Our thanks to Gerald R. Vincent, author of The Civil Sword: James Delancey’s Westchester Refugees, 1777 –1785, forwho providingprovided the following information and gave his permission for thisit to be included page.here.

Roughly half of those volunteer dragoons who had served with Col James Delancey's Westchester Refugees and came to Fort Cumberland from New York on July 15, 1783, were settled at Remsheg: the rest drew lots in the Cobequid (Westchester) Grant. All were members of the same militia regiment and came (with one or two exceptions) from Westchester and Dutchess Counties, New York. At Fort Cumberland (now reverted in name to Fort Beausejour) they disembarked from the Brig THETIS and the Ship NICHOLAS AND JANE on July 15, 1783, and the regiment was officially disbanded. That winter the Wallace and Westchester grants were roughly surveyed and a few souls temporarily settled on the Town lots of about three acres each at North Wallace.

A few officers and men settled in the Annapolis area, and a number of those who landed initially at Fort Cumberland later removed to New Brunswick. Something like 450 men who had served with James Delancy, perhaps half of them single and the rest with, mostly, small families, came to Nova Scotia as Westchester Refugees to settle and build a new life at the end of the War. Rather than as strangers or individuals, they came as a displaced community from the farms and villages of Westchester and Dutchess Counties, NY, and most had blood or marriage connections with one another running back for near a hundred years (Look at the early marriages in Cumberland county to see those connections continued). They also had shared service in the Westchester Refugees as Light Cavalry, Dragoons, and Infantry, defending the northern approaches to New York City through all the war with the British and German regular Units in Westchester and Lower Dutchess Counties.

Though they were a unit, it was one on the losing side, and memories today (if any are preserved at all of that distant time) are of family and friends, not wars and regiments. People remember that the family was Loyalist, and perhaps that there was a Loyalist soldier who came to Nova Scotia. (Once, when I asked my father how the Vincents with their French name came to be living in a community that was otherwise almost all Lowland Scots from Annan, he said the family, ". . . came from somewhere in New York, I think, a long time ago." It turned out that he was right, of course, and Maryland before that, but I didn't think so then.)

Anyway, good luck with the reunion, and look out for those Browns! There must be, I think, at least five distinct Brown family lines in Cumberland.

Jerry Vincent
Duncan, BC

PS: -I should note that the "Refugees" part of the regimental name came from the fact that many of them were people who had been driven from their former homes and farms in Dutchess and Westchester Counties early in the war by their own neighbours, to settle in poverty in lower Westchester County. -jv