The 1777 Battle of Ridgefield, which happened right along what is now Main Street, played a significant part in America’s ultimate victory in the Revolutionary War. The American Patriot Militia was outnumbered by at least 3-to-1. More King’s troops fought at Ridgefield than on Lexington Green, at Concord Bridge, or at Trenton and Princeton. The American Patriot Militia was quickly dispersed by the overwhelming, well-equipped, and well-trained British military forces, under the command of their top Brigadier General. But the British took heavy casualties, with 60 to 80 troops killed or wounded and 20 captured in the day-long running battle. And, consequently, the Patriot Militia’s example at Ridgefield set the field for how the American Militia, drawn from across the 13 States, would ultimately defeat the British Army over the course of the remainder of the War.
The whole affair is brought to life by long-time Ridgefield-local Keith Marshall Jones III in his new book titled The Battle of Ridgefield: Benedict Arnold, the Patriot Militia, and the Surprising 1777 Battle that Galvanized Revolutionary Connecticut. Keith’s fifth book, The Battle of Ridgefield is actually a reprise of his 2002 treatment titled Farmers Against The Crown, but this new book has 90% new material. Keith has also previously authored three other historical analyses: Farms of Farmingville, about the 23 post-and-beam farm houses dating back to 1744 and still standing in one school district in Farmingville, Connecticut; a biography of John Lawrence, a New York lawyer and publisher who was one of the Founding Fathers - which won the Philadelphia Publishers’ Publication of the Year Award in 2020, and; a book about his own forefather, Chief Justice John Marshall, and his role as a soldier in George Washington’s Army.
Keith’s dad was career Air Force and Keith grew up, the oldest of five kids, with stints in Germany, Alaska, Mississippi, Texas, Kansas, and Washington State, where Keith went to Tacoma High School. His dad paid for just the first year of college for each kid, so Keith got a job with the May Company to help pay for the University of Colorado, where Keith got a degree in Political Science. He worked in Human Relations at McDonnell Douglas, before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School with a focus in Marketing. He then had a successful career in Brand Management with work for Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, Cadbury Schweppes, and Colgate. Keith and his wife of 51 years, Judith, raised their two boys in Ridgefield, and now split their time between houses in Manhattan and Tucson. Keith was a founder of the Ridgefield Historical Society in 2000, served as its initial President, and continues to help oversee its National Park Service Phase II Study for the Battlefield Protection Program.
“Imagine the circumstances!” Keith proclaims. “What heroes the Patriot Militia were! And they were just men from local towns, like Pound Ridge, who were willing to risk their lives, in the face of vastly superior military forces, in support of the ideal of freedom from British rule! …And remember, the farmers around this area at the time led a relatively good life. They were not being taxed by the British and there were no Redcoats around. Connecticut elected its own government from the very beginning. …Imagine making the decision to go to the local gathering spot, like the Bedford Green, and take up arms to form a militia of a few hundred fellow villagers…to go fight the British Army in the town over the next hill!”
“And there were still plenty of Tories living amongst the Patriot majority,” Keith continues. “In New York men were by law automatically conscripted to serve in the militia, but it was actually the community that enforced the duty to serve. There was no money, and you’d be outcast from the community’s barter economy if you were not a Patriot. Identified as a Tory, you’d be called out at the Congregational Church.”
“Every British soldier carried a Brown Bess Musket, capable of firing three rounds a minute of a 75 caliber musket ball, and equipped with a fixed bayonet. Like the modern day equivalent of facing a 50 caliber M16 with a pistol. If the projectile didn’t kill you, the sepsis from the wound probably would. And the very purpose of the bayonet was that no enemy soldier would survive being left behind on the battlefield. And every local farmer and farm hand knew that’s what they would be facing if and when they were called to arms,” Keith elucidates.
The Ridgefield Historical Society receives a gift of a painting of The Battle of Ridgefield
“It was April of 1777, and Washington’s Army was busy defending Philadelphia after having lost the Battle of New York and at Yonkers,” Keith sets the scene. “On the night of the 25th, a rider knocks on the door at the house of 37 year old farmer, William Fancher - where Fancher Road in Pound Ridge is now - to alert him that the British were burning the Danbury Depot, then the largest remaining supply depot for all goods going to New England after the burning of the Peekskill Depot, and were headed next to sack Ridgefield. …Fancher, though remembered as ‘too weak of constitution’ for extended field service, bid adieu to wife Sarah and their four young children, buckled on his sword, summoned younger brother Daniel, called out his Pound Ridge Company of the 2nd New York Militia, and set out on the Ridgefield Road!”
“On the morning of April 26, with the British in control of Danbury and 22 warehouses and 19 residences laid to waste there, British Major General William Tryon, who was staying at the house of a prosperous Danbury Tory named Nehemiah Dibble, directed that nearly 2,000 troops disembark from a dozen transport ships at nearby Compo Beach, and head for Ridgefield,” Keith continues. “Responsibility for defending Southwestern Connecticut lay with General Gold Selleck Silliman’s 4th Brigade of State Militia. From his fine center-chimney clapboard residence - that’s still standing - atop a gentle Fairfield hill, Silliman observed Tryon’s troops massing and immediately summoned the four Militia Regiments under his command, including: Colonel Samuel Whiting’s 4th Regiment composed of Fairfield, Stratford and Redding men; Colonel Increase Moseley Jr.’s Litchfield County-based 13th Regiment; the 9th Regiment made up of men from Greenwich, Stamford, Norwalk, and New Canaan Parish, commanded by Lt. Colonel John Mead, and; the 16th Regiment of Colonel Joseph Platt Cooke from Danbury. ‘As soon as you get 20 men of a company together’, ordered Silliman, ‘send them on immediately under a proper officer, and send the rest as fast as possible’. And by noon of April 26th, 600 men representing perhaps two-thirds of Silliman’s Brigade had gathered at the designated rendezvous spot nine miles South of Danbury in Redding, together with a few dozen Continentals under the command of Lt. Colonel David Dimon, and 66-year-old Militia Major General David Wooster took command. Whilst marching from Redding to Ridgefield on the 26th, none other than the then widely-revered Continental Brigadier General Arnold met the American forces. Arnold had been insulted by Congress’s political decision to promote five less deserving officers ahead of him for the rank of Major General, and saw the upcoming opportunity for battlefield valor as a way to prove himself. Arnold, Silliman, and Wooster made camp in Bethel to plot strategy, with Wooster as senior officer in charge.”
“Tryon did not expect serious opposition in Tory-infested Western Connecticut, and calculated that destroying Danbury Depot would inspire closet loyalists to replicate the ‘petit guerre’ then inflaming lower Westchester County,” Keith recounts. “The American objective was to somehow delay Tryon’s return to Long Island Sound until Connecticut and New York militia could swarm Danbury by the hundreds to contest Tryon’s Redcoats. Not knowing which road the British would take back to their ships, the three American commanders divided their 600 troops into two separate commands. Wooster would remain in Tryon’s rear with 200 men - soon supplemented by another 150 - in the event the Redcoats marched back the way they came. Arnold and Silliman positioned their 400 men to intercept Tryon’s column if he took the Norwalk Road through Ridgefield. Whichever route the enemy took, Arnold and Wooster would combine in a pincer movement to do battle. With word that Tryon had departed Danbury and begun the rugged four-mile trek to Ridgebury in the northeastern corner of Ridgefield’s 35-square-mile township, Arnold and Silliman headed for Ridgefield.”
“Wooster first led his division to strike the British rear guard from behind… and the Battle had begun!,” Keith retells the history. “One King’s Officer wrote: ‘The militia began to Harass us early & increased every Mile, galling us from their Houses & Fences’. Then, when Tryon’s column reformed after the mid-day meal, Wooster’s men burst through the trees, inflicting heavy casualties and taking half of the British supply wagons, and then vanishing into the surrounding woodland as quickly as they had emerged. …Shortly thereafter, British Brigadier General Sir William Erskine, who had tactical command of Tryon’s forces, positioned a trio of artillery pieces along with a primed and loaded rear guard contingent hidden behind a bend in the road on what is now Route 116. Rounding the bend, Wooster’s horse was felled by enemy blasts, but observing that the nearest enemy cannon might be captured if he attacked with alacrity, the gallant Wooster on foot urged his men forward. …But before the Patriot Militia could seize the gun, they were, according to eyewitness private Thomas Sherwood, ‘unexpectedly nearly surrounded by the enemy… and hastily ordered by Wooster to retreat’. No sooner had General Wooster remounted a fresh horse than a musket ball, purportedly from a Loyalist marksman, took him obliquely in the side and broke his backbone. A weathered granite marker, placed in 1906 along Route 116, still marks the spot where Wooster fell. Mortally wounded, the general was carried in his huge unwound sash as a litter to a large flat rock half a mile back toward Ridgebury. There he was joined by another severely wounded officer, Upper Salem Captain Thaddeus Crane of the 2nd Westchester militia regiment. Crane would survive, but poor Wooster lingered in paralyzed agony until dying five days later…in the parlor of Danbury Tory Nehemiah Dibble . . . the very house where Major General Tryon had lodged the night before the Battle! …Despite efforts by Wooster’s aide, a 23-year-old Yale graduate of the Class of 1775 named Captain Stephen Bradley, the Militia quickly disintegrated in the face of the advancing British soldiers… and, rather than delay the British march by pursuing the scattering Patriots, Erskine wheeled his rear guard back into column and resumed march toward Ridgefield, a mile and a half distant.”
“Shortly before the British forces reached Ridgefield, Arnold and Silliman’s divisions, together with Pound Ridge Captain Fancher’s Militia, the Lower Salem Companies of Captains Abijah Gilbert and Gideon Seeley, and a handful of Continental recruits from the 5th Connecticut Regiment, hurriedly fortified a formidable defensive ridgetop chokepoint atop the northern edge of Ridgefield’s broad, mile-long Town Street. From this commanding position - not unlike that at Boston’s Bunker Hill, the Americans could dare to take a stand against the much larger, more experienced, and more disciplined British troops…but with a southward avenue of escape at their back.”
Chronicling the Battle climax and the Americans’ defeat, Keith details, “Silliman wrote: ‘About 3 o’clock, the enemy appeared in one grand column that filled the road for more than half a Mile in Length’. Erskine first wheeled six artillery pieces into position and commenced cannonade. Large platoons of British troops were next dispatched to probe both flanks. Having taken the measure of Arnold’s defense, Erskine then brought three cannons forward to shell the American center, and then surged a 600-man column directly at the American forces. …The brunt of the British assault was absorbed by Captain Ebenezer Coe’s Stratford Company of the 4th Militia. His Lieutenant killed, and half his Company dead or wounded, Coe fell from a musket ball that entered one eye and passed through his temple. Bayoneted multiple times as he lay helpless, Coe somehow survived the day! Nearby, Lt. Nathaniel Gray of New Canaan Parish crumpled to the ground, dead. General Arnold, seeing his entire line give way, charged to the front just as a platoon of green-coated Loyalist troops clambered over the stone ledges and unleashed a volley in his direction. Pinned to the ground by his fallen horse, Arnold was seen to whip out a pistol and shoot the nearest attacker dead. Ordering the Retreat, he then apparently confiscated a second mount and made good his own escape. Lt. Colonel Abraham Gould, 4th Militia commander, was not so fortunate, dying in the saddle while rallying his withdrawing Regiment. Over the next hour, Tryon and Erskine secured the village. They took at least 16 prisoners, burned the abandoned Anglican Church housing patriot supplies, and embedded a cannonball in Timothy Keeler’s tavern - that’s still standing today!”
Keith summarizes, “The Americans suffered 13 known dead, including Wooster, and at least 29 wounded. But Ridgefield was where Tryon’s vision for British hegemony over Southwestern Connecticut came to die. Never again would the British venture into inland Connecticut. Not only was Revolutionary Connecticut galvanized into strong action against closet Tories and fence-sitters, but nearly 1,200 Nutmeg State Militia were freed-up to participate in the pivotal victory at the Battle of Saratoga.”
Keith concludes, “Fortune favoring the bold, Congress did award Benedict Arnold a Second Star after Ridgefield, and Arnold carried the day at Saratoga. Fancher returned unscathed to civilian life in Pound Ridge, where he served two terms as Town Supervisor, became Justice of the Peace, and had a leading role in establishing the Presbyterian Church of Pound Ridge; though his Lieutenant Jacob Travis was wounded and two Privates, James and Newton Crawford, were taken prisoner.”
“I have a passion for history,” Keith proclaims, “and the history of the Battle of Ridgefield is glorious!”
As featured in the November/December 2024 issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazine