Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Ira Allen had big dreams. The great tragedy of his life was that he seldom managed to bridge the gap between those dreams and reality.
Allen’s dreams focused on Vermont. He envisioned an independent Vermont (which existed for only 14 years); flirted at times with the idea of a Vermont aligned with British Canada (which, despite his many efforts, of course never happened); and also dreamed of a Vermont with a university that he would found (though this vision became a reality, it did so without the generous financial contribution he had pledged).
Allen’s biggest personal dream was to become a wealthy land speculator. It would become his greatest failure. Allen pursued this dream with the type of ambition that would make the most aggressive investor blush. In the early days of Vermont, land speculation was a cut-throat business — at times almost literally — and Allen proved up to the task.
Land speculation, a popular high-risk investment during colonial times, was something of a family tradition for the Allens. Ira Allen and his five brothers had caught the bug from their father, Joseph, who had purchased land in northeastern Pennsylvania, not to live on, but as an investment. Some of the Allen boys did likewise.
Starting in about 1762, they began buying land granted by the colony of New Hampshire in a territory where Abenaki had lived for untold generations and which was now slowly being settled by people of European descent. The area became known as the New Hampshire Grants — the name “Vermont” wouldn’t be coined for another 15 years.
Complicating the situation was the fact that New York also claimed jurisdiction over the territory and sold competing titles to the land. The Allens chose to buy grants only from New Hampshire, which charged lower prices than New York because its legal claim to the land was shakier.
Even as a young man, Ira Allen saw great potential in the Grants. At the age of 19, he went on several expeditions with his cousin Remember Baker, who taught him the basics of land surveying and wilderness survival. After studying surveying for another week with a Connecticut surveyor, Allen pronounced himself ready to launch a business of his own.
Lugging surveying equipment through the wilds of the Grants, Allen set down boundary lines for property owners who lived in southern New England, but who saw the land as an investment. His travels made him intimately familiar with the territory in a way those down-country speculators, who had never visited the land they owned, were not. That knowledge allowed Allen to swap worthless acres of swampland and mountainsides for prime agricultural land.
In 1772, while working land he owned in Poultney, Allen learned that some New York men were surveying to the north, near where the Winooski River meets Lake Champlain. To Allen, the land sounded more promising than his Poultney-area holdings. Proximity to the lake would make transportation and trade easier. The Winooski’s current, which was said to be strong, could power many mills, the factories of their day. Allen didn’t want the land divvied up by Yorkers. So he gathered a group of men – Baker, a Dutchman named Van Ornam and four others – and headed north.
Reaching the mouth of the Winooski, they paddled to a set of high falls and found a campsite on the shore, which they assumed belonged to the New York surveyors. They camped a short way downstream and waited for the surveyors’ return.
Presently, two men walked out of the woods toward the camp. Allen and company attacked and took the men prisoner. The captives confirmed that they were part of the surveying party and that the others would soon return. “I prepared our men with axes, clubs, etc., and arranged ourselves on the bank about two rods from the water, tying our prisoners to a pole behind,” and waited in ambush, he later wrote. The rest of the surveying team came into sight the next morning.
Allen wrote an account of the events that followed in his autobiography and in his “History of the State of Vermont.” In one, he stated that the boats held six white men and 13 Native Americans. Another time, Allen said the boats, apparently canoes, held four white men and 10 Native Americans. If either account is accurate, Allen and his men were outnumbered at least two to one. But they had the element of surprise, and two of the surveyors as hostages.
When the boats landed, the head of the surveying team, a man named Stevens, stepped ashore in a rage. With a hatchet in one hand, and pistols in his pocket, he marched toward Baker. He demanded to know why his men were tied up. Baker answered smugly that they were because he wanted them tied up.
According to Allen, his cousin Remember Baker then opened his shirt and dared Stevens to strike him. Stevens pulled out a “scalping knife” from his shirt, either to attack Baker or to free his men. But he didn’t move in either direction, because Van Ornam was pointing a gun at him. Then Stevens walked toward Allen. “When about 30 feet of me,” Allen wrote, “I presented a pistol at him, with a solemn word that death was his portion instantly if he stepped one step farther, or attempted to touch the pistols in his pocket.”
Stevens turned pale.
At this point, the rest of Stevens’ party came up the riverbank. Seeing that the situation could turn violent, Allen turned to Van Ornam, who may have been brought along for just this moment. Van Ornam had previously been held prisoner by Native Americans in the region and learned some of their language. Allen told him to explain that this was a land dispute that it did not concern them, and that they were welcome to hunt on these lands whenever they wanted. Van Ornam relayed the message. He apparently made his case well – the Native Americans paddled off and left Stevens and his men to their fate.
At this, Stevens surrendered.
But he had to know whether Allen really would have shot him. Allen said yes, that he had no intention of being hauled before a New York court. Then, Allen pointed his pistol toward a tree that was “about the same distance as Stevens was from me.” He said he would strike a certain mark on it. Even Allen seems to have been a bit surprised by what happened next: “The ball by chance struck the pole about half an inch under the mark.”
Allen let Stevens and the rest of the New York surveyors go, promising to kill any of them if they ever returned.
Ira spent the next two weeks exploring the area around where the Winooski meets the lake. Using a map prepared several years earlier by a New Hampshire surveyor, Allen made his way through the towns of Burlington, Colchester, Essex, Jericho, Williston, New Huntington (now Richmond) and Bolton.
“(T)his was the land my heart delighted in,” Allen wrote years later in his autobiography, which he never completed.
The tale peters out in 1774. Perhaps that was the highpoint of his life. By then, he had convinced three of his brothers and Baker to form the Onion River Land Company, which would buy up land in the Champlain and Winooski River Valleys. The future seemed so bright that the partners never put their agreement in writing. All would contribute what they could to the venture and share in the proceeds. It all seemed so promising.
But plans to make the area a frontier boomtown were delayed for eight years by the Revolutionary War. By the time it did boom, three of Ira’s partners – his brothers Heber and Zimri Allen, and cousin Baker – were dead. In 1789, his remaining partner, his brother Ethan, died.
Allen’s mills and his land deals, which were leveraged with mountains of debt, never made him the fortune of which he dreamed.
By 1803, finding himself in seemingly insurmountable debt and with his political power at low ebb, Allen decided it was time to leave. He threw an elaborate party in the midst of which he sneaked out a side door, rode a waiting horse to Lake Champlain, and sailed south.
Allen spent the last decade of his life fighting creditors and trying to realize the dream of riches that had somehow eluded him. He died in 1814 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia.
