Hi, Carole. This is a letter to the editor, if you like. Your recent history of Gen. John Burgoyne stops short of providing proof of his travels through South Berkshire. Yes, there was a traveled roadway from Ice Glen Road over the mountain and linking with Beartown Mountain Road in Monterey. It was passable 250 years ago and much of it can be followed today — exceptions being where heavy logging disrupted the earthen evidence.

But Burgoyne never came through Stockbridge. Friederike Charlotte Louise von Massow, Freifrau Riedesel (1746-1808), who was accompanying her husband, Brunswicker Gen. Friedrich Adolf Friedesel (1738-1800) during the Bennington and Saratoga campaign, came through riding in a carriage with her attendants and a number of the Convention Army, meeting up with her husband in Monterey, likely at Chadwick’s Tavern on the edge of Beartown State Forest. Von Riedesel himself came with other soldiers through Great Barrington, where his sharp uniform and manner led those who saw him to think he was Burgoye.

Henry White, editor of the Berkshire Gleaner and an inveterate explorer of roads old and new, sought to find the origin of the Burgoyne legend. (10 August, 27 November and 4 December 1910 issues). Dr. Orville W. Lane of Great Barrington delved into contemporary accounts including William L. Stone’s Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers During the American Revolution (1891). The issue was raised in Stockbridge magazine, 1 April 1914. Ed Knurow dug into the legend; his notebooks are at the Berkshire Athenaeum. Lots have chased the story.

Burgoyne, later historians have claimed, came through Kinderhook and Great Barrington, Tyringham (Monterey) and Sandisfield.

Lion Miles of Stockbridge did extensive research, looking at Burgoyne documents and reports by several who traveled with him. He concluded Burgoyne traveled with his own entourage, not with Convention Army regulars, to Stephentown through Lanesboro and Pittsfield then east through Dalton (where the legend of buried Hessian gold on Day mountain persists) and Hinsdale to Northampton.

I devote a lengthy chapter to this story in Henry Knox and the Revolutionary War Trail in Western Massachusetts (McFarland, 2012).

I’ve visited the plaque in the company of Rick Wilcox, with the permission of the property owner. The plaque was put up in this out-of-the-way but nominally precise spot by Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939.

Bernard A. Drew
Great Barrington

Hi Bernie,

Thanks for this. Of course, the proof relied upon by the property owner was the DAR plaque. I am so glad the DAR got it in the “nominally precise spot.” Thanks for filling in so many details.

Carole