Kingdom County Productions co-founder Jay Craven has been making films and documentaries in Vermont and the Northeast since the 1980’s. He is traveling across the region screening his latest movie: “Lost Nation.” It tells the stories of two individuals: Ethan Allen’s efforts to obtain statehood for Vermont and former slave Lucy Terry Prince and her family’s struggle to settle in the area. Craven spoke with WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley about how and why he mingled the histories of the two figures:
Ethan Allen is a larger-than-life sort of mythical figure in the state of Vermont who has always interested me and a whole sort of political situation that took place during that time where huge New York land owners, the Rensselaer's, the Van Cortland's, others, had hundreds of thousands of acre tracts in this territory that they, frankly, have probably never seen and certainly had not settled. At the same time, a what you might call a corrupt governor New Hampshire started selling 1,500 acre plots to poor settlers from southern New England. And Ethan Allen ended up leading the struggle against the New York courts, sheriffs and posses to hold on to that land when it became contested. So he is considered the founding father of Vermont. And I thought there was also more to the story than simply this one dimensional mythic hero and was anxious to dig into that. And there's been some new research over the last, particularly 15 years, that has sort of dimensionalized the Ethan Allen character in ways that I find fascinating. The Prince story I also was drawn to for you know, thematically, the same sort of idea of land and freedom for Ethan Allen on a huge scale. The Allen's accumulated 200,000 acres of land themselves that they were buying, selling. And for the Princes, the same idea of land and freedom, except for their own plot of land which became threatened during their settlement there. So you had two similar struggles on two vastly different scales. But the other thing that drew the stories together is the fact that Guilford, where the Princes settled, was in the heart of Vermont territory that was loyal to New York. Ethan invaded Guilford twice with 250 guys going house to house and arresting people that were not loyal to Vermont. So coincidentally, and after I had already decided to make the movie, it turned out that the Princes were actually right in the crux of this contested territory that brought Ethan. I mean, Ethan did not invade other towns. It was Guilford that he was focused on. I just found the story rich in its narrative quality, diverse in its early composition of the state of Vermont. Vermont was racially diverse from day one and that's not commonly known. There was also an indigenous presence, of course. And so I wanted to sort of dig into that daily reality of what being here during that very turbulent time was like.
You mentioned that new research has dimensionalized Ethan Allen. What did you mean by that?
Well, I mean Ethan Allen was hugely conscious of his own legacy. He projected himself onto the largest stage he could find as a great man. The history, the letters, the papers of Ethan Allen were very carefully managed by Ira Allen after his death to make sure that his proper place was occupied in the annals of this region's history. But at the same time, you know, Ethan was reckless. I mean, when he captured Fort Ticonderoga he forgot to bring the boats. You know, more than 200 of his own guys were left on the other side of Lake Champlain unable to participate. If there had actually been a fierce resistance at Ticonderoga, history might have gone differently. Likewise, when he tried, he wanted to invade Montreal, take Canada. He was ordered specifically not to do it and ended up in an aborted raid on Montreal with some 38 guys and was captured and put on a prison ship for two and a half years in prison and on the ship where he did not participate, frankly, in the Battle of Hubberton or the Battle of Bennington or the founding of the state republic of Vermont. Ethan was out of the picture for a lot of that critical history. So he was somewhat of an erratic figure. According to research he held five servants, black servants, who could, nobody is clear about whether they were enslaved or not. He had a fierce rivalry with Crean Brush, who was a very conservative New York Assemblyman who owned 40,000 acres of land in eastern Vermont. And John Duffy and Nick Muller, who were recent historians who wrote a book called "Inventing Ethan Allen" think that Crean Brush, when he was found dead in a New York City apartment may have, in fact, been killed by Ethan Allen. That's not clear that he was. But then, on the other hand, Ethan went on and married his daughter. So you know, what a story. He was enigmatic in some ways. He was varying in his loyalties. Of course, he negotiated with the British to possibly hand Vermont over to them when he felt that the Continental Congress was not paying sufficient attention to what Vermont wanted to become a state. All of these are aspects which create, I think, a sort of vastly interesting character.
Well, Jay Craven, how much in the film is true history versus dramatic exposition?
We used 162 sources to research the film and every beat of the film is motivated by that research. But there are changes. There's a lot of specificity and at the same time some time compression. There are interpretations of these characters. You know, was Lucy Prince as assertive as she appears in the film? We don't know. I mean, there's in fact relatively little information on Lucy, although her poem "Bars Fight" about the 1746 Deerfield Massacre is the first known work of African American literature. But as I say, every beat is motivated by research. But there are some liberties taken.
Jay, you are screening Lost Nation in Rhinebeck on March 23. Do you have any plans to be showing it elsewhere?
We're going to be touring this film for a long time. We feel that the film, you know, is really a part of New York history. I think probably a lot of New Yorkers aren't aware that there was this contested relationship, that while the Americans were fighting the American Revolution, the Vermonters and the New Yorkers were also having their own fight going on simultaneously, which was sort of curious. So we want to play New York, also Western Massachusetts. We're also going to be shooting our next film in Lennox, Massachusetts. So we're going to be touring very much in Western Massachusetts as well. People like history and I think that especially during this sort of turbulent time, we look to where our roots are and what we can learn from them. And I think this film hopefully will contribute to that conversation.
“Lost Nation” screens at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck on Sunday.
