The Green Mountain Boys aka The Vermont Irregulars Est. 1775 T-Shirt

May 10, 1775. Pre-dawn on the western shore of Lake Champlain. Eighty-three Vermont militiamen in linen hunting shirts row across the lake in the dark and storm the gates of Fort Ticonderoga. Not a shot is fired. The British garrison wakes up captured. The first American victory of the Revolutionary War is over before breakfast.

They call themselves the Green Mountain Boys. They have no official authority. They are not Continentals - there is no Continental Army yet. Washington is still a delegate in Philadelphia. The "Boys" are a backcountry militia organized five years earlier in Bennington to defend Vermont land grants against New York speculators. Their leader is Ethan Allen, a 37-year-old farmer, ironworker, and self-taught philosopher with what George Washington later called "an original something in him that commands admiration."

When Allen pounds on the door of the commandant's quarters and demands the fort's surrender, the British captain reportedly asks by what authority. Allen's answer becomes one of the most famous lines of the war: "In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" The Continental Congress did not actually authorize the raid. Allen made that part up on the spot.

What the Vermont Irregulars captured that morning would change the war. The artillery seized at Ticonderoga, roughly 60 heavy guns, including the cannon that would later sit on Dorchester Heights was hauled 300 miles overland by Henry Knox in the dead of winter on sleds across frozen rivers. By March 1776, those Vermont-captured guns were pointing down at the British in Boston. The British evacuated the city. The first major American victory of the war was made possible by 83 farmers from the Green Mountains.

The Green Mountain Boys flag, thirteen stars in a blue canton on a green field still flies today as the unit colors of the Vermont National Guard. The same outfit. The same flag. 250 years and counting.

About this design

This Green Mountain Boys design features a distressed vintage layout with the Vermont mountains, a Continental-era flintlock musket, tricorn hat, and maple leaf the symbol of Vermont then and now. The subtitle reads The Vermont Irregulars Est. 1775. The Green Mountain Boys flag appears on the sleeve. Part of our America 250 Revolutionary War collection commemorating the 250th anniversary of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, May 10, 2025, exactly 250 years to the day from the dawn that started the slide toward Boston's liberation.

America 250, made by veterans

This Green Mountain Boys shirt is part of our America 250 collection commemorating 250 years of military service from 1775 to 2026. Every design is grounded in actual unit history, not print-on-demand patriotism. Honor 250 years of America and the militia tradition that built her. Houston, Texas. Veteran-built.