Danbury served as an important Continental supply depot during the early years of the Revolution. Its inland location offered some protection from British naval power, and stores of food, clothing, tents, rum, and other military necessities accumulated around the village. In April 1777, British commanders launched an expedition from Long Island Sound to destroy the depot and demonstrate that Connecticut’s interior was vulnerable to attack.

Major General William Tryon led roughly 2,000 British regulars and Loyalist troops ashore near Compo Point in present-day Westport on April 25. The column marched inland through difficult country and reached Danbury the next day. The defenders were too few to stop it. British troops seized or destroyed large quantities of Continental supplies and set fire to storehouses and numerous homes. Discipline deteriorated as some soldiers found rum among the captured provisions. Flames spread through the village, leaving residents to confront the loss of property as well as military stores.

Connecticut militia assembled rapidly under leaders including Major General David Wooster and Brigadier Generals Benedict Arnold and Gold Selleck Silliman. Warned that resistance was growing, Tryon began withdrawing toward the coast on April 27. American forces attacked the column at several points. At Ridgefield, militia attempted to block the road with a barricade. The British broke through, but fighting continued along the route. Wooster was mortally wounded while pressing the British rear, and Arnold had a horse shot beneath him during the action.

The raiders ultimately reached their ships, but their retreat was costly and increasingly dangerous. Patriot forces had been unable to save Danbury’s depot, yet they demonstrated that a raiding column could not move through Connecticut without sustained opposition. Arnold’s conspicuous conduct helped earn him promotion to major general, years before his later treason transformed his reputation. Wooster’s death made him a Patriot martyr in the state.

The raid also produced strategic consequences beyond the immediate destruction. American authorities dispersed supplies more widely and strengthened defenses. Connecticut militia participation increased, and the violence deepened hostility toward British forces. The marker’s statement that the Danbury fire “blazed at Saratoga” expresses the traditional belief that men stirred by the raid later helped defeat Burgoyne’s army in 1777. The phrase is commemorative rather than a literal chain of causation, but it captures the mobilizing effect attributed to the attack.

This marker stands near the center of the revolutionary village and recalls both the depot and the burning of April 26. It does not mark a single surviving warehouse. The historic site is the broader townscape in which military supplies were concentrated and civilians suffered the consequences of their destruction. Danbury illustrates the Revolution as a war of logistics and raids: armies depended on depots, and communities behind the lines could become targets when they sustained the Patriot cause.