“On Tuesday forenoon Captain Garret came … and advised me to send directly for a team, and get some of our most valuable effects out of the way … We left the town by 10 o’clock, except the servants with Mrs. Hughes who stayed behind until they [the British] had landed, in order to secret things in the house…”
“We went in the first place to Mr. H. Bradley’s … and then set out for Parson Sherwood’s, where we arrived before sundown, and found a house full of refugees from Greenfield and Greens Farms, but it is impossible for me to describe to you the trials of that shocking night, although we were 10 miles out we could see the flames very plain, and the house we were in appeared all of a blaze.”
Excerpts from a letter dated August 10, 1779, from Priscilla (Lothrop) Burr of Fairfield, Connecticut to her sister-in-law Helen (Hobart) Lothrop of Plymouth, Massachusetts. From The Bulletin of the Connecticut Historical Society, No. 8, August 1936; Hartford, CT.