French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, arrived at Newport in July 1780 with thousands of French ground and naval forces to aid the Americans in the War for Independence. After wintering in Newport, his troops marched through Connecticut to join General George Washington’s Continental Army just over the New York border, and the combined forces moved down the eastern seaboard to confront Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis and the British army at Yorktown, Virginia. Following a prolonged siege, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, effectively ending the war and securing American independence. Rochambeau’s troops camped in Ridgefield’s Ridgebury Parish on July 1 and 2, 1781, their eleventh and last camp in Connecticut before crossing into New York on July 3 to join the Continental Army near present-day White Plains. His advance guard of chausseurs and grenadiers under Major Alexandre de Berthier was deployed on the ridge, while the Hussar Legion of duc de Lauzun took North Salem Road eight miles to the southwest to screen the camp from British spies. Before leaving for New York, Rochambeau celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday at Ensign Samuel Keeler’s Tavern in Ridgebury, and the next morning one of his regimental chaplains led a Catholic mass for the French troops. After the success at Yorktown, Rochambeau’s army returned north in the fall of 1782, passing through the area before reaching camp in Danbury on October 23 and 24. The campaign also touched local lives: seventeen-year-old Thomas Boughton of Ridgebury drove French supply wagons to Yorktown, more than four hundred miles from his hometown, witnessed the British surrender on October 19, 1781, and returned home the next year with seventy-five dollars in French silver; he later married Rebecca Coley, raised five children, and was buried in the Ridgebury cemetery after his death in 1846. On July 1, 1781, Rochambeau and his officers stopped for water at the homestead of Stephen Norris, and that morning Abigail Norris had delivered her sixth child; according to Norris family history, the child was named after duc de Lauzun, and town records show later generations of the family continued the name, while the grave marker of nine-year-old Delazon Norris may still be found in Ridgebury cemetery.