The Royalton Raid: Vermont's Last Indian Attack
Near Woodstock, Vermont
On October sixteenth, seventeen eighty, a force of nearly three hundred Mohawk warriors and British soldiers swept down the White River valley and struck the scattered settlements of Royalton, Sharon, and Tunbridge in the largest raid on Vermont territory during the entire Revolutionary War.
The raiders burned homes, took cattle, and captured more than two dozen settlers, mostly women and children, marching them north toward Canada. Four men were killed in the attack. Abiah Stockwell, a teenager, was among the captives who survived the brutal winter march to Saint Francis in Quebec and eventually returned home years later.
The raid had a military logic: Vermont's militia was stretched thin supporting the Continental Army, and British command in Canada hoped frontier terror would pull forces back north. It worked temporarily, but Vermont held.
For decades Vermont settlers called this the Last Indian Raid, though the characterization flattened a complicated history. The Mohawk raiders were not acting independently, they were allies in a British military campaign, striking at colonists who had settled on land they claimed as their own. A granite monument in Royalton today marks the raid, telling one side of a story that had two.
