Walking the Berkshires

The Quest for Salisbury Cannon

During the Revolution, a foundry in Salisbury Connecticut cast at least 837  iron cannon barrels - from swivels to 18 pounders and even mortars - to aid the patriot cause.  Today, the Salisbury Association Historical Society is hoping to bring one of them back.  

The Salisbury Furnace supplied Washington's army in 1776 with 40 cannon, some of which are thought to have been used by Henry Knox at the Battle of Trenton.  Another 69 cannon were sent to the Northern Army between October 1776 and January 1777.  Salisbury Cannon defended the Hudson Highlands, The Continental Frigates Hancock, Trumbull and Confederacy were armed with naval cannon produced in Salisbury, as were numerous privateers.  Connecticut's militia and coastal fortifications also used Salisbury cannon, including at Fort Griswald during Arnold's Raid.

They were mass produced, with no record of any unique identifying marks, but neither is there any record of a Salisbury Cannon bursting when fired and they are believed to have been made with particular skill.  A significant number may have survived the war, but tracing existing examples of American made Revolutionary War cannon back to Salisbury is a much more difficult question.  

Aside from the absence of maker's marks, authentication presents a number of difficulties.  Metallurgical analysis of cannonballs and other items made with Salisbury Iron that do not require samples of a size that would damage an artifact have not yielded a unique signature for Salisbury Iron, except that it is very high quality and contains a lot of manganese. Nonetheless, the Salisbury Association Historical Society is starting what many expect to be a lengthy process of researching and tracking down antique cannon which may have come from the northwest corner of Connecticut and I am delighted to be part of this Cannon Search project.

We will be working on compiling the physical characteristics of what are reputed to be surviving examples of Salisbury cannon, and documenting their provenance.  We will also be trying to work our way forward from the time the cannons left the foundry.  The Massachusetts-made frigate Hancock carried 22 Salisbury   12 pounders in her full compliment of 28 guns, and was captured by the British who bought her into their service as the Isis.  We will be tracing her fate, and that of her ordinance.  Many old guns were melted for scrap during the wars of the 20th century, but our hope is that we will be able to identify with a high degree of certainty whether a surviving cannon was made in Salisbury, and perhaps, if we are very fortunate, to be able to acquire one and bring it back to town.  I will keep you abreast of developments, but suffice it to say I will be haunting various Revolutionary War battlefields and other relevant places for a long while to come with this as one of my objectives for being there.

First Fireflies

Last night after a long day putting in the vegetable garden, I walked out to the garden gate and saw the first fireflies of summer in their dozens in the field beyond. By my reckoning this is at least 2 weeks ahead of schedule, just like nearly everything this spring.  It felt like Midsummer with the faeries flitting at the bottom of the garden, so I roused the children and took them outside to welcome summer.

High in the Highlands

I was on top of Mohawk Mountain yesterday, and despite the road to the summit I had the view to myself.  This is looking south across Cornwall toward Warren and Kent, CT.  I was there to take pictures in support of a submission for funding under the federal Highlands Conservation Act in FY2012.  I believe the forested and scenic character of the landscape is pretty compelling.

Here is the view looking north and north west toward Massachusetts and New York.  With a picnic table for each view shed, I wish I had brought my lunch.

 

Herringbone House

This Dutch Colonial farmhouse with its mansard roof and herringbone pattern brickwork caught my eye as I was driving along Milton Road in Goshen, CT.  It is unlike any other historic house that I know of in our region of New England saltboxes, Federals and Greek Revivals.

"Evolving Standards of Decency." Or Not.

Here is an 18th century image that suggests that the sexual humiliation of detainees may have rather deep roots in the American psyche.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas rejects the concept of dynamic meaning in a "Living Constitution."  He and fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia adhere to strict constructionism and its focus on original intent rather than new interpretations of the Constitution in a modern context.  By the logic of Thomas's dissenting opinion this week in an 8th amendment case, he might deem the actions depicted in this image to be evidence of the standards of the day at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted, and therefore Constitutionally justified. 

There are 100 years of precedent and case law regarding “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” that run counter to Thomas's opinion.  Sometimes interpretations that consider "the evolving standards of decency" are pejoratively dismissed as judicial activism. 

I'm not at all sure that such labels apply exclusively to those whose "liberal" judicial philosophy inclines toward pragmatic interpretation of the words and intent of the Founders.  Who is more activist than a fundamentalist, whatever his or her political persuasion?

In any case, whether or not the extra legal punishment depicted in that image of a tarred and feathered captive being threatened with diabolical sodomy is Constitutional under the 8th Amendment, it is clearly protected speech under the 1st.  Unless used to threaten a detainee.  Then it depends on the judicial philosophy of the majority of Supreme Court members.

Berkshires' Big Dig

(This article first appeared in the Winter 2008-2009 issue of Massachusetts Main Streets & Back Roads.)

The Berkshire Hills and rugged Taconics are merely roots of ancient ranges far greater in stature than the rounded crests of today.  Uplifted by clashing continents, these mountains rose and wore away over a period of tens of millions of years.  The resulting geological record in western New England is a trove of folded rock and minerals transformed by tremendous heat and pressure.  Worn down to hard nubs, cracked by ice and scoured by glaciers, our mountains are now shadows of their former selves.

 

As ramparts go, these diminished ranges remain formidable impediments, dictating the patterns of travel and settlement in the Berkshires since the first Neolithic hunters occupied the tundra lands the ice relinquished.  The rivers of our region, with their narrow intervals and fertile bottomland, only rarely breach the mountain chains running north and south on either side.  There are just a few gaps and saddles between the ridges to accommodate east-west travel.  Anyone who has driven the switchback of the Mohawk Trail from North Adams to Florida is keenly aware that these mountains are still an impressive barrier.

 

Early travelers through the region found the going very hard indeed between the Connecticut River and the Hudson.  In 1694, it took one colonial delegation three days to travel the “Great Road” between Springfield, Massachusetts and Kinderhoek, New York in a party that included 60 Connecticut dragoons and spent nights sleeping rough in huts of pine boughs.  Commissioner for Massachusetts the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth described the road as “very woody, rocky, mountainous, swampy; extream (sic) bad riding it was…a hideous, howling wilderness.”  This ancient path would later serve as a military road during the French and Indian War, and witness the passage to Boston of the guns of Ticonderoga and the surrendered regiments of Burgoyne’s Saratoga army.  

 

With our Independence from Great Britain came the defeat and dispossession of the Iroquois, whose influence and proximity had served as a check on the expansion of Algonquian settlements in the Berkshires even before the arrival of European colonists. With the fertile western lands of the Iroquois now open, it wasn’t long before men of ambition and ingenuity started to hatch plans to expand commerce by piercing the mountains between New England and New York.  In 1819 an idea was hatched to connect Albany and Boston by canal, and a route for this venture was even surveyed through the northern Berkshires in the mid-1820s before the scheme stalled on the flanks of Hoosac Mountain and was abandoned for being too costly.

 

When railroads supplanted canals as the modern means of transport, a northern route through the Berkshires once again was proposed as a way of linking the mill towns of central and western Massachusetts.  Climbing westward up the Deerfield River valley, the Troy & Greenfield Line would have to cut through the Hoosac Mountain to reach North Adams.  In 1852 an attempt to bore through the mountain was made using the extremely expensive Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine, that managed to burrow a dozen feet into the rock before it seized up for good. 

 

Four years and millions of dollars later, the Troy & Greenfield Line secured the service and investment of Herman Haupt as its chief contractor.  The project was now one of the greatest engineering efforts of its day – a tunnel four and a half miles long through the heart of Hoosac Mountain - and Haupt was one of the most brilliant engineers available.  Politics and rival railroad interests, naturally, intervened, with Massachusetts ultimately abandoning its promise to provide funding to complete the work.  His reputation slandered and his fortune at risk, Haupt was commissioned a Brigadier General in the early months of the Civil War and put in charge of railroad development for the war effort.  He was a tireless worker and his contributions were a major factor in maintaining the military superiority of the North, but he lost his investment in the Hoosac Tunnel project when Troy & Greenfield defaulted on its mortgage and was taken over by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

 

Stuart Murray, author of A Time of War which details the history of Berkshire County and its citizens during the Civil War, describes the challenges facing our own “Big Dig” during this period.  “(I)t was difficult to find reliable workers because so many men were away at war.  Excavating the shaft, twenty feet wide and twenty-four feet high through the mica slate of Hoosac Mountain, required hundreds of laborers working long hours with hand-drill, pick and shovel.  Black powder blasted the rock apart, but explosions left dangerous cracks and unseen weaknesses that resulted in sudden collapses.  Men died regularly in rock falls.”  On October 17, 1867, 13 workers died in a gas explosion in the central shaft, earning it the name “the bloody pit.”

 

By 1868 miners were averaging 150 feet per month and rail lines extended from Troy and Boston to either side of the mountain.  On Thanksgiving Day, 1873, the final feet were cleared and a bevy of dignitaries and 500 assembled onlookers ceremoniously stepped through the 5 foot opening between the two ends of the tunnel.  The first trains would run in early 1875, with an official opening in July, 1876 coinciding with the nation’s centennial.

 

Today you can stand on a ridge overlooking the Deerfield and be unaware of the marvel of engineering beneath your feet.  A few freight trains pass through the tunnel daily, but in the Berkshire hill towns the need for connectivity is now about high speed internet access instead of railroads.  Our mountains are generally free from communications towers, resulting in gorgeous views as well as fragmented cellular service of dubious reliability, much like the “Great Road” of old.

Throwback

The NY Times has challenged CT Attorney General and candidate for US Senate Dick Blumenthal's representation of his military service during the Vietnam War era.  He is not, in fact, a Vietnam veteran, having never deployed to southeast Asia but rather serving as a reservist in Washington D.C.  

"what is striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events...the idea that he served in Vietnam has become such an accepted part of his public biography that when a national outlet, Slate magazine, produced a profile of Mr. Blumenthal in 2000, it said he had “enlisted in the Marines rather than duck the Vietnam draft." It does not appear that Mr. Blumenthal ever sought to correct those mistakes."

As distasteful and damaging as these revelations appear, Blumenthal is hardly the first American politician to misrepresent his record of military service during wartime.  I wonder, however, whether future politicians in uniform today will fall as readily into the same seductive trap as some have done from Blumenthal's era? 

For one thing, service in the National Guard or Reserves is hardly the means today to avoid a tour (or more) in Afghanistan or Iraq.  In an all volunteer army and a war that has lasted for close to a decade, the chances that a service member will not deploy to a conflict area would appear to be long odds.  When guarding military facilities against the tactics of terror, even the coast guard reserves are deployed in the Persian Gulf.  In these conflicts, those military personnel who are technically not combat troops are often under fire and may well become engaged in combat.  

What will it mean when a future politician claims to have been a service member during the War on Terror Era?  Does that necessarily imply that only those based in Iraq and Afghanistan will be considered war veterans, and what percentage of personnel are likely to have served at least one deployment in or near the main arena of conflict? If you spent your tour guarding enemy combatants detained in Gitmo, does that count?  Or guarding our cities, airports, and public facilities against domestic terror attacks?  Where will we set the bar?  Does it have to be an Orange Alert or greater?

Combat veterans and those whose units are recognized as having served in a war zone are quite rightly considered war veterans, though their experiences and actions may differ greatly.  Yet I suspect that the rub will come not in the eyes of the public (excepting, of course, flagrant misrepresentations of actual service) but rather in the bureaucracy of the VA as it sorts out veterans benefits claims from millions of service men and women.   It would be tragic if it all boiled down to what class of veteran is recognized as capable of developing PTSD.

What Blumenthal appears to have done says as much about the context of the times in which he served as the content of his character.  In an era when many Americans consider every person in uniform a hero, regardless of where and how they serve, it may be that when Blumenthal's son, a newly minted Marine Corps officer, considers a career in politics, the need to represent one's service record as a war veteran will seem less important than the fact of his service.  Or perhaps old habits die hard, and there will always be the temptation for some soldiers turned politicians to make their record appear to be more than it was.

Paradise

There were Baltimore Orioles feasting on winter moths in the new leaves of the oak trees at Windrock, and weaving their nests on the outermost branches.  The air was clean and bright and the lilacs still in full bloom, while ours in the Litchfield Hills have faded.  There were osprey gliding like kites in the wind.

Children ran in the grass in their shorts, or tottered around on too big high heels and gowns from the dress up box.  Drip castles emerged on a sand bar.  Novel solutions were found to vexing mechanical problems, like using several small threaded lengths of pipe to make one large extender for a pipe wrench to fix the hand pump. We planted trees to screen us from the new construction next door.

I taught my daughter to skip stones.  I watched my son give evidence of a deep love of dogs, where once he had been frightened of them.  We joined my uncle and cousin for a glorious afternoon sail in his new yawl from Mattapoisett to its summer mooring.  We saw lady slippers emerging in the woodlands, and wisteria twining up the side of the house.   Emily swam, and Elias found quahogs in the cool waters of the bay.  I felt my spine uncoil and my back straighten in what is the closest to heaven I know on this Earth.

The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire

Western Massachusetts has a long and storied history of popular resistance to overreaching authority.  During Shay’s Rebellion which took place just a few years after the Revolution, frustration with unresponsive government and ruinous debt lead many farmers and merchants in this area to armed insurgency.  In 1801, citizens of Cheshire in Berkshire County found a novel way to express their disaffection with the tax policies of Massachusetts.  They made an enormous cheese.

 

John Leland, a Baptist preacher and evangelist, was the driving force behind this novel approach to tax resistance.  Elder Leland was a strong defender of the religious liberties not only of his Cheshire congregation but of Baptists across the Commonwealth and in Connecticut where Calvinism was deeply rooted and entwined with politics.  As a religious minority, Baptists were among the staunchest proponents of the separation of church and state.

 

The followers of Elder Leland were strong supporters of the Republicanism of Thomas Jefferson worked to elect him over the incumbent John Adams in 1801.  During the campaign, the idea was hatched to collect milk from the good “republican cows” of Cheshire to create an enormous wheel of cheese and deliver it to Jefferson at his inaugural.  While cheese making was a local specialty, nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.  Undaunted, Leland and his congregation managed to get Cheshire farmers to donate a day’s supply of milk from their herds to make the vast cheese.

 

They used a large cider press to create a cheese as wide as a millstone and just as heavy.  Well over a foot thick and four feet in diameter, Cheshire’s cheese tipped the scales at 1,235 lbs and there was still plenty of milk left over to make three smaller cheeses. 

 

The big one, though, was for Jefferson, and Leland was determined to make the trip to the Capital in the dead of winter to deliver “The Greatest Cheese in America – For the Greatest Man in America.”  This required the hire of a sleigh, and nearly a month long journey over the nation’s dubious roads.  John Leland and his parishioner Darius Brown made the journey, and attracted throngs of people along the way.  There was even an offer of $1,000 – which Leland declined – to exhibit the cheese in New York as a circus attraction.

 

Undoubtedly, the cheese ripened considerably in transit, and it attracted both jeers and admiration en route to the White House.  Some Federalist detractors dubbed it the Mammoth Cheese, in reference to the mania over newly unearthed mammoth bones on display at the Peale Museum in Philadelphia and greatly admired by Jefferson.  The name was received as a compliment, however, and as with Yankee Doodle the intended insult was embraced with pride. 

 

Jefferson flung wide his arms to welcome the cheese bearers as they arrived at the inaugural, expressing his gratitude to this “mark of esteem from freeborn farmers, employed personally in the useful labors of life.”  The citizens of Cheshire took great pride in their accomplishment, and in 1940 a monument to Leland and the Mammoth Cheese was erected in town.  Crowned by a statue of the cider press that formed the cheese, it is one of the most unusual public monuments in Massachusetts, and proof that the American genius for combining publicity stunts with politics is as old as the nation itself.

(This article first appears in the Summer 2009 issue of Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads)

Through the Berkshires With Henry Knox

Mr. Henry Knox, Esquire, still technically a civilian with his commission not yet in hand, undertook a military expedition in the winter of 1775-1776 that is remembered as one of the epic stories of our nation’s founding.   Knox made an overland journey of more than 300 miles from the shores of Lake Champlain through the Berkshires to Boston to deliver nearly sixty cannon and other essential military supplies to Washington’s army.  These guns are widely credited with forcing the British to evacuate the city and provided a tremendous boost to patriot morale.

The expedition was a remarkable logistical feat, requiring Knox and his teamsters to cross imperfectly frozen rivers and traverse the rugged terrain of western Massachusetts along the way.  They dragged their sleds over tracks that had never seen such a caravan before and would never again see the like.  In passing through the Berkshires, Knox recorded that it was “almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up and down such hills as are here.”  It also demanded that he be a good manager of men as well as war materiel, for most of those who moved the guns were hired teamsters and not subject to military discipline.  The success of the expedition is testimony to Knox's considerable organizational skills and unflagging spirit.

Washington’s correspondence shows that he had made previous requests for New York to forward military stores from such places as Ticonderoga and Crown Point before sending Knox to see that it was done.  Washington even asked one of his aides, Colonel Joseph Reed, to look into the matter on his way to Philadelphia but had received no further information.   Where others had failed to act, Knox delivered.    

Washington instructed Knox to first seek the needed supplies in New York, and then proceed to Albany and points north to gather all that was required:

“[Y]ou must go to Major General Schuyler, and get the Remainder from Ticonderoga, Crown Point, or St John's. If it should be necessary, from Quebec; if in our Hands. The Want of them is so great, that no Trouble or Expense must be spared to obtain them. “

It is fortunate that Knox was able to find sufficient ordinance at the southern end of Lake Champlain, without having to chase after the invading army in Canada in deep winter for more artillery.  As for expenses, it took three years for Congress to reimburse Knox for his personal outlay on the expedition.

Ever the optimist, Knox wrote to General George Washington from the shores of Lake George regarding the prospects for transporting cannon and other essential military supplies from Ticonderoga to Boston:

“The route will be from here to Kinderhook, from thence to Great Barrington, and down to Springfield.  I have sent for the sleds and teams to come here, and expect to move them to Saratoga on Wednesday or Thursday next, trusting that between this and then we shall have a fine fall of snow, which will enable us to proceed farther, and make the carriage easy.  If that shall be the case, I hope in sixteen or seventeen days time to present your Excellency a noble train of artillery.”

It ultimately took twice as long as he anticipated, for the way was hard and the snows were erratic, but by January 25^th the guns had reached Framingham, Massachusetts and were soon with Washington in Cambridge and Roxbury.

In 1927 during the Revolution’s Sesquicentennial ,  the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts placed a large number granite markers with metal plaques along Knox’s probable route, which is suggested in part by the letter quoted above.  Now considered one of the earliest Heritage Trails created in the United States, one can still follow the markers from Ticonderoga to Boston.  There are seven of these commemorative stones  located by roadsides in the Berkshires between Alford and Westfield.  The monument on the New York / Massachusetts line is shared by both, with a state plaque on either side. 

In 2008, an effort was launched to conserve these plaques and restore the bronze to its original luster.  The marker at the state boundary on Rte 71 has now been treated, but this is not the first attention it has received since the trail was established.  Along with several other markers on the New York side and another one in Massachusetts, it was moved to its present location in 1975 to reflect new ideas about the route of the Knox expedition after it turned east out of the Hudson Valley toward the Berkshires.  Whatever this evidence was must have been fairly convincing, because within a very short period of time both New York and Massachusetts had agreed to move the monuments to reflect an alternate route to Massachusetts.

Unlike other notable expeditions of the Revolution, such as Benedict Arnold’s trek through the wilds of Maine to Quebec , or the Sullivan / Clinton campaign against the Iroquois, we have very few written accounts by actual participants.  Aside from Henry Knox’s few letters to his wife and to Washington and his incomplete diary, the only other journal known from the expedition is a reminiscence written in the 1830s by one John Becker, who had accompanied his father as a twelve-year-old teamster as far as Springfield.  This accounts for some of the difficulty in establishing the precise route of the guns.

Neither Becker nor Knox had much to say about the Berkshire portion of their journey, but both accounts mention Claverack, New York, as a place where they tarried.   Claverack was then part of the “Lower Manor” of the Renssaeler family and was not incorporated as a town until after the Revolution.  The new route of the Knox Trail does not extend as far south as Claverack Center, but cuts diagonally below Kinderhook toward modern Rte 71 and the Green River Valley where it then  slices through the Taconic Range between New York and Massachusetts.  The old route had the guns passing into the Berkshires along Rte 23 in South Egremont, and the New York plaques still record this route in their original design.  In addition to moving the marker at the state line up to Rte 71, the next monument was shifted to the village of North Egremont, where it has since been physically incorporated into that community’s 9/11 memorial. 

According to Knox’s diary, the divisions of his train passed into Massachusetts on January 10^th, 1776 and by nightfall had “Climb’d mountains from which we might have seen all the Kingdoms of the Earth.”  This description, if accurate for this stage of the journey, sounds more like the tortuous pass between modern Hillsdale, NY and South Egremont , where the monuments were originally located, than the alternate route that passes through the Green River Valley that slopes through Egremont Plain to Great Barrington. 

Be that as it may, there is no controversy considering the next stage of the journey, which follows modern Rte 23 from Great Barrington to Monterrey (then considered a part of Tyringham).  The draft teams and cannon at this point passed for a dozen miles through a thick pine forest called Greenwoods.  Knox biographer North Callahan describes this part of the journey as among the most difficult of the entire trek, featuring  “an ominous confusion of mountains, precipices, chasms and deep valleys, which were interspersed with rivers, lakes and dank swamps.” 

The trek continued through the Town of Loudon (now East Otis) and on to Blandford, which Knox says he reached on the 11^th of January. Here he found his lead division reluctant to proceed further, citing the lack of snow up ahead where they would have to descend the “tremendous Glasgow or Westfield mountain”.  It required several hours of cajoling, and subsequently engaging the services of one Solomon Brown of Blandford along with two additional teams of oxen, to move the cannon eleven more miles through Russell to Westfield.

Successfully descending the east flank of the Berkshires into Westfield on January 13^th certainly lifted their spirits.  Here, for the first time since leaving Albany, there is evidence that the apparition of so many men and beasts and their caravan of cannon made a memorable impression n the local inhabitants.  Teamster Becker recalled;

“Our armament here was a great curiosity.  We found that very few, even among the oldest  inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon…We were great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey.”

At the urging of the populous, Knox allowed one of the great mortars to be fired several times for their amusement.     Knox was a great lover of fireworks, and it would have been hard for him to resist the temptation to crown their revels with a celebratory salute even at the expense of his precious gunpowder.

By the time the expedition reached Springfield, the New York teamsters were ready to depart, and so Massachusetts men conveyed the supplies the remaining distance to Cambridge.  Whether the siege guns really forced the British to give up Boston or provided them with a ready excuse to do so is open to conjecture, but there is no doubt that the fact of their arrival gave a boost to patriot arms that they would not enjoy again until the following Christmas, when Washington and Knox crossed the Delaware to surprise the Hessians at Trenton.

 

(This article was to have appeared in the winter 2009-2010 issue of MA Quarterly but the free magazine appears not to have been published so I reproduce it here in full.)