Dayton. He served with reputation in the '77 campaign, probably on Gates' staff. He certainly bore dispatches from the general to the committee of safety on the Grants. The next year he had an adventurous trip to Canada, where he was sent to obtain information of the military situation, and narrowly escaped arrest and execution as a spy. A large reward was offered for his capture, and he was taken ill while hiding in a brush-heap from his pur- suers. Hunger and disease at length com- pelled him to venture to approach a log cabin, where he heard three men conversing about the reward and planning his capture. When the men left he crawled into the pres- ence of the woman of the house, frankly told her his name and plight, and threw himself on her mercy. She gave him food and a bed, and kept him hid in the house until the men had returned and left again,
53
ALLEN.
ALLEN.
and then directed him to a place of conceal- ment a little off, and she stealthily fed and nursed him there until he was able to travel, knowing all the time how much money it would be worth to her to betray him. Years afterward he met her and rewarded her generously for her womanly ministration.
In September, 1778, Cochran was in com- mand of Fort Schuyler and did active and efficient work on the frontier. In 1780 he was promoted to a lieutenant-colonelcy. He came out of the war like most of the heroes who had fought through it, deeply in debt, and Sparks, in his life of Baron Steuben, gives a pathetic account of Cochran's distress, as he viewed the circumstances in which his ser- vices to his country had left him and the empty-handedness with which he must go to the wife and children who were awaiting him in the garret of a wretched tavern. It is a scene to which, for the credit of human nature, attention cannot be too often directed, show- ing what man with all his littleness and im- perfections is capable of doing and sacrific- ing for an idea.
Later years, however, brought deserved prosperity to Cochran. He lived after the war at Ticonderoga and Sandy Hook, N. Y., dying at the latter place July 3, 1812, at the age of seventy-three, and being buried near Fort Edward.
ALLEN, HEMAN. - The eldest of the Allen brothers, and a most capable man of affairs, as he proved himself before his early death, at the age of thirty-eight, was born at Cornwall, Conn., Oct. 15, 1740. He was only fifteen years old when his father died and he soon had to take the care of his widowed mother and the younger children. He was a merchant at Salisbury at the out- break of the Revolution, and probably his legal residence was there though he was prominent in Vermont affairs, a delegate from Rutland to the convention in January, 1777, that declared independence, and from Colchester to the Windsor convention that framed the constitution, an agent of the Dorset convention in January, 1776, to pre- sent their petition to Congress to be allowed to serve in the common cause under officers to be named by Congress, and the minutes of the council of safety showed that he re- ported on the mission July 24, 1776. His name in fact appears on the record of all the conventions, except two, from July, 1775, to July, 1777, and in two he was delegate at large or adviser and counselor, once with Seth Warner. He served on the most im- portant committees, as of that to fix the basis of representation of the towns in January, 1776, and that to treat with the inhabitants of the eastern part of the state in July of that year. He represented Middlebury once.
His service in the mission to Congress in 1776 was very tactful and probably pre- vented an adverse decision which would have been ruinous to the new state at that time. His brother Ira regarded Heman Allen with even more admiration than Ethan.
Heman was in the Canadian campaign as a captain in the regiment of Green Mountain Boys. He was at the battle of Bennington as a member of the council of safety, and he caught a cold there and died of decline in the May following. He was a considerable owner of Vermont lands. Henry Hall says : "Of all our early heroes few glide before us with statelier step or more beneficent mien than Heman Allen. His life of thirty-seven and one-half years was like that of Chevalier Bayard, without fear and without reproach. A merchant and a soldier, a politician and a land owner, a diplomat and a statesman, he was capable, honest, earnest and true."
ALLEN, EBENEZER, one of the framers of the constitution, a brave and successful partisan leader, and the pioneer abolitionist, was not of the Connecticut family of the other famous Vermonters, and only distantly related to them. He was born in North- ampton, Mass., Oct. 17, 1743. His parents moved, while he was a child, to New Marl- boro, Mass., where his father soon died, and he, as one of the oldest children, had to bear much of the burden of the support of the family, with only meagre opportunities for education. He was for a while, at least, an apprentice to a blacksmith. In 1762 he married a Miss Richards, who survived him for many years, and in 1768 he came to Ben- nington, living there for three years, and thence proceeding to Poultney, where he helped in the first settlement of the town. He was with Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, and was a lieutenant in Warner's regiment of Green Mountain Boys in Canada in 1775, and he moved to Tinmouth soon after. He was a delegate from there to the several conven- tions of 1776, and to the historic ones of the next year that declared the state's independ- ence and framed the constitution. In July, 1777, he was captain of a company of min- ute men in Herrick's regiment of Rangers, and he greatly distinguished himself at Ben- nington. At one time during this fight, with only thirty men, under cover of a natural breastwork of rocks, he stood against the main body of Raum's army, and a hot and well directed fire threw the assailants into confusion and temporary retreat. He saw considerable service later in the war, was promoted to be major in the Rangers, and afterward several times a colonel in command of a regiment in the state's service. He participated with Brown, Herrick and John- son in the movement in the middle of Sep-
54
AI.I.I.N.
tember, 1777, to ent off Burgoyne's com- munications by attacking the posts in his rear, and with only forty men he made a brilliant night attack on Mt. Defiance, occu pied by two hundred men, captured it and had turned its guns on Ticonderoga when Brown decided to give up the attempt to take the fort. Two months later, when the British abandoned Ticonderoga, Allen cut off their rear gnard and with a force of men took forty-nine red-coat prisoners. He used to explain in after years how he did this. It was by a ruse, and by the employment of most all his men scattered about to yell and make the English think the woods were full of Her- rick's Rangers, or "white Indians," as the English called them, and of whom the in- vaders had learned to have a mortal terror. In this capture was the negro slave of a British officer, Dinah Morris, with her infant child. "Conscientious that it is not right in the sight of God to keep slaves," he gave her a written certificate of emancipation and caused it to be recorded in the clerk's office at Ben- nington, where it stands with the clause for- bidding slavery in the constitution, and Judge Harrington's blasphemous, yet reverent de- cision that he would require a "bill of sale from God Almighty" as proof of ownership before he would remand a runaway negro back to slavery, as one of the brightest jew- els in Vermont's imperishable diadem of honor.
He was in command of the fort at Ver- gennes in 1778 or 1779. He was also in 1779 on the board of war.
In May 1780, Sir John Johnson, made a raid from Canada into the Mohawk Valley and Governor Clinton hastened to the south end of Lake George to intercept his return. The Governor dispatched a request to the commander of the Vermont troops at Castle- ton to send aid. The next day Colonel Allen wrote that he had reached Mt. Inde- pendence with two hundred men one hun- dred more would follow at once, and he would lead the three hundred to the scene if the Governor would send boats to trans- port them. Johnson escaped by way of Crown Point, but Clinton in writing to Con- gress was constrained to say that this punct- uality did great honor to the men of the Grants. There is but little record evidence left of the military events of the four years after 1779, as it was all "play war" so far as Vermont was concerned, with almost no fighting. But it is certain that Allen per- formed much service about Lake Champlain, and mainly on the western side.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.