Benedict Arnold was born at this Norwich homestead on January 14, 1741, the son of Benedict Arnold IV and Hannah Waterman King Arnold. The family belonged to a respected mercantile line with Rhode Island political connections, but repeated childhood deaths and his father’s declining fortunes unsettled Arnold’s early life. The original house no longer survives, so the marker identifies the family property and birthplace vicinity rather than an intact eighteenth-century dwelling.

As a teenager, Arnold was apprenticed to his maternal relatives, the Lathrops, who operated an apothecary business in Norwich. Accounts of his youthful military activity during the French and Indian War vary in detail, but he did enroll for militia service before completing his commercial training. He later moved to New Haven, where he became a druggist and merchant engaged in Atlantic and West Indian trade. Those ventures developed the energy, risk-taking, and organizational skill visible in his military career.

When war began in 1775, Arnold helped promote the expedition that captured Fort Ticonderoga and then led a punishing march through Maine toward Quebec. Wounded in the failed assault on Quebec, he nevertheless remained in command during the subsequent siege. In 1776 he improvised a fleet on Lake Champlain and fought the delaying action at Valcour Island, buying the Americans time before the next British invasion from Canada.

Arnold again distinguished himself at Ridgefield in 1777 and at Saratoga, where his aggressive leadership helped break the British position at Bemis Heights. He suffered a severe leg wound in the victory. Promotion disputes, political enemies, financial grievances, and a court-martial contributed to his growing resentment, though none made treason inevitable. In 1780 he secretly negotiated to surrender West Point to the British in return for money and status.

The conspiracy failed after Major John André was captured carrying incriminating papers. Arnold escaped to British lines, received a British commission, and in 1781 led destructive operations against Virginia and his native Connecticut, including the burning of New London. That final attack gave Norwich and the surrounding region a particularly painful relationship with their native son. He spent his remaining years largely in Britain and died in London in 1801.

The birthplace marker therefore anchors one of the Revolution’s most complicated biographies. Arnold was neither only the brilliant battlefield commander remembered at Saratoga nor only the traitor of later national memory; he was both. The vanished house connects his celebrated and condemned actions to a colonial household shaped by commerce, family loss, apprenticeship, and social ambition. Interpreting the site requires holding those achievements and betrayals together without treating his eventual choice as predetermined from childhood.