Belden Merims, in a post on this blog titled Colrain: A History, wrote this about the Colrain Resolves:
Unlike the settlers in the valley, who were almost all of English extraction, Colrain’s Scotch-Irish settlers had no love for the English. Resentments festered, and in January, 1774, at Wood’s Tavern the prominent men of the town gathered and drew up what became known as the Colrain Resolves. Predating the Declaration of Independence by 18 months, the six resolves declare the rights of the individual, objection to taxation without representation, legal authority for independence, the right of the group to self-government, the necessity for action, a listing of specific grievances, the necessity for independence rather than mere reform, and the struggle for independence transcending the individual.
When war came, Colrain was ardently patriotic. In 1775, when the alarm rang at Lexington, Colrain Minutemen marched to Boston. Later they served at Ticonderoga and at the Battle of Bennington. Second in command of a company of Colrain men who were assigned to the defense of West Point was John Bolton, who rose to command later. When the Continental Congress failed to pay his men, he mortgaged his property to maintain them. At the end of the war he found himself homeless and spent his last days with his children in New York, dying there in 1807. Ten percent of Colrain’s population, 198 men, served during the Revolution.
There is a new short film about the Colrain Resolves. The video is available to watch on YouTube:
Additional information about the history and the video is here https://www.ulsterscotsagency.com/news/article/488/the-colrain-resolves/
Charles H. McClellen’s “Early Settlers of Colrain Mass.” includes the original wording of the Resolves in the section on the Revolutionary War.
https://archive.org/details/earlysettlersofc00mccle/page/48/mode/1up?view=theater
Below is an article about the Colrain Resolves published in the Springfield Republican (Massachusetts) on August 23, 1953.
