Person:Zadoc Steele (1)

After some service, emigrated to Brookfield, Vt., when in Oct. 1781, he was taken by the party of Indians that burnt Royalton. The captives were eventually in a British prison on an island in the rapids above Montreal, from which a number of them, including Zadoc Steel, made their escape. They dug a passage under the wall of the prison building, and the pickets with which it was surrounded, yet so deep as to pass under the ditch. Steel, with three others, in a dark night, gained the outside, eluded the sentinels, hastily rolled together a few logs for a raft, and committed themselves to the rapids. They succeeded in landing on the north side of the river, and after various adventures and escapes in an enemy's country and a pathless wilderness, half-starved, and without shelter, even in the latter weeks of autumn, they finally succeeded in reaching the American settlements. The affair, as related by Mr. Steele in a narrative, printed at Montpelier, in 1818, was one of the most intrepid adventures of the kind ever undertaken. Mr. Steele died a few years ago at Stanstead, Lower Canada. James, son of James, resided in Ellington, until his death in 1819. He was one of the earliest Methodists in that town, possessed much more than ordinary intelligence and ability. His son, Oliver Wolcott Steele, resides in Ellington; has been a member of the Assembly, and for many years Town Clerk and principal Justice of the Peace. He is a man of high respectability and much of an antiquarian.