The Battle of Bennington

The monument stands three hundred six feet tall, the tallest structure in Vermont, a dolomite limestone obelisk marking a battle that was not fought in Vermont, named for a town that was not the battle's objective, commemorating a general from New Hampshire who refused to take orders from the Continental Army.

On August sixteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, General John Stark led a force of roughly two thousand New Hampshire and Vermont militiamen against a column of Hessian troops under Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum near the village of Walloomsac, New York, about five miles west of the Vermont border. The Hessians were heading for Bennington because that was where the Continental Army had stockpiled supplies: horses, cattle, flour, and cash the British desperately needed to keep Burgoyne's campaign moving south from Canada.

Stark had refused to march his men under Horatio Gates's command. He had fought at Bunker Hill and taken a demotion rather than accept a junior ranking he thought he had not earned. He told the New Hampshire legislature he would fight on his own terms or not at all. The legislature gave him his command.

The battle killed approximately two hundred Hessians and resulted in the capture of roughly seven hundred more. Baum himself was mortally wounded. A reinforcing Hessian column under Colonel Breymann arrived after the first engagement and was also defeated, in a second fight the same afternoon.

The Hessians who died near Walloomsac were not German volunteers. They were soldiers rented to the British by the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who received three pounds seven shillings per man killed, in lieu of disability payments, under the terms of his contract with the Crown. The victory at Bennington, as it came to be called, shifted the momentum of the Saratoga campaign and contributed directly to the British surrender at Saratoga in October. That surrender brought France into the war on the American side. The monument is in Vermont. The battle was in New York. The general was from New Hampshire.