Pack a picnic and your favorite lawn chair for live music on our scenic terrace overlooking the James River. We're wrapping up our concert series with Matt Minor and the Backroad Brights, a local country and bluegrass band!

Tickets are just $5. Register now!

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_{The kickoff lecture to our 2025-2026 Wilton Annual Lecture Series!}

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The famous battles that form the backbone of the story put forth of American independence—at Lexington and Concord, Brandywine, Germantown, Saratoga, and Monmouth—while crucial, did not lead to the surrender at Yorktown. It was in the three-plus years between Monmouth and Yorktown that the war was won. Alan Pell Crawford’s riveting new book, This Fierce People, tells the story of these missing three years, long ignored by historians, and of the fierce battles fought in the South that made up the central theater of military operations in the latter years of the Revolutionary War, upending the essential American myth that the War of Independence was fought primarily in the North. Weaving throughout the stories of the heroic men and women, largely unsung patriots—Black Americans and whites, militiamen and “irregulars,” patriots and Tories, Americans, Frenchmen, Brits, and Hessians, Crawford revealed the misperceptions and contradictions of our accepted understanding of how our nation came to be, as well as the national narrative that America’s victory over the British lay solely with General George Washington and his troops.

Alan Pell Crawford is the bestselling author of Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman—and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America and Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. His writings have appeared in American History, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and he is a regular book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal. His newest book is This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America's Revolutionary War in the South.