Dozens of historical reenactors in overcoats, stockings and tricorn hats lined up in the cemetery at St. Augustine Chapel in South Boston on Tuesday. They fired their muskets before marching down the streets of South Boston to the newly refurbished Dorchester Heights monument.
They were there to celebrate a momentous anniversary in American history: 250 years ago, British ships and their troops fled Boston harbor when they spotted cannons pointed at them from Dorchester Heights. That event would later be memorialized each March 17 as the state holiday we now call Evacuation Day.
Those British troops had laid siege to Boston for nearly a year since the Revolution’s first battles in Lexington and Concord. But that changed after a bookseller named Henry Knox succeeded in a grueling mission. Knox and his team managed to transport hundreds of pounds of captured cannons and other arms from Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to here.
“This is exactly what they had used up here 250 years ago,” Jeremy Clifford of the Fort Ticonderoga Association said on Tuesday as he pointed to a sight you don’t usually see in South Boston.
“We have two teams of oxen, and our tumbrel cart, which is a cart that the artillery used to carry their ammunition and other equipment up to the fortifications wherever they were trying to fortify,” Clifford said.
It’s about 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. For Clifford, that meant a four-hour drive.
“It took Henry Knox 60 days to get here,” he said.
The British evacuation is considered General George Washington’s first victory of the American Revolution, coming some nine months before the pivotal Battle of Trenton.
“That was the big thing,” said Ron Barnes, a Second Lieutenant of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and a colonel of the Pawtuxet Rangers, which brought a cannon to the event. “They had the cannons up on the hill and when you have the high ground in the cannons, you can be in charge.”
These days, residential buildings are blocking the view of the harbor from here. But 250 years ago “the view would have been much easier to see the ships in the harbor, and it would have really been something to see at that time,” Barnes said.
Of course the event was a good opportunity to shoot off some cannons. And naturally, it was also an opportunity for politicians to give speeches.
“It’s very hard to beat a community brought together by the cause of freedom,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in her remarks. “So on this anniversary, let us honor what was won here and let us remember that we live in a city and a country where ordinary people have the power to make history.”
Among the other dignitaries was the British Consul General, who was a pretty good sport about it all, showing that a lot can change in 250 years.
