The Battle of Ridgefield

Author Keith Marshall Jones III will share a new and definitive account of inland Connecticut’s only Revolutionary War engagement, on April 27, 1777, in a lecture at New Haven Museum, “The Battle of Ridgefield” on Thursday, April 24, 2025, at 6 p.m., Register here. The free NH250 event will also stream on FB Live.

Jones’s discussion will be based on his latest book, “The Battle of Ridgefield: Benedict Arnold, the Patriot Militia, and the Surprising 1777 Battle that Galvanized Revolutionary Connecticut,” which tells how Benedict Arnold and the patriots dashed British hopes for Crown hegemony over southwestern Connecticut. According to Connecticut State Historian Emeritus Walter Woodward, Jones’s work “shows that the action was a more complex and significant Revolutionary moment than previously realized.”

“The Battle of Ridgefield was a militia action involving local farmers and merchants against a professional enemy thrice their size.” Jones notes. “It reminds us today, when democracy itself is under siege, that Independence was won at the grassroots level and that is how it must be perpetuated.”

Jones will integrate findings from a new generation of historians with the National Park Service’s 2022 Ridgefield Battlefield Protection Program Phase I Study, and a digital trove of never-before-published archival primary source material to reveal a number of new conclusions.