John Stark - Brattleboro Historical Society

Stephen Greenleaf and the Revolution

In April, 1772, Stephen Greenleaf was appointed Justice of the Peace for Cumberland County in the Province of New York. He had recently moved from Boston with his family and purchased 800 acres of land and a saw mill from Samuel Wells. The 800 acres would become the most valuable land in Brattleboro, but 250 years ago the two room home that the Greenleaf family moved into was the only building in the area now known as Main Street. The 800 acres purchased from Wells had originally been the land set aside for New Hampshire’s Governor Wentworth when the town was chartered in 1753. In 1766, after the King of England had declared that Brattleboro was really a part of the province of New York, Samuel Wells traveled to Albany and obtained New York title to the land. In the 1770’s the Great River Road, now Main Street, ran from Fort Dummer to the Wells […]

Battle of Bennington Revised History (1843)

In 1843 the local paper, The Vermont Phoenix, published a revised history of Vermont’s influence during the Revolutionary War. The events in the Revolutionary War that were up for reinterpretation concerned Brattleboro and the Battle of Bennington. In 1843 the War for Independence had been over for 77 years and people thought they knew what had happened. History books had written about the reasons and outcomes of the war but new information was coming to light from sources that had not previously been represented in the documentation concerning the Revolutionary War. History books had long established that the Battle of Bennington, between the British and the Americans, was one of the turning points of the war. The Americans won the battle capturing, killing and wounding almost 1000 British soldiers. The British objective of the battle had been to seize as many supplies…including food, horses, cattle, wagon and oxen from the Vermonters as possible. The British […]