(HOST) As a biographer of the Founding Fathers, commentator Willard Sterne Randall has spent the last three years researching Vermont’s Founding Father Ethan Allen. And he was stunned to hear the recent news that Allen’s Homestead in the Winooski Intervale – the only home Ethan Allen ever owned and lived in for any length of time – was about to close it doors.
(RANDALL) Anybody who has heard of Ethan Allen knows he led the Green Mountain Boys who stormed Fort Ticonderoga at the outbreak of the Revolution. But how many know more than that? After writing about Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton and Benedict Arnold, I got interested in Vermont’s fighting Founder. Right away, I heard the latest spin on Ethan, as everybody calls him. Wasn’t he a drunkard, they ask, putting thumb to mouth and tipping pinky finger skyward? From sifting old letters, I’m getting a different picture.
The truth is, Ethan was the first American war hero, a frontier freedom fighter who acted while Congress dithered. Without Ethan, the British might easily have rushed down Lake Champlain, sliced off New England and crushed the budding revolution. Without him, Washington had no cannon to drive the British out of Boston. And without him, let’s face it, there would be no Vermont.
Ethan Allen defined Vermont’s borders and defended them against land-grabbers from New York and New Hampshire. He fought off, and then fooled, the British, making Vermont the first state to establish free trade with Canada.
But Ethan did more than that. His memoir of his torture as a POW after he tried to capture Montreal became the United States first bestseller, inspiring wavering Patriots. His book on reason, calling for the separation of church and state, anticipated Tom Paine and intrigued philosophers in Paris.
Ethan never sat for a portrait, yet Vermonters never forgot him. In 1984, local historian Ralph Nading Hill discovered Ethan’s Homestead inside an altered building. Hundreds of people pitched in to restore it. Ironically, it’s ineligible for federal funds because not enough original materials survived. Yet the Homestead is the only authentically restored home of a Vermont founder. Thomas Chittenden’s house burned sixty years ago.
For twenty years, the Homestead has welcomed thousands of school children and history lovers, its volunteers teaching them not only about our roughneck Founding Father, but about Vermont’s struggle for independence and survival on the raw New England frontier.
When I want to see how the first Americans lived, I go to Ethan Allen’s Homestead, not to Monticello. I see this little house where nine people, including two freed slaves, crowded in at night. But all day long they farmed, growing their own flax, food and flowers. I, like them, can understand, at this homestead, what it was like to be this new thing, free and an American.
Willard Sterne Randall is a historical biographer and teaches at Champlain College.