BY LARRY JOHNSTON
What do you think of when someone says Ethan Allen?
Furniture, right?
Only the history teachers among you thought American Revolution. What the 1932 furniture company has to do with the man is not for me to say.
No, this article is about the real Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. His is a great story. Everyone can find something to love or hate about the man. He was at times a drunkard, a war hero, a heretic, a traitor and a frontiersman.
What I learned about the man came from visiting Burlington, Vt. I have before me every piece of Ethan Allen literature I could find. I also visited his home outside the city. It now is a museum.
The house is a modest square box with an attic serving as a second floor. It continuously was occupied until 1970, but is now owned by a local park service. An informative guide in period clothes leads visitors around the grounds and into the house.
The grounds originally were used for growing flax. Flax is a tough fiber-filled plant. The fiber can be woven into linen. Linen has been used for thousands of years. The familiar binding you see around Egyptian mummies is linen. I could find no record that either Ethan or the Egyptians made any furniture out of the stuff.
Born in 1738, Ethan Allen left Connecticut and ended up in Vermont. Don’t ask me why or how, but I can see one possibility. Settlers to the area notoriously were more secular than religious. Consequently, the first structure they built was a tavern, not a church. If Ethan enjoyed drinking so much, maybe he came for the bars.
Anyway, Ethan operated a reasonably successful business, which allowed him some status and plenty to protect. At this point, it is important to know Vermont is sandwiched between New York and New Hampshire. Powerful forces in both states made legal claims in an attempt to annex the little colony out of existence.
Ethan did not take too kindly to the idea. Probably over a few beers, in 1770 he organized his famous regiment to defeat those claims by force. Thus, he was an outlaw for several years.
His timing was good, however. By 1775, the colonies and Great Britain began having skirmishes as a prelude to revolution. Ethan and his Green Mountain Boys joined up with Benedict Arnold (he had a propensity toward making unfortunate acquaintances) to capture Fort Ticonderoga in New York. Overnight, his outlaw status metamorphosed into hero.
In retrospect, part of his popularity may have come from a suggestion he circulated that all preachers in the colonies be fired and the money saved in salaries be used to buy liquor. Heaven bound, he was not.
Despite his contribution to the Revolution, his beloved Vermont failed to receive recognition because of the New York and New Hampshire boundary disputes. Vermont would have been the 14th colony. Ethan thought he could save his land by asking the representatives of Great Britain to grant recognition instead. Does this sound traitorous to you?
Yes, poor Ethan then found himself suspected as a traitor to the American Cause. Suspected but never charged, and that is how his life ended at age 52.
I would like to think he died with a beer in his hand and in a “swivel recliner covered with rich imported leather.” Oops, I started reading from the furniture catalog.
