Complicated Legacies: Vermonters want to like, as well as respect, our founding fathers

By J. Kevin Graffagnino 

Vermonters who study our state’s eighteenth-century beginnings have mixed feelings about Ira Allen. We know he was an important player in many of the key developments in Vermont between 1770 and 1800—a major land speculator and founder of the Onion River Land Company; a key participant in the clandestine Haldimand Negotiations; Vermont’s first state treasurer and surveyor general; a tireless author and propagandist for independent Vermont’s right to exist; an enthusiastic developer of northern Vermont towns and Champlain Valley trade after the American Revolution; and a principal in the drive to create the University of Vermont and locate it in Burlington—who stood shoulder to shoulder with his older brother Ethan and first governor Thomas Chittenden atop the pyramid of early Vermont leaders.

But Vermonters want to like as well as respect our Founding Fathers, and from his own day to the present, Ira Allen has never generated much affection from those familiar with his remarkable career. While we name banks, bowling alley, laundromats, military units, counties, and anything else you can think of after Ethan Allen or Thomas Chittenden, once you get past the towns of Ira and Irasburg, there’s not much on today’s Green Mountain landscape you can tie to the younger Allen. We give Ira our respect, but we withhold our approval.

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We might have wanted Ethan Allen on our side in a bar fight. I’d welcome Thomas Chittenden to my corner in a political or government battle. And I’d want Ira Allen on my side in any kind of cause or contest—as long as I didn’t have to trust him very far. Ira had moments where he could be brave, generous, visionary, and even selfless, but as his fortunes waned in the latter decades of his life those sterling qualities faded and gave way to less admirable characteristics and practices. 

Perhaps if Ira had succeeded in bringing his bold dreams and plans to fruition, he would have become the good man his behavior in his 20s and 30s hinted at, but it seems that the desperation of his efforts to remain afloat financially took him in a different, darker direction by his mid-40s. The behavior of his Vermont contemporaries towards him speaks to his flaws. Members of his own family took him to court or fought with him over various issues and nearly everyone who engaged with him in politics or business kept a close eye on him. 

Had he achieved the fortune and power that seemed within his grasp at 35, Ira might have eclipsed brother Ethan and Governor Chittenden in the Green Mountain historical hall of fame. Instead, the disappointments and failures that piled up on him after Vermont joined the Union in 1791 made him an exile and a forgotten man here by the time he went to a pauper’s grave in Philadelphia in 1814.  

But in the end, it doesn’t matter whether we like Ira Allen or not; what is important is that we weave him into the tapestry of the early Vermont story. Ira was involved in so many Vermont affairs between 1770 and 1800 that you cannot paint a complete picture of those decades in our state without him. Ira was a frontier dreamer and visionary who saw a bright and expansive horizon while most of his contemporaries were focused on clearing their land, cultivating their farms, and hacking a living out of the landscape around them. That Ira never saw the future he knew was coming—Burlington as a thriving city, Lake Champlain teeming with waterborne commerce and trade, and a northern Vermont full of growing towns and villages—is immaterial. Throughout American history, it has always been the next generation that transforms the hopes and plans of the pioneer entrepreneurs into reality.

There is honor in what Ira accomplished in and for Vermont, and respect due for what he attempted but did not achieve. We don’t need a pure and saintly Ira Allen on a pedestal when there considerably more of interest in him as a complicated, nuanced, inconsistent man whose checkered career tells us so much about the origins and formative years of our state. 

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.