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Redding Connecticut Vintage Retro Ceramic Mug - Black Logo
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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.
The Revolution came up the road. In 1775 some hundred Redding men marched north under Captain Zalmon Read in the new 5th Connecticut Regiment. On the morning of April 26, 1777, the war came to them instead: a British and Loyalist column under William Tryon, landed at Compo the evening before and bound for the supply depot at Danbury, halted on Redding Ridge in front of the Anglican church. The militia gathered behind it. By that afternoon Generals Silliman, Wooster and Arnold were in Redding with the Fairfield County men, and the next day they caught the column at Ridgefield. Redding's part in that week was the militia's part: neighbors with muskets, turned out on a morning's notice.
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.
