In 1775, a young bookseller in Boston with no military experience and a voracious appetite for reading history took on a seemingly impossible mission. General George Washington’s undersupplied Continental Army needed heavy weaponry to drive the British Army out of Boston, and as Lesley Herzberg of the Berkshire Historical Society explains, the job fell to Henry Knox.
“Henry Knox goes and does reconnaissance at Fort Ticonderoga, because all of these arms have been seized at Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775 by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold and the Green Mountain Boys," she told WAMC. "And so, all of this artillery is just sitting there, but it needs to get to Boston. So, it needs to get 300 miles across New York and Massachusetts to Boston in order for General Washington to be able to use it. And so, Knox is like, I can do it.”
On paper, Knox was an odd choice for a complicated and vital military scheme. While he’d witnessed the Boston Massacre in 1770, the 25-year-old had never even been to New York before taking on the artillery mission.
“He’s young, he's not a part of the military, he's a big guy, 250 pounds, he's missing two fingers from a rifle accident. He's just not who you're going to think of as this military strategist," explained Herzberg. "But yet, he comes up with a way to transport all of these things 300 miles across the two states.”
Between Knox's diary and the letters he wrote over the course of the arduous journey from Ticonderoga to Boston, historians have a fair amount of insight into the unlikely hero of what became known as the "noble train of artillery” across the wintery Northeast.
“He's writing letters at the same time to General Washington, but also Philip Schuyler and his wife, Lucy Flucker Knox, who was the daughter of our loyalists in Boston. So, I think it's a human story as much as it is a military story. And we can see that through the letters that still survive," said Lauren Roberts, the Saratoga County Historian, chair of Saratoga 250, and also a New York State 250 commissioner. “He's promising his wife, I'll be home really quick, this is really going to be a short trip. And at the same time, he's in his diary, and he talks specifically giving descriptions of the Cahoes Falls. And it's this poetic description of how the ice froze over the falls, and it made it look like frozen milk. And he still has this humbleness about him. He's talking about how the natural beauty of this area makes him feel small, even though he's the one that is accomplishing this huge feat.”
Knox arrived in Boston, cannon in tow, in early 1776. By March, the audacious plan to free the city from British control had worked. After bombarding the occupying forces, the moonshot by a young bookseller was a decisive moment in the War of Independence.
“It really was the biggest early victory in the American Revolution," said Roberts. "The sheer fact that he was successful in this mission meant that the British left the city of Boston. He was the able to relieve them of that siege. George Washington absolutely was enamored with Knox after he was able to complete this mission. It really sets him up to be the successful person he becomes later in the war and after in our early government.”
Knox went on to ascend to the rank of general in the Continental Army, and was the nation’s first Secretary of War.
At 10 a.m. Saturday morning at the Knox Marker on the state line on Route 71 between Hillsdale, New York, and Alford, Mass., the 250th anniversary of the artillery wizard’s greatest achievement will be celebrated with a ceremony.
“We have our draft horses from the Washington County Draft Animal Association that are pulling two sleds," Roberts explained. "These are replica sleds built by our local BOCES students to simulate what Knox would have been transporting his cannon on. And so, we've got two teams of horses that are actually pulling these sleds across to the border, and then at the end of the ceremony, our New York draft animals will unhitch and the Massachusetts animals will hitch to those sleds. They'll pull them across the border. There's going to be a cannon salute, a musket volley.”
Jonathan Lane is executive director of Revolution 250, the private nonprofit behind years of organizing leading up to the uprising’s semiquincentennial anniversary in Massachusetts. He says the importance of the "noble train of artillery” and its entrance into the commonwealth cannot be overstated.
“For us, Knox coming through the Berkshires is the road to, first of all, Massachusetts' independence, right?" Lane told WAMC. "So, we don't win the Siege of Boston without Knox's artillery. And so, Washington places the artillery, they drive the British out of Boston, and the British never come back to Massachusetts. That's the moment, and we didn't know that 250 years ago, but that's the moment we as Massachusetts people secure our independence.”
The state line ceremony commemorating the 250th anniversary of Knox’s artillery train will be followed by events at the Hillsdale Firehouse at 11:30 a.m. and at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington at 2 p.m.
