Wyoming Forts A-Fort Durkee, B-Fort Wyoming or Wilkesbarre, C-Fort Ogden, D-Kingston Village, E-Forty Fort, G-battleground, H-Fort Jenkins, I-Monocasy Island, J-Pittstown stockades, G-Queen Esther’s Rock Source: Lossing, Benson, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, January 7, 1859, p. 353
In many ways, the life of Abraham Parrish wasn’t that different from any other person participating in the formative decades of the grand American Experiment.
In other ways, he lived a unique life that exposed him at an early age to the rarified frontier air that existed when Western New York emerged from its dense terra incognita forest. He witnessed firsthand nearly all the major personalities of our region and saw how they forged this thickly wooded region into an industrious civilization.
But let’s not get too far ahead…
Zebulon Parish represents a typical American story. He was born on February 12, 1726 in Windham, a town in the eastern half of the Colony of Connecticut between Hartford and the Rhode Island border. He not only shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln, he shares something else – his descendants were active in the abolition movement.
There was a very good reason Zebulon’s family joined the fight against slavery – his grandfather, John Wattles, came to America as a slave.
Our story, therefore, begins in Scotland…Continue Reading “The Story of Abraham Parrish, Mendon’s First Tavern Keeper (Part I)”
William French and the Westminster Massacre
Self-named by Benning Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire, Bennington became—in 1741—the first township granted west of the Connecticut River. It was a fact that would soon matter far more than anyone expected.
French headed to Westminster, a small hamlet on the west side of the Connecticut River, nestled in the broad curve of the oxbowing waterway, in the fertile eastern valley beneath the Green Mountains.
That afternoon, French walked along King’s Highway to the farmhouse of Capt. Axariah Wright, an eccentric old patriot. There he met Daniel Houghton and nearly 100 other men. They were there to confront a problem they believed could no longer be avoided.Continue Reading “William French and the Westminster Massacre”