Ancestors

Gilbert Townsend Vail

Gilbert Townsend Vail was born at Goshen, in Orange County, New York, about 1740. His father, Samuel Vail, came from Southold on Long Island. Samuel was one of the twenty men who organized the town of Shelter Island in 1730, and he settled at Goshen about 1740. His mother was Hannah Petty, of a Southold family.

He married Hannah Arnout, a daughter of Peter Arnout of Goshen. When her father made his will on 30 March 1764, he named his "son-in-law Gilbert Veale" and gave him the use of the house and the land within the fence for seven years. The couple were probably already living on that ground. Their son Joseph was born at Goshen on 27 April 1770, or by another account in 1768.

In the Revolution he was a minute man of the Orange County militia. A Vail family memoir printed in 1911 places him in Captain John Wood's company of "Colonel Hatfield's regiment." No Colonel Hatfield commanded in the county. The colonel who led the Orange County men at Minisink was John Hathorn, and the memoir's name is probably his, misread.

On 20 July 1779 Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader, raided the Minisink settlements on the Neversink and the Delaware with Mohawk warriors and Loyalists. Houses, barns, a church and a gristmill were burned. The militia of Goshen and Warwick gathered under Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Tusten and Colonel John Hathorn and followed the raiders up the Delaware.

On 22 July they found them on the high hills over the river near the mouth of the Lackawaxen. Hathorn split his men into three divisions, but Brant attacked before they were placed and broke the rear division. The rest were driven together on a rocky hill of about an acre. There, with forty-five men, Hathorn held out for more than five hours. When the powder was gone, the men formed a hollow square to fight with clubbed muskets. The square broke at one corner and the survivors ran. Dr. Tusten had been dressing the wounded behind a rock, and the warriors killed him there with the seventeen men in his care. Of the men who went into the fight, only about thirty came home.

Gilbert Vail was one of the dead. The bodies lay on the field for forty-three years. In 1822 the bones were gathered and buried at Goshen under a monument raised by the people of the county. No one could tell whose bones were whose. His name was cut on its west side as Gilbert S. Vail. A new monument, the gift of Dr. M. H. Cash, was put up at Goshen in 1862, and his name is on it with the rest.

His daughter Mary Ann, called Polly, was born on 11 January 1780, almost six months after he was killed. Hannah died in 1784. In the state's own records of the war his name is on the list of "Pensioners and Applicants for Pensions." For a man killed in 1779, that probably means a claim made by his widow or on behalf of his children.

If Gilbert Townsend Vail is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Gilbert Townsend Vail (1740-1779)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/gilbert-townsend-vail-1740-1779-cfdcfe.