Ethan Allen (1738-1789)
Filed under the name Ethan · July 18, 2026
Ethan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys and helped capture Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775, and he went on to play a real role in Vermont's early history afterward. I don't know a lot of Revolutionary War history — that wasn't exactly the focus at the schools I went to, on and off, while I was raising kids and working — but I know something about people organizing themselves outside the official system to get something done that the people in charge weren't going to hand over willingly. The Green Mountain Boys weren't the regular army; they were regular men who decided the fight mattered enough to show up armed and unofficial. That's a shape of story I recognize — folks without official standing getting something real done anyway because nobody else was going to do it for them. Fort Ticonderoga's a name I'd never heard before reading his file, but the instinct behind taking it sounds pretty familiar to me.