Knox Cannon Trailer marker, Shewsbury Common. Photo by Rich Grady

Henry Knox and Evacuation Day

By Rich Grady

My wife taught elementary school for many years in Boxborough, Massachusetts. She thoroughly enjoyed teaching 4th graders about the regions of the United States and was frequently gathering information to share with her students. When she covered the Northeast, she would tell the kids, “You can practically dig up the Revolutionary War right here, in your own backyards.” Driven by curiosity, some of her students took her literally and dug up their backyards, looking for relics!

Shrewsbury Common. Photo by Rich Grady

Well, fast forward to last week, when I was visiting my daughter and her family at their home in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. On the way home, I stopped by their Town Common, across from the Public Library, to take a short stroll and dig up some history. It has that quintessential New England feel, with an adjacent steepled church and some town buildings on the perimeter, and stately tall trees lining a path through the center of the Common. On one end is an obelisk erected in 1869 to honor soldiers who died in the Civil War. Across a brick walkway from the obelisk is a rectangular block of granite with the following inscription: “Through this place crossed General Henry Knox in the winter of 1775-76 to deliver to General George Washington in Cambridge the train of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga used to force the British Army to evacuate Boston.”

Boston is in Suffolk County, where Evacuation Day is an official holiday on March 17th every year. This holiday has long been embraced by the city’s numerous Irish American workers as an official day-off, conveniently coinciding with St. Patrick’s Day, making it doubly appreciated. Evacuation Day celebrates the memory of March 17, 1776, when the British Army and local Royalists shipped out of Boston and set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were intimidated by cannons dragged by the colonial rebels to the top of Dorchester Heights, in present day South Boston. It was a masterful deployment of considerable firepower brought to bear on the siege of Boston.

The siege was carried out by New England town militias and their minutemen. They had chased the Redcoats back to Boston from the North Bridge in Concord on April 19, 1775, and then dug in around the outskirts to contain the British troops and cut off supply routes on land. The contours of the city were different back then, when Boston was an 800-acre peninsula jutting out into the harbor, with one road in-and-out along the neck.

A rotund, 25-year-old bookseller and self-taught military strategist, Henry Knox, joined the colonial militia during the siege and worked on fortifications, including emplacements for the limited amount of field artillery in their possession. In addition to his book-learning, Knox had some practical experience from drilling with the Boston Grenadier Corps, a colonial militia that he co-founded in 1772.

King George III considered the New England colonies to be in rebellion as the conflict intensified around Boston, but it wasn’t only New England entering the fray. George Washington of Virginia was commissioned as General and Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in June by the Continental Congress at their meeting in Philadelphia – around the same time as the Battle of Bunker Hill – and he arrived outside Boston in July 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence. He set up his Headquarters in Cambridge and took over the siege, asserting command over the situation and forging the colonial militias into a single army. He needed artillery to fortify the positions they had taken to contain and harass the British troops, and word had traveled about the artillery acumen of the young Bostonian bookseller, Henry Knox. He impressed General Washington with his leadership traits and the work he had done on fortifying their siege positions around Boston.

Knox was promoting the idea of bringing captured cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in New York back to Boston, and General Washington liked the idea. He ordered Knox to bring back as many cannons as he could. The Fort had been captured in May 1775 by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, along with Benedict Arnold who led a force of militiamen from Massachusetts and Connecticut, about one month after the Lexington and Concord battles – so, the cannons were available, and that was the easy part.

Historians have documented the Knox-led effort and consider it one of the major accomplishments of the Revolutionary War. The trail Knox took covered 300 miles – you can find it today if you look-up the “Knox Cannon Trail.” He and his men used sledges and oxen to drag almost 60 cannons, together weighing about 60 tons, across frozen rivers and snow-covered hills and mountains. It took them 56 days during the winter of 1775-1776 to complete the trip, arriving outside Boston in late January. By early March, the cannons were in position on Dorchester Heights – the perfect place to rain cannon balls down onto the British garrisoned on the head of Boston. As a result of the cannons and their strategic placement, General Howe of the British Army gave the evacuation order, and on March 17, 1776, they left.

The synchronicity of Evacuation Day and St. Patrick’s Day being coincident on the calendar is certainly worthy of recognition and celebration. This year, I will spend March 17th in Boston with my three brothers, and I intend to propose a toast to Henry Knox when we are ensconced in a pub embracing a pint to celebrate the day!