Ethan Allen's Last Farm

Ethan Allen is the man Vermont never quite gets over. He captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British before dawn on May tenth, seventeen seventy-five, demanding the garrison surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. He was imprisoned on a British prison ship, survived, became a symbol, wrote a deist philosophical tract that scandalized Connecticut Puritans, and then spent the last years of his life farming in the floodplain just north of this spot.

The farmhouse still stands, preserved now as the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Allen moved to Burlington in seventeen eighty-seven, four years after the Revolution's end, on a piece of land in the Winooski River Intervale that he and his brother Ira had helped shape into the frontier town that would become Vermont's largest city. He died here in seventeen eighty-nine, at fifty-one, reportedly after a convivial night with neighbors. The cause was listed as an apoplectic fit.

His brother Ira is the reason you can visit a university in this city. When the Vermont legislature was deciding where to put a new state university in seventeen ninety-one, Ira Allen, the largest landowner in the Burlington area, donated fifty acres and pledged four thousand British pounds sterling. Burlington won the competition. The money, historians note with wry consistency, never fully materialized. But the land did, and the University of Vermont was chartered that same year, making it one of the oldest universities in New England.

The Allens were complicated men. Land speculators as much as patriots, they built their fortunes acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres from dispossessed settlers and indigenous communities. But they also built the skeleton of a state, and their bones are in this ground. Burlington remembers them.