The Danbury Raid: Wooster's Last Stand
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
In late April of seventeen seventy-seven, a British force of roughly two thousand troops under General William Tryon landed on the Connecticut coast and marched inland to Danbury, where they burned Continental Army supplies and much of the town. Generals David Wooster and Benedict Arnold, with Colonel Abraham Gould, rallied local militia and Continental soldiers to harass the British withdrawal. General Wooster, sixty-six years old, was mortally wounded in the fighting on April twenty-seventh and died five days later, one of Connecticut's highest-ranking officers to fall in the Revolution.
The engagement produced a Minuteman statue and lasting memory in Ridgefield, where Arnold's counterattack briefly blocked the British retreat. About one hundred patriots were killed or wounded in the fighting across these engagements.
