 Hi, I am Tom Schroer, and I am the front desk manager at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Welcome to the museum and welcome to our monthly lecture series. Each month, we host a different guest lecturer to share on a topic related to early American history, Vermont history, or the homestead. Our monthly lecture series is part of our larger community enrichment program. And we would like to thank our community enrichment sponsors, M&T Bank, and North Country Federal Credit Union. We would also like to thank CCTV, and our partners for the monthly lecture series. One of our partners for the monthly lecture series, CCTV records this program and later broadcasts it and allows us to share it on the Homestead Museums YouTube channel. This allows us to reach a greater audience and helps the Homestead Museum fulfill its mission to bring history to life. The Ethan Allen Homestead Museum is a community nonprofit. And if you would like to help us continue to offer community enrichment programming, please consider becoming a member, which you can do after the presentation in the gift shop or online. Memberships help the community. Memberships help the museum continue its mission and we thank you for your support. I have the forms all ready to go. I'll take you two minutes. After today's presentation, there will be a short Q&A session. And then we will end with some museum announcements, including some upcoming special events and our next monthly lecture program. I would now like to introduce our, who am I introducing? You. I'm now introducing John Tevinar, who is the president of the Board of Directors of the now Homestead Museum. Who's going to take it from here? I guess we have it. We did not have a rehearsal, I guess, obviously, for the session today. So thank you for coming. I think we have a few out of state visitors with us. We have, is this Minnesota over here? And somebody else from out of state? So I think, so welcome for those of you who are from away, as we say. I am John Tevinar. I'm the current president of the Board of Directors. Thank you for those of you that put money in the basket out there. I hope that your wrist did not get, or your arm didn't get broken by our greeter at the door, who does an excellent job of welcoming folks when you come in. And thank you for those of you who donate throughout the year. We do have a fall fund drive, and that's usually quite successful. And so thank you for helping out. As Tom mentioned, these programs would not be possible without the donations of our friends. This is the, I don't, I guess I do math, so I should go back and count the number of years. But we started in 2007 with this lecture series. So what would that be? That's about 16 years. This is the 156th lecture in our series. We do them every month, except the month of December because of the holidays. So I mean, we plan on continuing and expanding our programs as time goes on. So let me take a few moments to introduce our speaker, who is Glenn Fay. I've known Glenn for a long time. We are fellow educators. Glenn is a historian, a photographer. He's a descendant of Green Mountain Boy Daniel Champion. Is that correct, champion? OK, because I know there's another name similar to that, but I had never heard of Daniel Champion. And also of the New Hampshire militiamen, John Powers. That's probably where Glenn gets his love of revolutionary or era history, right? He is also the author of a couple of books, actually probably three books. If we count the booklet, which I don't know if you're going to mention the Fannie's booklet along the way. He has written the Hidden History of Burlington. And this one, which I really love, is about Ebenezer Allen, Ethan's cousin, who lived in South Hero, where Ethan visited the night before he died. And these books will be available afterwards out in the gift shop area. So at this time, Glenn, it's all yours. And would you join me in greeting our speaker, Glenn Fay? So welcome. And how many of you have read at least one Ethan Allen biography? How many of you have written an Ethan Allen book? OK, that'll make my job a lot easier. I'm working on, I've been researching for a couple of years now, a book that's tentatively called The Intimate Family Life of Ethan Allen, or Ethan and Fannie Allen. And it's focused on Burlington, right here. And it started out as a project to try to get more information on exactly what happened here and when they came, how they got here, and what their life was like. So it's expanded a little bit, but these slides have been plucked from that project. The story begins with Felix Powell, who was the first settler in Burlington. And Felix actually would have known the Allens because he was from Connecticut. And he bought lots of, oh, if you're here for this, I'm in the wrong place. Felix started by buying a couple of lots out on Apple Creek Point, was 190 and 191, which are choice lakefront today, as you might know. And Felix lasted a couple of years. This was in 1774. And the war was just starting to happen. The red coats were coming into Vermont with raids, and everybody cleared out in 75. And in fact, the raids did burn down anything they could find, including Ira Allen's settlement on the river and so forth. At the same time, Felix bought these two lots right here, number 32 and 33, which is where we are right here. And Felix, over the years, he sold those, a man named Marsh, William Marsh, ended up buying them. He was a loyalist. And that was not a good thing if you owned land in Vermont because Vermont was confiscating loyalist land to sell to fund the militia. And that's just what they did. Ira Allen bought the lots 32 and 33. And it ended up going having successive owners over the years or sharecroppers. This is the actual deed of 32 and 33. And it's actually signed by Ira, but it specifies he's buying it for General Ethan Allen. And this is at the state archives. So Ethan tried to publish his book in 1782. Didn't go very well. The Connecticut printers didn't want to mess with the church. This is a book on reason at a time when Puritan religion was very important. Mary, his first wife, died in 1783 in Sunderland. She's buried here in Arlington Cemetery at the Episcopal Church. So this marks where she was buried, leaving behind three daughters. This is a receipt I hadn't seen before. I stumbled upon by accident in the Allen family papers that is a receipt that shows an invoice, actually an invoice from Stephen Rowe Bradley, who had a boarding house in Westminster, Vermont. And it's for 18 nights, 55 meals, and a pretty good liquor tab as per bill. And Allen was staying in Westminster a lot because he was working with the legislature. And Westminster was really quite the hub at that time. Westminster was founded in 1739, I believe, by Massachusetts. So that was the first township in Vermont. It was actually not founded by New Hampshire, but Massachusetts. This is the marriage announcement of Ethan and Fanny, written by Ethan's friend, Anthony Haswell, who was a publisher of the Vermont Gazette in Bennington. And it describes Fanny as a lady possessing, in an eminent degree, every graceful qualification requisite to render the hymenial bands felicitous. Probably have to read behind between the lines a little bit on that. So appendix to reason. So after Ethan published reason, he had some more work to do on it. And he wanted to write about the human soul, the immortality of the human soul. And so he published what is loosely called the appendix. And this is a picture of it. It's in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. And the library dates it to 1784. And he writes on the preface here, this appendix can be published at a future day when it will not impinge on my future or present living. And apparently, he was feeling the wrath of people threatening him and complaining about his anti-church views, his anti-religious views with his deist philosophy. And the deist philosophy was about God in nature as part of nature. And this is very threatening to the church because Ethan had quite a following. And for his day, he was not formally educated, but he was articulate enough to be a problem. And so church people were not real happy with him. And you'll see this over and over again. The title for this, the formal title, is an essay on the universal plentitude of being and on the nature and immortality of the human soul and its agency. So that's the title to give you an idea of Ethan's where his head was at with all of this stuff. However, Ethan was still trying to get this published. And even as late as 1787, after Reason had been published, he was thinking, I think he was trying to make money, basically, because he had a best-selling book in his narrative on captivity. So here he writes Royal Tyler, who was in Massachusetts at the time. He was a well-educated attorney. And he's asking Tyler, should you procure 18 or 20 pound by subscription in ready money? It shall be published next spring. So he's telling Tyler, I'll publish this if you can help me out a little bit and if you have any spare change around. And this is in August 28, 1787. So Ethan was in Burlington living here. The family was moved here by then. We know for sure. And I'll show you how we know in a minute. And by the way, most of these slides are kind of boring. And it's a lot of, I know I'm reading to you, which I don't like to do as a presenter. But these are all primary source documents. So if they're primary source, it's hard to argue with them. Because particularly if they put a timestamp on it and it's signed by someone, there's really not much conjecture there of what was going on. So a lot of these, the book and the slides are trying to use primary sources whenever possible or the very best sources that eliminate questions. So what did the Allen siblings, Ethan's siblings look like in 1787? Surviving. We have Ethan, Ira, and Levi, three boys. Ethan's the oldest. The ones that were lost by 1787 included Lydia, who died at 28. Zimri at 28. Heber died at 39. Heeman, who died at 37. Lucy, who died at 26. Also, Ethan's first wife had died at 50. And his son Joseph at 11 or 12. And his daughter Lorraine at 20. So when we think about this, in the modern day standards, this is like, how would you get over this? Losing all of your siblings, most of your siblings. And it's mostly tuberculosis and smallpox, which now, of course, are both preventable. So this is what it looks like in 1787 when he comes here. Now, Levi is an interesting character. He's been called the Black Sheep of the family. And he's married to a woman named Nancy. Her maiden name was Allen from Connecticut. She lives at St. John, Quebec, up on the Richelieu River north of here. And so he's a merchant. And he also has race horses. He buys prints, who's an enslaved man in Dutchess County. He's a violent man. He challenges no fewer than three different men, including Ethan, to a duel with pistols. And ultimately, he dies a popper in Burlington in one of the debtors' jails. And so this is kind of, Levi is a tragedy of the family. And it's unfortunate because he owned probably a good, probably a quarter of the state of Vermont, real estate in the 1700s. So I actually have enough for a biography on Levi, but I don't wanna write it because I don't think anybody would wanna read it. It's so depressing. And he's a poet. He writes poetry to Nancy back at home and tells her how much he misses her. And then he's gone for a year and a half. And she's having an enormous breakdown in the meantime. So Ira, the third brother, would marry a woman named Jerusha Enos in 1789. They had three kids. Yeah, Ira also housed the widows and children of Heber and Heman in his Sunderland home and then in Colchester, he had a large Colchester home on the Winooski Block site. So that corner of Main Street and East Canal Street with that big block of buildings of businesses called the Winooski Block is exactly where Ira had his large mansion there. And we don't have any pictures of it or any more information than that. So in 1787, Ira and Ethan, I think it was May 1st, yeah. They signed a termination agreement for the Onion River Land Company, which was the original company of partners of some of the Allen Brothers and Remember Baker. So in that agreement, Ethan gave up all of the mill sites. Ira retained half of Lot 33, which was right on the river. And they gained supposedly 1,000 acres of land on Burlington Bay that had been Heemans that Heemans had given them, which Ira had paid taxes on. Ira also gave Ethan 700 pounds of worth of merchandise a year for the next, I believe it was 10 years but I could be wrong. Now what's sad about this is Ethan only lived a year and a half longer than this contract. So this was part of the lawsuit where Fanny and Jebez Penningman would sue Ira to regain those 1,000 acres or a share of the 1,000 acres and the 700 pounds and so on and so forth. So the move to Burlington happened sometime in 1787. Wow, that color, it's really rich. And so they were living in Sunderland down here south of Manchester and there's a little red line that approximates how they might have traveled. And we know from a letter that Ethan was looking for cordage or rope for a sailboat to sail to move the family up the lake to Burlington. And water was by far the easiest and the fastest way to Burlington because there was no road except for a horse path between here and Middlebury. And the description of this, of the path on land is like nothing you've ever seen. It wouldn't have, you couldn't have hauled an ox cart. So however, the southern part of the state did have some paths and some roads. And what I think happened was he probably had the boat, if he did have a boat and move the family by boat, it would have been from Skeensworld, which is Whitehall or Crown Point, Chimney Point area. So the boat would have been there. He would have moved probably with hauled wagons to load the boat. He actually brought cows with him, according to Fanny. So it probably would have been at least a week over land and another week on the water if they had good winds. But they would have been rowing too. So the conditions in that time period in this frontier area of Burlington were pretty difficult to say the least. Now, being on the river had its advantages because the river is the main transportation artery. It's like being on the main road. And again, they probably had boats down here and they probably used them while they were here. So what did the Yellen family look like who moved to Burlington? I hope we get a chance to find out. Nope. So Ethan, 49 years old, Fanny, 27 years young. Lucy Caroline, by his first marriage, 19, Marianne, 15, Pamela, eight are coming with them along with their daughter Fanny Margaret who Fanny had when she in 1784 in Sunderland. And Hannibal Montresor was born, we know, on November 28th. So the household also included two black men, one named Newport, a black housekeeper, and possibly others. And we know this from accounts sworn affidavits in that were actually published in the Burlington paper at the time. We know all that. And so that's quite a family. So Burlington at the time was a, there were supposedly, I read out here at the museum, I'm not sure where this data's from, but there were supposedly 40 dwellings in Burlington, but Burlington included South Burlington and included parts of, you know, Williston and Richmond, it was 36,000 acres. So there were some spread out houses, but a lot of them on the bay, a half a dozen or a dozen, and then a half a dozen or dozen on the river across from the mill, where there were actually mills by then. And so we have a couple of folks just to note here who were friends of the Allens include, these are the Lawrence's on Lime Kiln Road right by the bridge near St. Mike's. This is Ira Allen's place at the dam. This is the Allen Homestead where we are right now, Felix Powell out on the point there, and the C is for the Collins's on Battery Street, and that was where Fannie gave birth in November. And what we have is information from John Collins' son that said that the Allens lived with them for three months before Fannie gave birth to Hannibal. So we know she gave birth on November 28th, so if we backtrack three months, looks like August is when they arrived here in Burlington. Now that doesn't mean Ethan wasn't here beforehand. And because we have documents that were written like letters that were dated and time, a place stamped in Burlington. There was a celebration on August 10th, a colonial celebration of the first anniversary of the people that lived here every year. And this comes from Hilda Lawrence, who is the daughter, she's six years old when Ethan dies. So she has a working memory of seeing Ethan Allen in the casket, in the house. She has a working memory of the Allens coming over to their house by Lime Kiln Bridge on the Burlington side. And she says her father, Stephen Lawrence, and her mother, Mary, both were here before 75, along with Felix Powell. And then after 76, a Gideon King senior, John Boyden, these guys are on the bay, and they're the predecessors to the shipping industry that arises. Fred Saxton, Simon Tubbs, John Collins, all arrived around the same time. Now she says after the war, the war technically didn't end until 1783, but I think I've seen evidence that they were here before that. So things might have been simmering down up here enough so people felt safe to come up here. So this is a letter to Stephen Roe Bradley, and Stephen was the guy who had the boarding house to where Ethan and Fanny got married. And Ethan writes here talking about how great it is. He's got all this land, and he's smitten with the lifestyle of a farmer. But this guy, Bradley, went on after Ethan died to become a district judge and member of the Broad House on the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Senate president wrote to him. So he was a major guy, and he and Ethan were very close. We have lots of correspondence between the two. And Ethan was trying to get him to get the Fanny's land back because her father was a loyalist and they had confiscated his land as well. So typically on farms in the 18th century, there were beef cows. Alan talked about selling beef cattle, so we think it's safe bet that they had beef cattle here, milking cows, calves, mares, possibly sheep, pigs, hogs, a horse. They had a yoke of oxen that, and we know they grew corn, wheat, peas, flax, Berlinin, medicinal plants, and so forth as well here. But we don't specifically beyond what we find in letters or some of the different anecdotes we don't really know any more than that. This is a letter to Levi. Notice the date, January 29th, 1787. So he hasn't moved the family here yet. This is the beginning of the year, and he's asking Levi to exert a little skill. He could be talking about intimidation. He could be talking about negotiating some kind of compromise, but it sounds like Ethan owes Armstrong. It's a small amount, like 15 pounds, which isn't a lot of money, and he's trying to get Levi to kind of help him out. Kind of gets to the Ethan's personality and how they work together. June 3rd, 1787. He's writes Ethan again, and again there's no mail delivery. So Ethan sends one of his workers up the Richelieu River, maybe with letters for other people, and he says, you know, we really need flour. We don't have money. There's cash, it's very scarce. My farming business goes on very brisk. I come up for seed corn, do not family, fail us. Here my family is well, my compliments to Mrs. Allen, referring to Nancy. And so here's a letter from Nancy to Ethan, and it may be one of my favorites from all of these, and it says, it's on June 28th, 1787, and it says, I have just time to inform you of your brother's safe arrival at Quebec with a small quantity of lumber. So they're sawing lumber at the river, floating it down the river, taking it up Lake Champlain to Richelieu River to the trading post, and then Levi is finding a way to ship it up to Quebec from there. So he's actually trying to make a go of selling timber uncut lumber and lumber. And he wrote me, he had reasonable, he should be successful, wish to God he may for repeated misfortunes have almost turned my brains. She says, I am in great want of tables and my tables and chairs and bedsteads. Do be kind enough to get them made as soon as possible. Ethan Allen, furniture. Right there. Dare say, you have enough to do to take care of your business and your large family of children. For I hear you have at least one dozen. Well done, old rogue. Shall have to put a poor opinion, have but a poor opinion of you after this. I wish you a speedy reformation. Talking about when you move the family up. So it's end of June, family's not here yet. Nowhere does Nancy offer regards to Fanny, Ethan's wife of three or four years, which is maybe a coincidence. And the book has a chapter on the mysteries of the Allen's house, what it was like to live there, the kinds of quarters they had in that square footage and lots of good things like that from living historians who know. So the reaction is to reason the only article man book. For one thing, there was a fire when his book copies were being printed that destroyed most of them. And some people think it was intentionally set, but this is kind of a big deal. So he only ended up with a few hundred copies of this book. Here's a letter that was published in the Burlington paper, originally published in the Vermont Gazette on January 2nd, 1788. He says, remember before it is too late for these things, your offended God will call you into judgment and threatening him with punishment by God. And Reverend Nathan Perkins, who did a tour of New England in 1789, the year Ethan died later that year, came through. And it's too bad Ethan wasn't still here, it would have been an interesting debate. But Perkins writes in his journal, Alan was an awful infidel, one of the ye wickedest men that ever walked this guilty globe. I stopped and looked at his grave with a pious horror. So he actually goes up to Greenmount Cemetery, if you can believe this, and shakes his head. And this Perkins was a, he also said that after touring Vermont, which was just a, it's like he couldn't find any place that wasn't filthy and gross and nasty and decrepit, that Vermont was just full of heathens. Just a bunch of heathens, he said, pretty interesting. And then this is a June 5th, 1788 settlement with his brother Levi for 100 pounds. Levi pays Ethan 100 pounds, we don't know what for. 100 pounds is a lot of money. I forget, I think it's 3,000. So it's a chunk of change. Notice who witnessed it on the bottom. Lucy Caroline Allen and Marianne Allen, his two daughters. So this was signed while they were living here and Levi was visiting. And they also, Ethan, Ira and Levi, journeyed up to Montreal, probably over water, and come back to talk with General Haldeman to push Vermont Canada trade. And Ethan actually wrote a letter to Lord Dorchester, who is Guy Carlton, who war historians will know as a British general, weighing the potential of Vermont's allegiance with the US versus Great Britain. So this is a Canadian archives painting of St. John, what St. John looked like at the time, which is basically a little town with a fort. So Fanny's, Fanny was really a pretty interesting character. First of all, her father is the guy in uniform on the left, Captain John Montresor, who was an engineer with the British Army. Her mother died in childbirth, or surely thereafter. She was raised by her aunt, in mostly New York City, where her aunt married Creen Brush, who's the man up at the top. Colonel Creen Brush was a British, Irish-born aristocrat who made his way into the New York legislature and became a land baron. He had 60,000 acres in Westminster. So before too long, when Fanny was about 11, when this portrait was painted, they moved to Westminster, Vermont, and on to this brush estate, and they lived there for a while. So Fanny lived an extravagant lifestyle. They probably had servants. She had private tutoring. Girls couldn't go to school then. There were girls' schools in some places, but Fanny was educated in the classics, in languages, in science, in music, and so forth. So she was a really kind of a talented, privileged person. And these are her slippers that are at Fort Ticonderoga, her biology kit with magnifying glasses and so forth, and some earrings that are also at Fort Ty. So Fanny is, she's in this different culture than Ethan Allen grew up in on the farm. And there are some accounts, historical accounts, of there being friction between Fanny and Ethan's first kids, the girls, including Lucy Caroline and Pamela and Marianne and so forth. But I couldn't find any primary sources that showed that yet. However, this is an interesting letter from Sam Hitchcock, who's in Bennington to Lucy, who is in Burlington or Vergeance. They lived in Burlington for a few years and in Vergeance for a few years. He says, I shall be obliged to call and see our chaste, discreet, and virtuous mother. He's talking about going to Westminster. Shall I express a great deal of love to her on your account? I shall be glad to see the little boys. This is Ethan and Hannibal. And on this account shall call, but I should be happily disappointed if she should be from home. So this is really an interesting piece. And it gets to the family dynamics a little bit of at least one person, Sam Hitchcock, who's a big time lawyer and a Harvard graduate and then a lawyer who came to Vermont and became a rose to different offices. Another letter that was interesting was a letter from Ira to Fanny in 1802. And by the way, the Hitchcock letter was in 1791, two years after Ethan had died. So Ira to Fanny in 1802, he's in Kredges and Adamant. He says he's not the guardian of the boys, of the two little Fanny's little boys. I shall feel a duty I owe to the memory of my brother and you as parent to three of his children to advise you for their best good as occasions from time to time require. Mrs. Allen, his wife, Jerusha, will more fully explain my reasons for writing you this letter and inform you of some other things that may be useful to you in more ways than one and which I have not time to state in a letter. So this, Ira was not the, he's kind of a godfather for the whole family. He supported everybody, but it's clear that he was getting pretty fed up with supporting the boys. And in the meantime, Jebes Penningman and Fanny are doing pretty well. By 1802, they had four kids of their own. Jebes Penningman and Fanny's new husband and Fanny. And he was collector of customs up in Swan. So Mayden, Ira is looking at all this debt and he's seeing Jebes doing pretty well and why should I be supporting the Allen? Again, that's conjecture, but that's what the letter said. So these are Oxen and Oxen were the Allen's took frequent trips into town on ox carts. And according to accounts, people wrote and they're very slow. They go about two miles an hour, top speed if they're motivated. So it would take, be an all day trip going into the bay and back or out to Colchester Point. So here's a little bit about Levi. This letter is, notice the date. It's a couple of weeks before Ethan dies and Levi is telling Ethan about his grand plan. So the fact that he's telling Ethan this tells us that he isn't really that intimate with Ethan. That these two are not, they don't really know necessarily exactly what they're doing. But Levi and Ira had been cooking up this scheme. In fact, Levi became Ira's power of attorney. And this first on this broadside on the left is a British Navy poster that's asking for ship mass, large trees, four or five feet in diameter that the British Navy would pay good money for to buy. So Levi had this plan that they would harvest the infinite timber here in Vermont, sell it to the British Navy and get rich. So Levi actually is planning to go to Great Britain. He gets delayed by three or four months because of contrary winds. So he literally sits around. He's up at Ebenezer's for a week or two. He's all over the state. Meanwhile, Nancy is up at the, well, in January Nancy was probably at Ira's place hanging out for the winter, but he says Nancy's situation is truly bad. I was much pleased to see Fanny make you and everything easy. So I don't know exactly what he's talking about. This is clipped from a longer letter that's not really explanatory, but Levi left behind lots of journals. So there's lots of stuff to read, mostly just account books. And this is kind of what it would have, the shipping ports would have looked like at the time. So what's really strange about this is this is the last correspondence we have of Levi to Ethan. Levi does finally go to London about the time about the day Ethan dies. Levi doesn't find out until June for some reason. This is a letter from John Kelly who's a New York City lawyer big time out of state landowner. He basically says you and Ira owe me a lot of money. I think he was trying to get the brush estate back. For Fanny and Ethan. And he was part of, but in order to do that, he had to, they had to pony up some money and things were a little slower right then. Cash was non-existent. So he's complaining that I need my money and in order to make this work. So everybody knows the story of Ethan's last journey and on the ox card plodding two miles an hour. And this is a newspaper article that basically laid out the funeral procession from Ira's place in Winooski now. Used to be Colchester. Going across the river hauling three cannons every three minutes. Cannons would fire every minute. Six platoons of infantry field officers withdrawn swords, officers, magistrates, spectators, muskets were fired. Major Bill Goodrich is the only person who spoke. They did not want any religion at this funeral. And they opened the casket one final time, closed it, lowered it into the ground and the procession marched back down the hill to muffled drums back to Ira's house and they had a keg of rum tapped for the celebration afterwards. So anyone know who this is? So this, if you read any of the old biographies, you'll read about all this controversy about Ethan's grave and was he really buried there or did Fanning dig him up and bury him in Montreal under the citadel or there's all kinds of weird conspiracy theories. Well, they actually found, when they were making that monument in 1858, they actually, Ira Allen's son, Ira Hayden Allen writes John Norton Pomeroy, who's the head of the committee, of the monument committee, to tell him that they had dug under the grave where everybody thought his grave was and they found the body. They found Ethan in his casket. It was deeper than they had looked before but it was there unmistakably. And this guy gets wind of it because it's in the papers, John Mead. And he wants to, he asks if he can come up and measure Ethan's cranium for his statue design. He was not successful in measuring Ethan's cranium. So John Willick, who Ethan had been writing back and forth President of Dartmouth writes him the day after Ethan dies, February 13th. The observations in your letters give me much pleasure and for my idea of your philosophic and contemplative turn persuaded I am that you will be by sublime reason pervade the name, the maze of atheism into the region of Theism. And Silas Baron Hathaway who sued Ira into further bankruptcy and debtors prison said, and this is in the Burlington paper, though possessing many eccentricities peculiar to himself, Ethan exhibited through his life a strong sense of honor and invincible spirit of patriotism. And he goes on to say he didn't give bonds or IOUs and he left cash to pay three men his unpaid bills. So he of course did use some IOUs but basically the way people survived was on IOUs because there really was no cash because of the economy and currency. And this testimony from Holly Whitters who was 17 worked here on the homestead. Ethan always paid up on time after he died. Ira Allen paid us our due wages so and Fanny also apparently paid wages after they were after Ethan was gone as well. So what happened after Ethan was Lucy Caroline, his daughter married Sam Hitchcock in April, two months, three months later. They had five, six kids. One of them was Ethan Allen Hitchcock who according to Lucy I had a strong resemblance to his grandfather, Ethan Allen. And he became a general and aid of President Lincoln. Interestingly enough. So this guy was born eight months after Ethan died. Ethan Alfonso Allen. There's no evidence anywhere for Voltaire. It is sometimes called Ethan Voltaire Alfonso. His West Point graduation information says Ethan Alfonso and he lived a long life and in the meantime the next following year Mary Ann, his daughter died and Fanny returned the remaining family to Westminster to live with Margaret and her husband Patrick Wall. Pamela may have stayed behind and lived with the Hitchcocks. So there are some historians that say both Mary Ann and Pamela did the two remaining Syrian sisters but Mary Ann died in 1790. So Fanny's in Westminster again. She meets among other people, a man named Dr. Jebez Penningman and she marries Penningman in 1793. They have four kids, very interesting names. European kind of classic names with middle names, Giulietta Hortensia. Udney is named after their attorney, Udney Hay and Adelia and they move back into the homestead here, believe it or not. I think Jebez built a frame house in addition to the original house and a carriage barn and in 1801 he was appointed by the president to US Customs Collector later and after a few years, they lived in a farmhouse on the southeast corner of Route 15 and Lime Kiln Road for decades, very happily ever after. The Dunbar Bontel, by the way, was built on the Penningman farm. It became the site of Fanny Allen Hospital and part of the UVM Medical Center and it's actually named after another Fanny Allen, little Fanny Margaret who was the first daughter of Ethan and Fanny. She was 10 years old when Fanny married Jebez Penningman and of course, her becoming a Catholic nun was a big deal back then. There were no Catholics in Vermont until the late 1700s because the Catholics were the mill workers and they did come in to Burlington, immigrated to Burlington, but at that time this was a big deal because Ethan was a DST, he was not into organized religion at all and she attended Middlebury Seminary for Girls and Emma Willard School and went to Montreal. This is a little bit about Fanny's charm which I think is really interesting. It's a letter from Jebez Penningman to Stephen Ro Bradley and it basically indicates several letters indicate that Bradley's mother was staying with either with the Penningmans or nearby. She was under the watchful eye of Dr. Penningman so Bradley's older mother is under the watchful eye of Dr. Penningman and this is a PS at the end of the letter. Mrs. Penningman and Miss Fanny Allen join me in respects to yourself and Mrs. Bradley. Fanny proposes to visit Westminster in May when she will pay her personal respects to yourself and her much-esteemed friend, your good lady. So those are all we have of Fanny's indirect words. We don't have any letters written by Fanny anywhere that we've found anywhere. And then we have another interesting letter, anybody who's ever been a teenager can relate to this. This is from Ethan Alfonzo who's 19 now and 1808. He's writing Zimmery Enos Allen who's 16. I am head over ears in love with a fine young lady but dare not proceed farther on account of the displeasure of my parents and which is full and great an obstacle to the union is my use in circumstances in life. When I make myself master of the minds of Peru, I shall then get me a companion. Meaning when he has money and he's earned his fortune, maybe it'll work out then. And what's interesting is he actually married twice after that later in life, lost his first wife. Here's another excerpt and we're almost finished. I'm going a little longer than I wanted. These are in the same Burlington paper. Two quotes by stepfather and son. Peneman who is the collector of customs says, Raph says, well as vessels must be prevented from proceeding to a foreign port, meaning any place in Canada. After that purpose, one or two armed boats may, if necessary, be stationed near the line. Allen writes a letter. This is Ethan Allen Jr. This fag end of the embargo goes to prohibit the farmers of Vermont and New Hampshire from driving their swine into Canada for sale, an anti-Republican act. And it turned out that the actual trade during the embargo of 1808 actually increased during the embargo. So, I think this is the last real slide. It's about Fannie and Adelia collecting wildflowers. If you look closely, you can see their handwriting on these. They looked up the scientific names and they looked up the fluorography or they knew the fluorography, which are the romantic flower names for different flowers. And they comprise this collection of hundreds of wildflowers which were found their way back to UVM's Pringle Herbarium and they're actually online if you Google it or contact UVM and you can see their digital photos but we had them here at the Homestead last fall and it was really amazing. But these two guys are two Paris bonus father and son who came at different times to Vermont at that time period late 1700s, early 1800s. And in this book had been published around turn of the century on scientific nomenclature. So it was just starting to be a thing. So Fannie was really ahead of her time. I mean, not only was she educated and smart but she knew how to do things and wanted to do things and it's a really interesting, interesting collection. So that's about it. I have, there's more in the book about the slavery question. There's more about the impact on Vermont's DNA on unique DNA that we have politically here and how our beginnings kind of affected that and influenced that. And that's about it. I have a few books that people want to hang around if anyone's interested in chatting or getting this on the book. Questions, we'll take a couple of questions. I don't have time. Well, coming out, this was great. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, the more you dig, the more you find and it's very, it's rich. And, but I'm to a point now where I have pretty much a draft that's coherent enough to actually send out and see who might be interested in it. It's not a very good time to be publishing history of old white dudes. And, you know, so, you know, and I may end up doing it myself, self-publishing. I haven't done any myself yet, but that's a possibility. Yeah. You said a couple of times that Ethan was a deus. And in fact, there were a lot of early American leaders who were deus. But I understood that he rejected deus in his book, you know, a reason for the only Oracle mankind. And that he argued with Dr. Congress Young, I think, about this. Young was a deus and Ethan Allen rejected even that. You know, you don't have to be able to explain how the world got going, which is where the deus is. Do you feel that he was a deus? Well, I think, yeah. Let's look at this other recording. Can you kind of summarize the question in the microphone, please? Oh, yes. Ethan at various times claimed he was a deus and not a deus. And depending on the interpretation of the historian, and there are some Thomas Young biographers out there. And there are people that say Ethan plagiarized. Plagiarism wasn't a law when this was published. It wasn't even a thing. So he was criticized for plagiarizing, I think, because the church really hated this book. And more over than, you know. But, and there was also an agreement that whoever outlives the other will publish this between them, some biographers say. But I think the point you're trying to get at is was he a deus, capital D, deus or not? And there are, you know, it really depends on your interpretation. Ethan was very argumentative. And so he could probably argue both sides of that argument. So that's a question that could go on for a long time at the tavern here if you want to hang around. Yeah. Just a comment, Tom, on that. We do have copies of the original. It's an abridged version, but we do have those. We also have a little booklet that Michael McDyve who taught at Champlain College and gave a talk here in, I think it was in 2010, which is a little summary. It's about 10 pages, but it's a one page for every chapter of the book. And that really is a very good place. But he does say, he doesn't believe this green being because he says it there, God is infinite and therefore cannot be jealous. He was criticizing the Old Testament version of the time that, you know, a jealous God would bring down wrath on people. So it is a very interesting read. Angie. I have a question about Ira. The quick-famed summary you had of about Ira, Ethan's brother, was that he had in there that he took in his late brother's widows and children. And it's often assumed that Ethan's daughters from his first wife may have also gone to Ira's household right after Ethan died before Lucy got married. Ethan was the elder brother. Why wasn't he taking in his late brother's widows and children? Or maybe the timeline is just off from when that happened. But that just stuck out to me because Ira was the younger brother. You would think Ethan is the head of the family may have done that. And also because Ira tends to get a really bad rap in Vermont, his legacy is not as unspoiled as Ethan's husband throughout time. And I just wonder if Ira deserves that reputation or not. OK, so two parts to the question, right? So Ethan was in prison when Heman and Heber died. And in fact, he was released about the time Heman died. He went to visit Heman. He had just died. So both of their wives and children needed a place to go. So Mary, by the way, I think something stayed with Ira too in Sunderland. So he's got this place in Sunderland. There's a B&B called the Ira Allen B&B in Sunderland, Vermont, just south of Manchester. They claim is the original building, the original Ira Allen building. So there's that. In terms of his Ira's standing, Ira's a complicated guy. And his biographer, who wrote a dissertation on him, Kevin Graffonino, basically concluded that he wanted to overthrow the Canadian government. That's why he went to Europe, to get the guns and the cannons. And that was his intention, to arm the Vermont militia so they could overthrow Canada. When he was in debtor's prison here in Burlington, and then he left for Philadelphia to escape debtor's prison, he was trying to plan a war down south with Mexico. So he had all these schemes going on. Meanwhile, he's got a mountain of debt. He's making promises he can't keep. So he's a really complicated character. But he donated the land for UVM. His one of his nephews got the money, cash, after he left town. Somehow squeezed the cash out to give UVM that Ira had promised. So they're two different people. As to the conjecture that the girls went to live with Ira, it's conjecture. And until I see primary sources that show something more than that, I had seen it was the Hitchcocks. But you have different historians saying different things. So it looked like there was some bad blood, but we don't know exactly. Thank you, Glenn. I think you're going to be outside. Yeah. Help yourself with the refreshments that we have up there. Before you have real quick, Tom has the list of the events. How we know? I think I can probably just step in real quick. We have our quarterly book club is reading a book that's for sale in the bookshop. It's a historic fiction book set in Revolutionary Boston. And that will be on August 6th at 3 PM. And next month, our presentation is July 19th. Can you double check the date for that for our monthly lecture? No glasses. And that is with the Vermont Holocaust Memorial. And they have a couple of speakers coming in to present on the connections between the Holocaust and Vermont and their memorial project as well. So that will be Sunday, July 16th at 2 PM. Thank you, everyone.