Westminster massacre

The Westminster Massacre site marks the location where armed confrontation erupted between local settlers and New York authorities on March 13, 1775, resulting in the deaths of two unarmed farmers who had occupied the courthouse to prevent land seizures.

This violent clash occurred just over a month before Lexington and Concord, making it one of the earliest armed conflicts of the American Revolution when sheriff's deputies fired into a crowd of protesters defending their property rights.

The event became a rallying cry for Vermont independence movements and helped unite different settler groups against external control, ultimately contributing to the formation of the Green Mountain Boys militia and Vermont's path to statehood.

Visitors can find a historical marker along U.S. Route 5 in Westminster that commemorates the massacre, while the nearby cemetery contains the graves of William French and Daniel Houghton, the two men killed during the confrontation.

Despite involving only two deaths, the incident earned the name 'massacre' because it symbolized the intense resistance of frontier settlers against colonial authority and became Vermont's first act of revolutionary defiance.