History is filled with complex people and stories. By now it's hardly a surprise when an erstwhile hero falls from grace. It seems like we’re always learning that there is more nuance to what seemed like the simplest narrative.

UVM alumnus, historian, author, former Silver Special Collections Director Kevin Graffagnino ’76 has recently published “Ira Allen: A Biography,” and in doing so is offering a fuller story of the enigmatic figure from the American Revolution. The publication marks the end of nearly four decades of research, which had Kevin wistfully remarking that he realized he has now spent more time with Ira Allen than anyone except his own wife.

He stopped by our UVM Foundation offices to talk about the work, and we started by asking what UVM alumni and donors might want to know about Ira Allen  - and what they should know.  

 Below are excerpts from a fascinating conversation about the complex life of one of our locally ubiquitous but underexamined figures – and insights into precisely why Allen might be worth learning more about.

Who was Ira Allen to the University of Vermont?

“There's a statue on the UVM green: Ira Allen, founder of Vermont, founder of the University of Vermont.  

Neither of those statements is entirely accurate.  It’s true that he's a founding father for both the state and the university. In 1791, Vermont joins the union after 14 years of independence as the first addition to the original 13 colonies that became the first states.

In 1791, everybody knows that the Vermont legislature is going to charter a university as a mark of statehood. It’s a way of saying, ‘we're really a state,’ states have universities, so we're going to have one. The question is where is it going to be located?

And there's kind of a bidding war in the summer of 1791 be just before the legislature meets to charter this school. Bennington wants it. Rutland would like it. Williamstown over near Northfield, Woodstock thinks it would be a good idea. All this interest is because people recognize a university can grow into an economic driver.  And it can grow into a mark of distinction and pride for the community in which it's located.

So they start bidding: “We will give so much in building materials.” “We will set aside so much value in land. We will even give some money,” and the bidding advances to a high of 400 pounds. Ira Allen, who's up here in Chittenden County (he owns most of Colchester, what today is Winooski). He owns much of Burlington and he wants it in Burlington. And he says, “400, that's the top bid? I'll add a zero, I'll give 4,000.” Bidding is over. That's it.

Legislature charters it, and it's accepted. The University of Vermont will be in Burlington and Ira donates the land for the central campus, the green, Waterman, William Science Hall, et cetera. All of that is acreage that he donates. So he's responsible for the fact, not that UVM exists, but that it is here in Burlington.

The problem is he never really fulfills the pledge. He runs out of cash. He's cash poor. He says the land is worth a thousand to 1500 pounds and that the board of trustees, they have no school, they have no buildings, they need money. And they say, “Ira, you've got to fulfill, you've got to finish up.” And he says, “I will, I will. I'll do it soon!”

But he keeps running out of cash.

He owns 200,000 acres in northwestern Vermont, much of Franklin, much of Chittenden and much of what become Orleans and Washington counties. But he won't sell any of it. He needs cash and he can't get it. He's got a shortage of ready money and the solution in retrospect would have been to sell a hundred thousand acres and keep the best hundred.  He won't do it, so he never has the money to fulfill the pledge.

It’s important to note he believes sincerely in the university as the place that Vermont farmers and mechanics, as he puts it, will send their sons (of course it's only the sons) to be educated. His position is, “I don't want the university to educate rich people. They can go wherever they like for their education. But the average Vermonter needs a university, and that's what I want.” He asks them to rename it Allen University. And the legislature's response is well, sure if you paid off your pledge, we might do that. That would be a reason. 

But he can't. He keeps saying, soon, soon, soon. And it just doesn't come to fruition. So today, people who wander the university campus - parents and students and alumni, you see the statute, you see Ira Allen Chapel.  And that is all because of James Wilbur.

If you go to the Fleming Museum, James Wilbur (who paid for the Chapel and the statue) paid for the back half of Fleming, which housed his collection If not for Ira Allen, James Wilbur's money would've gone somewhere else because it was his adoring passion for Ira that got him to be a UVM donor.

Guy Bailey, who was president at the time, does a magnificent job of cultivating Wilbur and gets him to put up the statue. Then he gets him to pay for the Chapel and Fleming and he gets him to leave his collection, which is the basis of UVM Silver Special Collections’ Vermont History Collection, and $3 million in cash in 1930. That's more than $50 million dollars today adjusted for inflation, making it one of our biggest gifts ever. So that's, that's why there's so much Ira around the Central Green.

It's James Wilbur's money.”

What it was about Ira Allen that so compelled Wilbur?

“Wilbur makes a fortune out in the west and midwest. We don't know why, but he retired to Manchester, Vermont. He bought a large acreage there. I don't know if he built the mansion or purchased the mansion, but today it’s the Wilburton Inn. It's the size of Waterman. And for some reason in the 1910s he decides that he will collect early Vermont history and that Ira Allen is the neglected hero of early Vermont and that he's going to right that wrong.

So he starts writing a biography of Ira. It's two volumes. It's close to a thousand pages. It's very good on what did Ira do? What were his actions? It's not nearly as good on objective analysis of why, who was he? What were his motivations? It's an adoring biography of a saint and it falters as serious history as a result. Very useful for 'Where was Ira on this day and what happened?'

Very detailed, but it's not a good objective analysis.

It elevates Ira to the pinnacle of early Vermont leadership. And what he deserves is to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Thomas Chittenden, with Ethan Allen, with other early notables. He needs to be at the head table, but he's not the towering presence that James Wilbur thought he was. He's not, but he was really important.

I think Vermont probably would've existed without him and would've survived without him. And I'm not a big believer in the individual as essential to any political or social movement.  But what Ira did was extraordinary."

In Vermont, how do we put Ira’s life into the broader conversation about the relationships and impacts of European settlers and indigenous people?

Here you have to go a little further north, in particular to Swanton, which had a centuries-long Native American presence. Ira claims ownership of Swanton after the Revolution. He wants to develop the town. He likes Swanton because it has a river that flows into Lake Champlain, and that river has excellent mill sites. Ira knows that every little community needs a grist mill, a sawmill, little industries, and in those days you power everything by water. He buys up the best of mills sites in Addison, in Chittenden and Franklin Counties. And Swanton is on that list because the French had built mills there.

The Abenaki are a hindrance to him. Like many settlers and speculators of northern Vermont, Ira adopts the legal strategy, which is not fact but strategy, that the Abenaki in Northwestern Vermont gave up their rights because they backed the British in the American Revolution.

Now, that's just a strategy, not the truth. There are documented records of Vermont Native Americans who served the American side in the war. There are documented instances of them serving the British side. It's not at all clear, but it's a Caucasian court system, and they lean towards European Americans. The Vermont courts agree with Ira.

The Native Americans no longer have legal title to any lands in the state of Vermont. And it's not just Ira - there are thousands of Vermont settlers who are going to take advantage of this. But for some generations of Abenaki, Ira is the point person for this injustice.

He has been very strongly criticized from time to time by Abenaki spokespeople as the leader of the settlers who forced them off their lands. He uses the Vermont courts and the growing numbers of settlers to simply overwhelm the opportunity for them to come back and resettle, particularly in Swanton. That's the major settlement that Ira blocks them off from, so to Abenaki people, Ira is not a good guy.

He helped engineer the loss of their lands and that it was supposedly legal does not make any Native American feel better about it.”

With this history and its living implications, what should we learn from Ira Allen? What about his life was so compelling that it was worth the decades of scholarship you put into this book?

“I respect and sometimes admire the few people who dreamt big in the 1780s and 1790s. Most residents of Vermont were concerned with the boundaries of their own farm. They had to chop down trees, maybe they can get a crop in this summer if they're surviving. And their dream is that someday their farm will thrive.

But Ira is like Bobby Kennedy, not looking at what is and asking why, but looking at what is not yet and asking why not. So, he looks at northern Vermont and he says, ‘I see Burlington as a city on a hill, I see prosperous towns in northwestern Vermont, I see Lake Champlain teeming with waterborne trade and commerce.”  In short, Ira sees the future.

He plans to send the agricultural products and lumber of the Vermont frontier north to Canada, because Lake Champlain flows north.   And he sees what he could bring back from Canada, from Europe, the manufactured goods that can’t be made here but were needed here.

He thinks, “I'll make money selling our stuff. I'll make money buying and selling their stuff.” And the result will be that Vermont is not a frontier anymore. Vermont is thriving towns and communities, and the University is educating the sons of farmers.  Like Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Ira has vision while the world wears bifocals.  That's who Ira is.

He's the prototype for Vermont of the frontier dreamer, entrepreneur, visionary. Every frontier has them. 95% of them go bankrupt. They're ahead of their time. They can't hang on financially long enough to see it become true.

And it's the next generation in Burlington who make it happen, who become rich, who build the mansions, who bring Ira's dream to fruition. But every frontier society needs those dreamers to get us out of the cabins in the mud and to lift our eyes to the sky. And I like that about what he sees a Vermont that is not yet, but that is going to happen. And he has faith that it's going to happen.

To 98% of 18th-century Vermonters, that's just dreaming. They think, “What about my farm? I don't have enough firewood to through the winter.”  Most of us then and now lead lives of congenial mediocrity and we're happy if we have our families, if we have balance in our lives, et cetera.”

 But we need the dreamers. And Ira is Vermont's great early dreamer. And it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't seen it, thought about it, worked to make it happen. The tragedy for him is that he doesn't benefit personally.”

Was it a tragedy for him?

“For him? Yes, but not for us.

Generally speaking, there's not a lot that's tragic about somebody we don't really like. It would be tragic if George Washington failed as president. He's George Washington, after all.  As for Ira, he ends his life in poverty in Philadelphia in exile because if he comes back to Vermont, he'll be arrested and put in jail for debt because everybody in Vermont's got a claim against him. And he goes to an unmarked pauper's grave in Philadelphia.

He was probably the richest man in Vermont 20 years earlier. He was this close to really solidifying and making it happen. On a personal level, there's certainly an element of tragedy that is common to frontier entrepreneurs.

So, I like those guys. They're ambitious. And Ira is ambitious without some of the qualities that I dislike. I don't like aristocrats, I don't like, “I'm better than you are. My father has more money, so I must be more important.”

I like the small-town ethos of Vermont, which says that our schoolteachers are just as important for educating three generations of our kids as you are for building a McMansion on the hill over there.”

Reflecting back, how does Ira stand up in the pantheon of Vermont luminaries today?

“Well, Ethan Allen becomes the great Vermont hero. He's personable. He's Daniel Boone. He's Davey Crockett. And look at the number of things in the state named after Ethan.

And for Ira, there's the town of Ira, which is mostly mountain and forest down in Rutland County. There's Irasburg, Ira Allen Chapel, a statue, and that's it.

Ethan is the image of Vermont.

If you're not from Vermont, you've heard of Ben and Jerry. Now, they tell me, young people would all say Noah Kahan.

And there’s Bernie Sanders, with whom I think Ira had some things in common.  They share a philosophical belief in the common man and woman as the reason we should have institutions and government, not to help the rich but to help the people. I think Bernie is and Ira was very sincere about that

There's nothing in his record that says Ira Allen wanted to be an aristocratic figure. He hoped to be rich, but he was quite generous when he had the money.  

His goals were broader than just himself: they were community. They were the state of Vermont. Late in life he gets more self-serving in his actions through financial necessity, but he really was a guy who believed that the farmer was just as good as the landlord. And I like that about him.

I like that the Allen brothers sincerely believed in the rhetoric of the American Revolution, that we're all equal.”

Learn More

You can read more about Ira Allen: A Biography on the Vermont Historical Society website.

So many UVM alumni are engaged with fascinating, meaningful work across nearly every imaginable discipline and field. Read other interviews with and profiles from the expansive world that is Catamount Country:

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