Arnold Homestead

Benedict Arnold IV was a native of Newport, Rhode Island, and the great-grandson of Benedict Arnold I, President and also Governor of the Colony of Rhode Island. His son felt the sting of his family's sudden demise sorely. He was very close to his mother who died in 1759 and having been put to work from the age of fourteen he continued to care for his father and sister until his father died two years later in 1761. Sometime about 1760, his father's debts forced him to sell the house. Lacking the respectability the family had once enjoyed at Norwich, the younger Benedict couldn't leave town quick enough and turning a new leaf established himself at New Haven in the same year. The fortune he made there as a merchant not only enabled him to build the Arnold House, but in 1763 he was able to buy back his childhood before selling it on a year later for a substantial profit.

The life of the young man who would become a Major-General in the Continental Army before selling out to become a Brigadier-General in the British Army is well-documented. His treachery made him one of the most detested men in American and at best he was merely tolerated by the British who had little respect for a man who could sell out his own country. But, for the people of Connecticut, his treachery hurt most when at his suggestion he mercilessly torched the town of New London - in his own native state.

In 1780, when news reached Norwich of his treachery, the townsfolk dug up his father's remains and threw them and his headstone into the river. That the house didn't suffer a similar indignity must have been a relief to those then living there, William Phillips and his wife Abigail, who'd relocated here during the British occupation of Boston. But, years later, when it was struck by lightning in 1853, it was abandoned, and the townsfolk wasted little time plundering it of all of its original interior features, either destroying them in anger, or keeping them as souvenirs. One of the few things to survive was one of the interior bannisters that can now be seen on display at the Leffingwell House Museum.

The old frame house was lost to fire at the end of the 19th century and the site is now marked by a plaque and remembered by the adjacent street, Arnold Place. Despite his treachery, General Arnold - a master tactician - is credited for delaying the British at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain in 1776, which otherwise would have almost certainly tipped the scales of overall victory decidedly in the favor of the British.