On the night of April 26, 1777, British troops put the town of Danbury, Connecticut to the torch.

They had come for what was stored there: the provisions, the tents, the barrels of supply that kept the Continental Army standing. What they could not carry off, they burned.

Word of it had to travel fast, and it had to travel at night. Across the New York line, in what is now Putnam County, a militia colonel named Henry Ludington had four hundred men under his command. Every one of them was scattered across the countryside, home on furlough for spring planting.

The story handed down in the Ludington family is that the rider who went out to gather those men was the colonel's sixteen-year-old daughter, Sybil.

As her family told it, she rode close to forty miles that night, in the rain and the dark, through country thick with loyalists who would have been glad to come across the daughter of Henry Ludington alone on a road after sundown. She knocked at farmhouse doors and called out that Danbury was burning and to muster at her father's house. By morning, the regiment had come in.

I want to be straight with you about one thing, because you would rather hear it from me than come across it later and wonder why we left it out. Historians have argued for a long time about how much of that night can be proven. There is no militia record of the ride and no letter from 1777 describing it. The account came down through Sybil's family and did not reach print until a century afterward. Her defenders answer that a girl carrying muster orders for a man with a bounty on his head had every reason not to advertise what she had done, and that a great many true things in 1777 were never written down by anybody.

Here is what is not in dispute. Danbury burned. Those four hundred men were scattered across the hills. Somebody had to go out into the dark and bring them in. And a family remembered, and kept remembering for generations, that the one who went was their teenage daughter.

Episode 5 of Defiant Ones tells her story, and it is available right now.

Here is how to listen: Visit the episode page and start Episode 5. While you are there, request our free activity pack. It is built for children, to give the young ones in your family something to do with these stories once the episode ends. It costs nothing.

Tea Party Patriots Foundation is honored to help bring this series to you, alongside the team that created it, as our country marks 250 years of independence.

A great deal of what was done for this country was done by people nobody thought to write down. That is not a reason to stop asking hard questions about the record. It is a reason to go looking.

In liberty,

Jenny Beth Martin

Co-Founder, Tea Party Patriots

Tea Party Patriots Foundation

P.S. If you have children or grandchildren, listen to this one with them, and request the free activity pack so they have something to do with it afterward. For an older child, Sybil Ludington is a rare teaching opportunity: her ride is honored on a postage stamp and cast in bronze.

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