The churchyard of the Old Dutch Church in Kingston's Stockade District, photographed in autumn 2000.
By Silas Van Wyck | October 12, 2026
On the morning of October 16, 1777, British troops under General John Vaughan sailed up the Hudson River, marched into Kingston, New York, and set it on fire. They burned more than 300 buildings. They were thorough about it. The whole operation was accomplished in a matter of hours. Then they left.
Kingston was, at that moment, the newly established capital of New York State, a distinction it had held for a matter of months. The state legislature had convened here, documents had been filed, committees had met. Then the capital burned. The legislature relocated to Poughkeepsie, and Kingston has been a former state capital ever since, which is one of those things that sounds like a demotion but is really just the record of an afternoon.
Most of the local militia were elsewhere when the British arrived. They were away at Saratoga, as it happened, where the Battles of Saratoga were being decided at roughly the same time. The strategic success of Saratoga is taught in every American history classroom. The burning of Kingston is taught in fewer of them.
What did not burn is worth noting. A significant number of Kingston's stone buildings survived the fire. Stone, it turns out, has a tendency to remain. Those buildings are still standing in what is now called the Stockade District, the historic core of the city. You can walk past them today and observe them being buildings, which they have been doing continuously for well over two hundred years, fire notwithstanding.
The district takes its name from the original wooden stockade that once enclosed the settlement, which did not survive. The stone structures did. There is a lesson in there somewhere about building materials and municipal longevity, and Kingston has been living inside that lesson ever since.
The town rebuilt. This part of the story is less dramatic than the burning, which may be why it is mentioned less frequently, but it is arguably more consequential. Communities that get burned down and then rebuild represent a considerable amount of practical determination. Kingston did this and continued on, and 249 years later it is preparing to commemorate the occasion.
The 2026 Burning of Kingston Commemoration runs October 15 through 18, throughout the Stockade District and beyond. The full schedule is at burningofkingston.com, and it is a schedule, in the full sense of the word: reenactments, walking tours, historical demonstrations, performances, and a 5K road race.
The Capital to Capital 5K runs from Kingston to Hurley. Hurley is where the New York State government retreated immediately after the burning in October 1777, when the legislature needed somewhere to convene that was not on fire. The race covers that route. The organizers have chosen not to address directly whether this constitutes a historical reenactment of a government evacuation or simply a 5K that happens to have good historical context, which is probably the right call.
There are walking tours of the Stockade District, which means you will be walking past those surviving stone buildings with someone explaining what you are looking at and why it is still there. Historical demonstrations are scheduled throughout the weekend. Reenactors will be reenacting.
On Friday, October 16, the 249th anniversary of the burning itself, the Old Dutch Church at 272 Wall Street in Kingston is hosting a program called Black Patriots. Doors open at 5:30 in the evening. At 6 p.m. there is a screening of "Black Patriots: Heroes of the American Revolution." From 7 to 8:30 p.m., the program continues with music, poetry, and storytelling performances.
The purpose of the evening, as described by the organizers, is to amplify the stories of Black people, women, Indigenous people, and LGBTQ people in the American Revolution. These are stories that the standard narrative of the Revolution has historically done a poor job of including. The Radio Kingston coverage of the event provides more on the specifics of who is performing and what they are bringing to the program.
That an eighteenth-century Dutch Reformed church is hosting, on the anniversary of a British military assault, a film and performance evening devoted to the erased participants of the Revolution is a sentence that could be taken as ironic. It is not being taken that way here. It is simply the schedule.
The four-day commemoration is organized around the Stockade District, which is accessible, walkable, and full of buildings that have been demonstrating their structural integrity for approximately two and a half centuries. If you are in Kingston or nearby during the week of October 15, the schedule is worth consulting.
Kingston was the state capital for a few months in 1777. It was burned on October 16 of that year. It rebuilt. The stone buildings are still standing. And this year, as in previous years, the city is staging the burning on purpose, with a schedule and a 5K and a church program and reenactors and walking tours and an anniversary, because that is apparently what you do with a catastrophe when you have had 249 years to think about what to do with it.
The full schedule for the 2026 Burning of Kingston Commemoration is at burningofkingston.com.
Sources and Further Reading
Chronogram: Burning of Kingston 2026 Events
Radio Kingston: Burning of Kingston, Kitt Potter, and Black Patriots Event
