Join us on Wednesday, October 14th at 7:00 pm for a presentation by University of Delaware professor Wendy Bellion. The talk will explore the 1776 tearing down of the King George Statue and Wilton’s direct role in the historic events that followed.
On the night of July 9, 1776, a crowd emboldened by a public reading of the Declaration of Independence pulled a huge equestrian statue of George III from its pedestal at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. A British officer conveyed the decapitated head to London, intending to demonstrate the patriots’ defiance, and soldiers transported the remaining fragments via Wilton to Litchfield, where the statue was melted down and recast as ammunition for Continental soldiers. En route, loyalists in Wilton absconded with pieces of the statue, concealing them in fields, swamps, and cellars. This talk revisits this dramatic episode of the American Revolution and explores its lesser-known afterlife in the nineteenth and twentieth century, when the fragments re-emerged as historical relics and re-enactors recreated the lost statue—only to destroy it all over again.