Fort Dummer: Vermont's First Foothold

The land just south of downtown Brattleboro, now flooded beneath a reservoir, was once the site of Vermont's first permanent European settlement. Fort Dummer was built here in seventeen twenty-four, and everything that came after in Vermont began from this spot.

The context was Dummer's War, a conflict between the Abenaki people and New England colonists that flared in the seventeen twenties. Abenaki raiders had been striking English settlements along the Connecticut River valley, pushing south into Massachusetts. Colonial authorities in Boston ordered a response. Lieutenant Timothy Dwight led a militia force northward in seventeen twenty-four and constructed a log stockade on the west bank of the Connecticut River, just inside what is now Vermont.

The fort was a simple wooden structure, roughly one hundred eighty square feet of stockade with twelve guns and a garrison of about fifty-five men, including forty-three English soldiers and twelve Mohawk allies. In October seventeen twenty-four, Greylock, a Western Abenaki war leader, attacked with seventy warriors and killed several of the defenders in the only known military assault on the fort.

Fort Dummer served for nearly four decades. It was an active military garrison through King George's War and the French and Indian War, and also functioned as a trading post for much of that period. By seventeen sixty-three, with the French threat ended by the Treaty of Paris, the fort was abandoned. It was dismantled by seventeen seventy-one.

The fort's legacy outlasted its walls. It was the anchor that made the Connecticut River valley feel settable to English colonists, the point from which they pushed northward to establish Brattleboro and eventually the rest of Vermont. In nineteen oh eight, the Vernon Dam flooded the original site. The water is still there. Fort Dummer State Park nearby marks the general location, and a historical marker explains what lies beneath.