On April 19, 1775, British and American soldiers exchanged fire in Lexington and Concord, Mass., and the next day Fisher Gay is said to have closed his store in Farmington and set out for Boston with about 100 men.

In May, Farmington's Sixth Company in the Second Connecticut Regiment, the first of the town's regular militia units to be mustered, marched to Boston. Amos Wadsworth, a shopkeeper, wrote to his brother in Farmington that "the army are in high spirits, and appear to be perfect strangers to fear." He added, "Better to die a freeman, than to live a slave." Wadsworth believed that America was "threatened with nothing less than absolute slavery" under a tyrannical English monarch.

The town's two other companies of militamen were mustered in July. One of them, commanded by Major Joel Clark, was equipped "with excellent firearms and warlike accoutrements made in the town of Farmington to which they belonged," the Connecticut Courant reported. The men who enlisted in Farmington included two Tunxis Indians and fourteen African Americans. Approximately 5,000 black men fought in the American Revolution.

Some of the African American soldiers from Farmington were free men, but others were slaves. In Speaking for Ourselves, published by the Farmington Historical Society in 1998, Barbara Donahue wrote that Pharoah Hart and Joseph Munn were each promised freedom in return for three years of service in the Continental Army.

Hart fought in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1777 and  Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1778. He was freed after his service, but not without a disagreement over his army wages. He had agreed to give his owner, Selah Hart, a portion of his wages, but Selah demanded and received all of them, Donahue wrote.

Munn was sold by his owner, William Nicholls, while he was in the army, and the new owner refused to free him. Munn petitioned the state legislature, but he was turned down because he'd been dismissed from the army. The reason was that he'd broken an arm while on active duty. Donahue wrote: "Ironically, in fighting to guarantee his country's freedom, he guaranteed his own enslavement."

Col. Fisher Gay went on to fight in Massachusetts and New York in the Second Connecticut Regiment. He died in New York in 1776. Others from Farmington who joined the fight included Deacon Porter, who marched off to the war in his wedding suit; Deacon Samuel Richards, who witnessed with the Third Regiment the execution of British spy John Andre at Gen. George Washington's headquarters in Tappan, N.Y., in 1780; and Timothy Hosmer, the doctor who pronounced Andre dead.

Not all town residents rallied to the cause of the Revolution. A few dared to take a stand as Loyalists, or Tories. As Christopher Bickford wrote in Farmington in Connecticut, the Tories included some political conservatives opposed to rebellion against the crown, a few Episcopalians attached to the Church of England, and the rare opportunist who thought he was backing the winning side.

One self-declared Tory, Mathias Leaming, was "excommunicated" in a town vote and had his land confiscated. His gravestone in the "Memento Mori" cemetery reads, " In Memory of Mr. Mathias Leaming Who hars got beyond the reach of Parcecuchion. The Life of man is Vanity."

Leaming's gravestone faces west, the opposite direction of the others in the rows nearby. He asked his brother to bury him with "his feet to the west, so that when the last trumpet sounded he should rise and shine, facing opposite from his persecutors."

The number of Tories in Farmington was small, however, compared to that in towns such as New Haven and Stamford, and particularly in strongholds of Loyalism such as Redding and Newtown.

Several hundred patriots joined Farmington's three regiments in 1776 and 1777, fighting at Boston, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and West Point, Stoney Point, and Morristown, N.J. After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, the main route from Newport and Hartford to the highlands above New York City was through Farmington. Troops, equipment, and provisions passed through the town, and local enterprises furnished cloth, grain, flour, saltpeter for gunpowder, and other supplies.

Toward the end of 1776, with British victories in New York and General Washington retreating to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania, patriotic fervor began to give way to what Bickford described as "grim determination." Farmington companies suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Long Island in September 1776. The number of wounded soldiers returning home increased, recruitment became more difficult, and townspeople felt the burden of heavy taxation for the war. "These are the times that try men's souls," wrote Thomas Paine, who was with the Continental Army during its retreat.

But Washington took the offensive again, crossing the Delaware River and capturing 1,000 Hessians at the Battle of Trenton in December 1776. In October 1777, General Horatio Gates defeated British General John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga, N.Y., a turning point in the war.

Some of Burgoyne's officers were held as prisoners in Farmington. One British officer taken prisoner during the war, William Sprats, stayed on after the war to help build "Oldgate,"  the house at 148 Main Street, for Zenas Cowles. It is said that he employed Hessian soldiers, also former prisoners, as carpenters. The gate, with its Oriental symbol for "peace and prosperity," reflects the Chinese influence on design during the late 1700s.

Artillery and small arms seized from the British at Saratoga were brought back to Farmington by Colonel Ichabod Norton, where they were kept in John Mix's orchard.

With the American victory at Saratoga, France joined the war against the British. Twice during the war, the commander of the French army, the Comte de Rochambeau, passed through Farmington with his troops. One block up Main Street from "Oldgate" is a sign marking the route of Rochambeau's two marches through the town.

In 1781 the French troops, on their way to join General George Washington's army in Westchester County, camped off Main Street, about a mile south of the intersection of Routes 4 and 10. Rochambeau and his officers stayed at the inn run by Phineas Lewis, later known as the Elm Tree Inn. On the return trip in 1782, after Washington and Rochambeau had defeated General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, the troops may have camped along Garden Street, with the artillery and wagons near Hatters Lane.

Washington passed through Farmington during the war, too, at least six times. In 1780 he traveled through the town on the way to Hartford, where he met Rochambeau. On his return, he took the "High Road" through the South Meadow gate and continued on to   Litchfield. In 1781 he stopped for dinner in Farmington before riding to Wethersfield to meet again with Rochambeau.

According to town lore, one local boy, waiting in a crowd to catch sight of Washington outside the Elm Tree Inn, saw him and said, "Why, he's nothing but a man."

"That's right, my lad, I am nothing but a man," Washington is said to have replied.

While no battles were fought on Farmington soil, years of war left the town exhausted. At a town meeting in 1782, as the war drew to a close, a resolution described the townspeople's mood as "a mixed sensation of pleasure and pain," the Courant reported. The declaration spoke of the "sufferings and dull aches of the people" and stated that "the loss of those patriots and heroes, who have died in their country's cause, fill us with the most-felt afflictions and sorrow."