BENNINGTON — Bennington Battle Monument & John Stark

On August 16, 1777, a 59-year-old New Hampshire general stood before a force of Vermont militia volunteers and delivered one of the most galvanizing lines in American military history.

“There are the Red Coats; they will be ours or tonight Molly Stark sleeps a widow.”

What happened next changed the entire Revolutionary War.

British General Burgoyne was driving south from Canada with a professional army of 7,000 — British regulars, Hessian mercenaries, and Loyalist forces — executing a plan to split the colonies in two along the Hudson River corridor. He dispatched a detachment of roughly 800 soldiers to raid Bennington’s supply depot for horses, cattle, and provisions. It was meant to be a quick foraging mission. It became a catastrophe for the Crown.

John Stark was already a legend before he arrived in Vermont. A veteran of Rogers’ Rangers and Bunker Hill, he had quit the Continental Army earlier that year in frustration over politics and promotions — and came back only on his own terms, reporting to the New Hampshire legislature, not the Continental Congress. He raised 1,500 volunteers in weeks.

On August 16, Stark’s militia and Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys under Seth Warner met the Hessian force near Bennington. By nightfall, nearly 900 enemy soldiers were killed or captured. American losses were fewer than 100. It wasn’t just a victory — it was the beginning of the end for Burgoyne’s campaign. Two months later, Burgoyne surrendered his entire army at Saratoga, bringing France into the war as an American ally. Without that alliance, American independence becomes much harder to imagine.

The Battle of Bennington didn’t win the Revolution. But it started the chain of events that did.

The Bennington Battle Monument, completed in 1889 and dedicated August 19, 1891 by President Benjamin Harrison, stands 306 feet tall — the tallest structure in Vermont — at the site of the supply depot the British were after. At its base stand two bronze statues: John Stark on the north side, Seth Warner on the south.

I photographed Stark low and close, his arm extended, the monument rising behind him into a sky as the sun first broke through from a departing storm. The leading lines were already built into the scene. Stark put them there in 1777.

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