Rest in Peace Traditional Geocache

The Ira Allen Cemetery is one of three cemeteries in Sunderland,VT   The Ira Allen Cemetery was established in 1786.  

Ira Allen was born in Cornwall in the Connecticut Colony (in present-day Litchfield County, Connecticut), the youngest of six sons born to Joseph and Mary Baker Allen. In 1771, Allen went to Vermont (then part of the British colonial Province of New York) with his brother Ethan as a surveyor for the Onion River Land Company. The Allen brothers established the company in order to purchase lands under the New Hampshire Grants. Through this, Ira Allen became involved in a dispute with the Province of New York over conflicting land claims in the region.^[1]

During the American Revolutionary War, Allen was a leading figure in the declaration of the Vermont Republic in 1777, which was originally intended to be independent of both the British colonies and the newly founded United States. Late in the war, he and his brother Ethan, along with Thomas Chittenden and others, were involved in the Haldimand Affair by their discussions with Frederick Haldimand, the British Governor of the Province of Quebec, about the possibility of reinstating Vermont as a British province. An alternate explanation is that the Allen brothers were not actually interested in returning Vermont to the British but merely used the Haldimand negotiations to both stave off a British invasion of Vermont from Canada and prod the Continental Congress into recognizing Vermont as separate from New York and New Hampshire and admitting it to the United States.  Vermont was granted statehood in 1791.

Ira is not buried here, he died in Philadelphia and was buried there.