Stephen D. Butzâs book âShaysâ Settlement in Vermontâ (History Press, 2017) reveals a little-known side of the Shaysâ Rebellion story that played out in a final confrontation in Sheffield in 1787.
When Perez Hamlin and other Regulators yielded to a superior Massachusetts militia force that chilly February day, instigators of the farmersâ revolt including Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays were elsewhere, sheltering on a mountaintop north of Arlington, Vt., on the New York border.
That location has become an active archaeological site. Butz merges scarce documentary sources with evidence found on the ground (recovered during several summer field schools) that remote Egg Mountain was home to a small community cluster that included a fort, a mill, a store and several dwellings.