For 10 days in October 1777, the people of Kingston knew the British were coming.
News had traveled upriver that British forces had overwhelmed Forts Clinton and Montgomery near Bear Mountain on October 6. The forts had been defended in part by Ulster County militiamen—farmers, bakers, brewers, and tradesmen who understood that their families and homes lay upriver, directly in the enemy’s path. Some were killed or wounded, hundreds were captured, and those who escaped began making their way overland toward Kingston. The British ships moved faster.
“It’s hard to imagine what that would be like,” says Ulster County historian Eddie Moran. “You’re an average Ulster County militiaman. You’re stationed at that fort. Here’s a British army coming up the Hudson River, and you know that you’re the only thing standing between that army and your family.”
By October 16, the fleet had reached Kingston. Most residents had already fled, carrying what they could toward Hurley, Marbletown, and Rochester. Government officials had removed important documents for safekeeping. A small number of militiamen remained behind, but they could do little to stop the British troops who landed at Kingston Point, marched toward the settlement, and set fire to houses, barns, mills, and public buildings.
This is why the event is remembered as the Burning of Kingston, Moran says, and not the Battle of Kingston. There was scattered resistance, but no large-scale confrontation between evenly matched forces. The central experience for Kingston’s residents was one of waiting, evacuation, displacement, and loss.
That history returns to the streets during the 2026 Burning of Kingston, held October 15-18 at locations across the Stockade District and beyond. Staged every other year, the commemoration combines military reenactments with tours, talks, performances, demonstrations, music, and programs exploring the people whose experiences have often been omitted from conventional Revolutionary War narratives.
This year’s theme, “The Many Faces of Revolution,” widens the lens to include civilians, women, Black Patriots, enslaved people, indentured servants, Indigenous people, children, and residents of different classes and trades. The goal, Moran says, is to show that the Revolution was experienced differently depending upon who you were and where you stood within colonial society.
A Revolutionary Capital
To understand why the British burned Kingston, it helps to understand the city’s brief but consequential role at the center of the emerging state.
After British forces captured New York City in 1776, New York’s revolutionary government moved north in search of a safer location. By 1777, Ulster County’s government was firmly aligned with independence. Its elected representatives supported the revolutionary government, although Moran notes that the electorate consisted primarily of property-owning white men.
Kingston became the new government’s seat. Delegates drafted and adopted New York’s first state constitution there, and the first State Senate convened in the stone house on Fair Street now preserved as the Senate House State Historic Site. George Clinton, an Ulster County native with deep family connections in the region, became New York’s first governor. The city’s importance made it a symbol of the rebellion—and an inviting target.
The British military strategy for 1777 called for three forces to converge on Albany, allowing the Crown to control the Hudson River corridor and isolate New England from the other colonies. General John Burgoyne would descend from Canada through Lake Champlain. Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger would approach from the west through the Mohawk Valley. A third force would advance north from New York City.
The plan fell apart. St. Leger’s campaign stalled at Fort Stanwix, in present-day Rome. General William Howe took the bulk of his army to Philadelphia instead of sending it up the Hudson. Burgoyne continued south without the support he expected, leaving his forces increasingly vulnerable near Saratoga.
British commander Sir Henry Clinton eventually sent approximately 2,000 troops north from New York City in an attempt to assist Burgoyne, or at least create a diversion. After capturing Forts Clinton and Montgomery south of the site where West Point would later be built, the force continued upriver under General John Vaughan.
The 10-day interval before Vaughan’s arrival gave Kingston time to prepare, although preparation largely meant deciding what could be saved and when to abandon the city. Local Committees of Safety functioned as emergency governing bodies during the Revolution, overseeing militias, supplies, the economy, and efforts to suppress Loyalist opposition. Kingston’s committee would likely have helped organize the evacuation, remove records, and muster whatever defense remained.
The precise details of its final deliberations are lost. Many local Revolutionary records were later sent to the state and perished in the 1911 New York State Capitol fire. But historians know the committee met, and they know the kinds of decisions its members faced as reports arrived of the approaching British.
This year’s program brings back the Committee of Safety in “The Night Before the Burning,” a dramatic reenactment of residents receiving news of the invasion and debating whether to remain, resist, or flee. Because no detailed transcript of the meeting survives, the production will use historical evidence to imagine the conversations that might have taken place.
For Kingston’s residents, the questions would have been immediate and personal: How much time was left? Which road was safest? Could elderly relatives and young children make the journey? What possessions could be carried? Would the house still be standing when they returned?
Most refugees traveled southwest into the Rondout Valley, placing distance between themselves and the British ships. Many sheltered in Hurley, where the state government temporarily reconvened. Others continued into Marbletown and Rochester, where some of the rescued records were reportedly stored.
A Nest of Rebels
The British had come prepared to destroy the settlement. Vaughan later described Kingston as a “nest of rebels” and “a nursery for almost every villain in the country.” The assault appears to have been largely punitive: an effort to punish one of New York’s strongest centers of revolutionary support and spread fear through the Hudson Valley.
After setting Kingston ablaze, the troops started toward Hurley, burning several houses along the way before being recalled to their ships. They also took at least two enslaved people captive. The surviving records do not reveal what happened to them.
Even the extent of the physical destruction can be difficult to reconstruct. One crucial source is the Sufferers’ List, an inventory of property lost in the fire that has been held for generations by the Wiltwyck Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. During this year’s commemoration, the chapter will formally transfer the document to the Ulster County Archives, where it will be preserved and made publicly accessible.
The list records property owners and their losses, but documents of that kind have limits. People who owned little or nothing—enslaved residents, servants, laborers, and other marginalized people—could suffer enormously without appearing in an inventory of damaged property. Recovering their experiences requires reading around the edges of the surviving record.
That effort shapes the 2026 program. Friday evening’s “Black Patriots of the American Revolution” combines film, music, poetry, storytelling, and spoken-word performance. Saturday includes a presentation on Lenape life and history, military and civilian encampments, demonstrations of period trades, tours of the Senate House and DAR House, and a scholarly overview of the burning.
The Committee of Safety dramatization will be followed by street battles between British and Colonial reenactors. Moran acknowledges that these clashes heighten the scale of the resistance. The few militiamen left in Kingston would probably have fired from concealed positions as the British moved through the streets.
The event’s traditional arrest of Kingston’s present-day mayor, Steve Noble, is also an invention, played partly for laughs. Yet Moran believes it captures something essential about the invasion. The British were moving through an inhabited city, taking control of its streets and systematically destroying the place its residents called home.
A multimedia presentation at Old Dutch Church will trace the flight, the burning, and its aftermath. On Sunday, the Capital to Capital 5K follows the refugees’ route from the Senate House to Hurley. Participants will retrace the route Kingston’s families followed under the threat of violence, carrying children, food, clothing, records, and whatever else they had been able to gather.
For Moran, this sense of proximity separates the Burning of Kingston from reenactments held on open battlefields. The setting is the contemporary city: streets people walk each day, beside buildings that survived the fire or rose from its ruins.
“We think about more famous Revolutionary War battles like Yorktown or Bunker Hill,” he says. “But Ulster County is a core setting of the American Revolution. There would have been fighting taking place here that was integral to the way the war unfolds, but there also would have been fighting here that shaped the lives of the people living here in pretty horrifying ways.”
Kingston rebuilt after the British departed, but the commemoration begins before that recovery, in the days when residents watched the Hudson and waited. Through its reenactments and expanded historical programming, the Burning of Kingston asks visitors to see the Revolution at street level: as a struggle over a new nation, and as a catastrophe that arrived at people’s doors.
The Burning of Kingston takes place October 15–18 at locations throughout the Stockade District and beyond, with reenactments, walking tours, performances, historical demonstrations, and the Capital to Capital 5K from Kingston to Hurley.
