A shortage of boats meant that multiple trips would be required to ferry everyone to the other side if everything else went according to plan-which it didn’t. (If you’re looking at a map, the route generally followed Route 7 north from Rutland to Middlebury, then south on Route 30 to Whiting before turning west towards the lake.)īeach reportedly managed a short nap before enough men arrived at the lakeshore, swelling the Green Mountain Boys’ ranks to about 230. Perfectly straight lines from village to village total about 60 miles, and he certainly did not walk a perfectly straight line. The distance he covered in 24 hours was estimated at 64 miles, which is confirmed using modern maps. Arriving at Middlebury, he then headed south to Whiting before turning west on the final leg of his journey (and presumably on his last legs) to the lakeside rendezvous point. But history records that Gershom Beach walked and/or ran from Castleton, east to Rutland, and then north through places like Pittsford and Brandon. Beach assumed the formidable task of heading north on foot and delivering a critical message to towns and farms along the way: that men were needed at Hand’s Cove before dawn the following day to launch an attack on Fort Ticonderoga.Įven today, using paved highways, succeeding at such a difficult assignment would seem unlikely. The answer lay in a fellow Green Mountain Boy, blacksmith, and close friend - Major Gershom Beach Jr., a son of one of Rutland’s founders. With few roads and rugged terrain, and battle-ready fighters needed in less than two days, how to sound the alarm and reach the men willing to follow him into the fray? Like the Massachusetts minutemen, the rest of Allen’s supporters were scattered about the countryside. Remaining with Allen were about 140 men-a tough, hardy group, no doubt, but believed well short of the numbers needed to tackle an armed fortress. on May 10 and launch a surprise attack.īut the multi-pronged plan that was finalized in Castleton, Vermont, 19 miles southeast of the fort, sent some men to Albany and others to capture Skenesborough (today’s Whitehall). From there they would row a mile southeast to the New York side of the lake at 4 a.m. The gathering point he chose was Hand’s Bay in Shoreham, Vermont, just northeast of the fort. On May 8, 1775, Vermont’s famous leader of the Green Mountain Boys, Ethan Allen, found himself in sudden need of troops to execute a quickly hatched plan for capturing Fort Ticonderoga. The Champlain Valley hosted a spectacular example in a Vermont resident who, just three weeks after Revere’s ride, completed a very impressive trek that had a direct effect on the war’s outcome. Longfellow’s poem, written in 1860, memorialized Revere’s famous ride of 1775, while similar or even more impressive feats were mostly lost to the ages. In Vermont and New York they should surely teach Less than a month later, at a different location but with the same cadence, Longfellow could have written: On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five Here’s the opening stanza from “Paul Revere’s Ride”:
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