BARNET-My new film, Lost Nation, will play at Williamsville Hall in Newfane at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 8. The film was partly shot in Newfane, where we found the perfect Ethan Allen home exterior.
I’ll be at the screening — and will probably take a question regarding one of the film’s most mysterious characters, Crean Brush.
Crean Brush entered Vermont history dressed for the wrong side of it. An Irish-born lawyer, Crown official, land speculator, and member of the New York Assembly, Brush represented Cumberland County — a large part of what is now southeastern Vermont — when New York claimed authority over this disputed territory.
He favored elaborate clothes, fashionable wigs, and fancy manners. Later Vermont historians would portray him as an “Irish macaroni,” an overdressed dandy awkwardly placed among plainspoken frontier settlers like a wedding cake left in a barn.
His arch enemy was Ethan Allen.
Allen and the Green Mountain Boys fought to protect settlers who held land titles issued by New Hampshire. New York claimed the same territory and ordered those settlers to repurchase their farms or face eviction.
Brush defended New York’s authority and held tens of thousands of acres in Westminster through British Crown grants. Allen called men like him “feudal land thieves.” Brush regarded Allen as a bandit hiding self-interest beneath noisy appeals to liberty.
Both descriptions had elements of the truth.
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Their conflict became personal in 1774, when Brush helped draft New York legislation that Vermonters called the “Bloody Acts.”
The laws made unruly gatherings of three or more people a felony, protected sheriffs and posse members who killed resisters while trying to arrest them, and offered bounties for the capture of Allen and several other Green Mountain leaders.
Allen responded in character. He issued threats, denounced New York’s government, and made it clear that anyone attempting to collect the bounty might not live to spend it. Brush and Allen exchanged hostile correspondence as the land struggle moved closer to open warfare.
When the American Revolution began, Brush fled to British-held Boston. There he sought to organize a Loyalist force that would return to the New Hampshire Grants, crush Allen’s “banditti,” and restore Crown authority. There is unproven evidence he sought to hire assassins to track and kill Allen.
British commanders did not approve his plan. Instead, during the British evacuation of Boston, Brush was authorized to take possession of linen, woolens, and other merchandise that might be useful to the rebels. He and his men entered homes and stores — and he was arrested.
Authorities kept Brush in jail for 19 months. In November 1777, he escaped, wearing his wife’s clothes. For a man already mocked for dressing like an ornamental dessert, this didn’t help.
He fled to British-occupied New York City. Ethan Allen was also in New York. Captured after his disastrous 1775 attack on Montreal, he had endured British prison ships, confinement in England, and imprisonment in New York’s notorious Provost Prison. The two enemies were, remarkably, in the same place at the same time.
Then, in May 1778, Crean Brush was found dead in his room.
The accepted account was suicide. But the historical record is not so tidy.
Many years later, former Loyalist Timothy Lovell gave a sworn statement describing his visit to Brush on the day he died. Lovell said Brush purchased a load of firewood from him. When Lovell returned an hour later to arrange its delivery, he found Brush dead with his throat cut.
Why would a man planning to kill himself order firewood for the coming days? Where was the weapon? And why did the earliest newspaper report describe his death as suicide without explaining how it occurred?
Respected Vermont historian John Duffy has raised an even more provocative question. Could Ethan Allen have killed Crean Brush?
Allen had motive. Brush had helped place a bounty on his head, sought a military force to destroy his movement, and threatened the land claims upon which Allen’s political and financial future depended. Allen also possessed — or claimed to possess — a knife while in captivity.
Prisoners regularly escaped or slipped away from British confinement. Allen himself admitted that he sometimes feigned madness to gain greater freedom of movement in New York.
None of this proves murder. Brush may have killed himself. Someone else may have killed him. Lost Nation enters this uncertainty without pretending to solve it.
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The film imagines the hostility between Brush and Allen in physical, personal terms. The two meet in a tense encounter, where they threaten each other. The film never shows the killing. It offers no confession and delivers no verdict. Instead, it allows the possibility to hang over Allen when George Washington and Alexander Hamilton question him about Brush’s death.
History supplies one final twist. In 1784, Allen married Brush’s stepdaughter and heir, Frances. Ethan then led the legal effort to recover the estate of the man who had wanted him captured or dead.
Did Allen love the younger, beautiful Frances? I think he did. Did he want access to the Brush lands? Did she believe he might have killed her stepfather? The historical record gives us fragments, suspicions, and uncomfortable coincidences.
That is where Lost Nation finds its story — not in asserting what cannot be proved, but in entering the shadows surrounding two ambitious enemies during a time when governments were collapsing, fortunes were being confiscated, and violence had become an accepted form of political argument.
Crean Brush lost the struggle. Ethan Allen became the hero who helped found Vermont. But victors shape the history, and some questions remain buried beneath it.
Like Brush himself, they refuse to rest quietly.
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Lost Nation screens at the Williamsville Hall, 35 Dover Rd., Williamsville, on Thursday, Oct. 8 at 6:30 p.m., with filmmaker Jay Craven introducing the film and leading a post-film Q&A. Tickets are $15 for all seats and will be available at the door, or in advance at kcppresents.org. For more information, contact Craven.
Jay Craven, the co-founder of Kingdom County Productions, is an award-winning film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was professor of film studies at Marlboro College. Lost Nation is his 10th feature film. The Commons’ Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and/or be unabashedly opinionated, passionate and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts Column was submitted to The Commons.