Towering at 221 feet tall, the Bunker Hill Monument is usually the attention-grabbing center of the former battlefield in Charlestown.
But on the 251st anniversary of the battle Wednesday, archeologists with the City of Boston were directing visitors to look down. Deep in a 20-foot-wide, cordoned-off hole in the ground, they had found remnants of the battle’s redoubt — a defensive fort the American militia had hastily built the night before the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775.
For Lauryn Sharp, the project archaeologist for the City of Boston, there’s no better way to celebrate the battle’s anniversary than to display the remains of the real thing.
“Seeing the actual structures for the fortification — that is what this commemoration is about, right?” Sharp said. “Being able to kind of interact with that and see it in person is really special.”
But as archeologists and visitors buzzed around the dig site, the unlikely subjects of national controversy hung quietly within the Bunker Hill monument — three signs displaying six quotes related to abolition, women’s suffrage and immigration.
Earlier this month, Trump’s National Park service had targeted those signs for removal, aiming to get rid of them in time for Wednesday’s anniversary.
Administration officials had said the planned changes were part of a “routine exhibit refresh.”
But last week, a Boston judge ordered the reinstallment of the signs at Bunker Hill and other sites nationwide, saying that removing the signs “sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”
The dispute left a bad taste in some visitor’s mouths, including Sarah Kyley Schauff, a forensic anthropologist archaeologist working on the City of Boston dig site.
“I think it’s shameful that this administration is diminishing the role, or trying to diminish the role, of immigrants, women, and enslaved people in our history,” Kyley Shauff said.
The targeted signs were up Wednesday, and according to one park ranger who declined to speak on the record, they had never come down.
Kyley Schauff said she’s relieved that visitors to the site this week can see the breadth of America’s history — from the battlefield artifacts to the quotes within the monument.
“I’m glad that they’re up,” she said. “I’m glad that people can see them on the anniversary and they can come here and see the redoubt, and that’s good news.”
Another visitor, Charlestown resident Tom Ward, agreed. He noted the importance of immigrants in both the Battle of Bunker Hill and the broader story of the United States.
“It should have never been taken down,” Ward said. “There were many immigrants that fought here. I’m the son of immigrants and many Irish immigrants fought and died here.”
Greg Hawkins, a visitor from Washington state, did not see the quotes as an integral element of American history, but a manifestation of a kind of culture war.
“We’ll see those signs eventually be replaced with the next emotional public controversy,” Hawkins said.
The convergence of an anniversary, a court battle, and an archaeological breakthrough underscored a the fact that Bunker Hill remains a focal point for defining the American story.
Jennifer Reed, a retired teacher volunteering with the excavation, said that’s what’s so exciting about uncovering the past.
“It’s sacred ground, and it’s such wonderful history,” Reed said. “And to be part of that and part of the uncovering of the redoubt and seeing that revealed for the first time in 251 years has been extraordinary.”