Another revolutionary Allen

The Allen brothers of Revolutionary War fame are something like the Marx Brothers of the movies. Everyone remembers Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo but forgets Gummo. With the Allens, Ethan is the famous one; Ira and Heman were equally audacious in Vermont history. But who remembers Zimri?

The brothers (there were also Heber and Levi) and sisters (Lydia and Lucy) were offspring of Joseph Allen and Mary Baker Allen. Ethan, said to have been born in Litchfield,  dabbled in enterprises in Cornwall and Salisbury, acquired land in Sheffield and instigated the iron furnace at Lake Wononscopomuc in Lakeville before relocating to Northampton, Mass., where in 1767 he engaged in a loud discussion of religion in a tavern and was invited to leave. 

Ethan had used up much of his wife’s inheritance in speculations while on extended hunting trips to the New Hampshire Grants. 

Mother Mary “and the children were taken care of by Ethan’s brother Zimri at his farm in Sheffield, Massachusetts,” according to historian Theodore Corbett in “No Turning Point”(2012).

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Zimri (1748-1776) was the youngest in the family. He lived for a time in Salisbury. He joined Ethan, Ira, Heman and their cousin Remember Baker in organizing the Onion River Co. in 1772 to speculate on land in the New Hampshire Grants and the Champlain area of New York state.

Ethan was the brashest of the Allens, but the others flirted with convention. They were outspoken Unitarians. The Connecticut Courant of April 27, 1773, carried this advertisement: “$100 Reward. Escaped out of the custody of me the subscriber at Salisbury, on the night after the 19th of April inst., Remember Baker of Arlington, in Charlotte county, and province of New York, and Zimrie Allen of said Salisbury, being each of them under an arrest for blasphemy, committed at said Salisbury on or about the 28th day of March last. 

“Said Baker is about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches high, pretty well set, something freckled in his face. Said Allen is near 6 feet high, slim built, goes something stooping, dark hair; each of said fellows being armed with sword and pistol, and are notorious for blasphemous expressions in conversation and ridiculing everything sacred. Whoever will apprehend said fellows and deliver them to the custody of the subscriber, so that they may be brought to justice shall have thirty pounds lawful money reward, for both, and fifteen pounds for either paid by Nathaniel Buell, Constable of Salisbury.”

Baker and Allen responded in the same newspaper on June 8, 1773: “Though we uttered some words that might be construed satyrical against doctrines that some sectaries of Christians believe to be sacred, yet we are rationally certain that many of the pulpit thumpers, in their solemn addresses, much more blaspheme the perfections and moral character of the God of Nature than we do.”

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The Allen brothers by now had secured land at Lake Champlain “and had built thereon saw-mills and grist-mills and established a line of blockhouses and outposts,” according to Ethan’s grandson, Maj. Gen. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, in “Fifty Years in Camp and Field” (1909). 

An advertisement in the Courant in June 1773 said: “Lately purchased by the Allens and Baker a large tract of land situate on both sides of the mouth of Onion River and fronting Westerly on Lake Champlain, containing about 45,000 acres and Sundry lesser parcels of land further up the said river. Whoever inclines to be a purchaser may apply to Ethan, Zimri and Ira Allen on the premises, or to Heman and Levi Allen in Salisbury.”

Zimri may have been in the Grants then, but he mostly ran Ethan’s farm in Sheffield.

At least one meeting of Onion River Land Co. board members was held in Sheffield, on March 15, 1775, according to Willard Stone Randall in “Ethan Allen: His Life and Times” (2012). 

Two months later, Zimri was a Green Mountain Boy, accompanying four of his brothers and three cousins (Baker, Seth Warner and Ebenezer Allen) on the successful May 10, 1775, assault to wrest Fort Ticonderoga from the British.

Of the Allens, Zimri and Heber were the most shy of taking political stands. 

“Zimri was like Ethan a ‘heretic’ in religious matters, and lived a quiet and respectable life and died at Sheffield, Mass.,” according to Hitchcock.

Lillian Preiss in “Sheffield Frontier Town” (1976) said two of Ethan Allen’s daughters were born in Sheffield and one son, Joseph, 11, died of smallpox in Sheffield. 

“When Allen returned to Sheffield [in 1778] after a three-year captivity by the British, he found that his brother Zimri, who had taken care of his farm and family for ten years, had died and the remnants of Ethan’s family had moved to Arlington on the Grants,” she wrote.

Another hint of Zimri’s life comes from Randall, who said Ethan returned from prison to learn his brother Heman [wounded at the Battle of Walloomsac, near Bennington, in August 1777] had died and “his bachelor brother Zimri, who provided a home for their aged mother [she died in 1774], had also died of tuberculosis.”

An attempt to pin down the location of the Allen farmstead in Sheffield — likely in Ashley Falls — may require a visit to the Registry of Deeds in Springfield.

Zimri Allen is apparently buried in Sheffield, location not known.

If the time period interests you, the writer’s book “Henry Knox and the Revolutionary War Trail in Western Massachusetts” (2012) relates other aspects of the American Revolution, as do two other books by area historians, “John and Ethan: A Revolutionary Friendship” by Ronald D. Jones (2007) and “The 14th Colony: A Brief History” by Tom Shachtman (2013).