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Why is Redding called Connecticut's Valley Forge? Because in the winter of 1778–79 Major General Israel Putnam quartered a division of the Continental Army here — about three thousand men in three camps of log huts — short of bread, blankets and shoes. Joseph Plumb Martin, a Connecticut private who wintered in Redding, remembered the season as one of starving and freezing. The main camp is now Putnam Memorial State Park.
Then the army itself arrived. Putnam chose the Redding hills for the winter of 1778–79 because from here a division could cover the Danbury stores, the Sound and the Hudson Highlands at once. New Hampshire men under Enoch Poor, Moses Hazen's Canadian regiment and two Connecticut brigades under Samuel Holden Parsons and Jedediah Huntington built their huts in three valleys. On December 30 the Connecticut line, unpaid and half fed, formed up to march on the legislature at Hartford; Putnam rode in and talked them back to their huts. In February a spy and a deserter were executed on the hill still called Gallows Hill. The division marched out in the spring, the chimneys fell, and the woods closed over the camp.
Why People Visit Redding
People come to Redding for what is not here: no highway, no strip, no crowd. They come for a Revolutionary War camp you can walk alone on a winter morning, for sixty miles of trails, and for the hills that drew Mark Twain, Charles Ives and Edward Steichen out of New York.
