Stockbridge "smelt powder" more than once during the heat of the Revolution. One peaceful Sabbath morning a messenger roused Deacon Timothy Edwards to say that the army was at Berkshire's very door, for Burgoyne had sent a detachment to capture Bennington's supplies. Deacon Edwards fired his gun in the street three times to call out the Stockbridge militia, who arrived too late for action, but Dr. Partridge aided friend and foe alike, attending the unfortunate English commander Colonel Baum.

After the dramatic surrender of the battle of Saratoga (pictured by Colonel Trumbull in the rotunda of the Capital), marking the first surprised failure of the British to cut our army in twain, a detachment of Burgoyne's crestfallen troops passed through Stockbridge en route to the seaboard, where transports were to receive them " whenever General Howe shall so order. " Colonel Prentice Williams as a boy remembered seeing "the Hessians smoking their pipes on Laurel Hill. " Burgoyne's Pass, over which they marched, is the grass-grown road which throws itself over a spur of Bear Mountain near " Bowlder Farm," the estate of Professor Henry W. Farnam of Yale.

Beautiful Laurel Hill is a " Sedgwick Gift" to the town; in that delightful season of the year when every copse in Berkshire is veined with gold and violet, the people of Stockbridge assemble on the grass arena for the delectable feast of wit and philosophy set before them by the Laurel Hill Association.

Sergeant's mission idea being somewhat after the fashion of modern University settlements, several white families volunteered to settle in Indian Town: the Ephraim Browns, Josiah Joneses, Woodbridges, and-most conspicuous in his fortified house on The Hill-Colonel Ephraim Williams, [1] Esq., deferred to in vexatious boundary disputes. They looked daily for Indians from the hostile north, and at Great Barrington and Sheffield, Conrad Burghardt's and Elisha Noble's houses were garrisons. The Williams house, an almost impregnable fortress, was planked with black oak and surrounded by a moat.