French General Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, arrived in Newport in July 1780 with thousands of French ground and naval forces to assist 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, then moved down the eastern seaboard to confront Lieutenant General Earl Cornwallis and the British army in Yorktown, Virginia, where Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, virtually ending the war and ensuring American independence. The French route south through Connecticut ran from June 19 to July 2, 1781, with the return north from October 23 to November 9, 1782. Over four days from June 19-23, 1781, 4,700 soldiers, officers, artillery, supply wagons, and roughly 700 animals passed through Sterling, Plainfield, Canterbury, Scotland, and Windham after crossing from Rhode Island, bringing a striking display of military movement to a region mostly spared major Revolutionary War activity until then. After landing in Newport in June 1780, Rochambeau met Washington in Hartford in September 1780 and Wethersfield in May 1781 to choose a location for a joint offensive, though as the French moved across Connecticut they knew only that they were to meet the Continental Army at what is now White Plains, New York. Engineers carrying axes and shovels went first to clear and repair roads and bridges along a route of close to 700 miles in total, including 120 miles in Connecticut, followed by an infantry regiment of almost 1,000 officers and men, artillery, at least 12 staff and regimental supply wagons drawn by four oxen each, commissary and hospital wagons, forge wagons, wheelwrights, and mobile camp forges. Breakdowns were frequent on the rocky, narrow roads, artillery and supply wagons were often delayed, and although the goal was to cover 15 miles a day, arrivals often came well into the night before the tents were struck again by 5 a.m. for the next day's march. The return through Connecticut in November 1782 came at a slower pace. A wheelwright from Scotland became memorable to Rochambeau in September 1780 when poor roads damaged the wheel of the carriage carrying Rochambeau and Admiral de Ternay to Hartford; though ill and at first resistant even for a hat full of guineas, he worked through the night after learning whose carriage it was, and when the wheel broke again on the return trip, he repaired it a second time. Rochambeau praised the patriot spirit he saw among Connecticut's inland cultivators and landowners. At campsites in Plainfield and Windham, French troops entertained local people with band concerts and spent silver at impromptu village markets crowded with produce, while homes and inns along the route, including the Samuel Dorrance Inn in the Sterling Hill section of today's Sterling, became memorable places of contact between French officers and their American hosts.

Photo: Michael Herrick

Scotland, Connecticut · USA