This is the first article in a series about travel and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
A century ago, when the automobile was still new and most thoroughfares were still dirt, two states decided to commemorate the most consequential road trip in American history, an epic slog undertaken 150 years earlier by a 25-year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox. And a bunch of other people. And horses. And oxen.
Late fall, 1775. George Washington had kept the British bottled up in Boston since spring, but he couldn’t force them out. The city, pre-landfill, was just a bulbous mass in the harbor attached to the mainland by a slender isthmus. Washington, who held the mainland, lacked the big guns needed to bombard Boston and the ships supplying the thousands of British troops stationed there.
But he knew where there were some.
In May, bands of Patriots led by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen had captured two British forts in northern New York, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and with them scores of cannons, mortars and howitzers. Declaring “no trouble or expense must be spared,” Washington sent Knox to fetch them, armed with £1,000 (about $193,000 today), letters imploring other Patriot commanders to assist him, and Knox’s own prodigious knowledge of artillery, acquired over years of paging through his own inventory.
The plan was to float the weapons — 60 tons’ worth — down lakes Champlain and George before they froze, then tow them overland on wooden sleds, cross hopefully-by-then-frozen rivers, climb mountains, descend mountains, stop outside Boston to build carriages for them, wheel them to Cambridge, and hand them off to Washington, who in turn would haul them up to the heights of Dorchester under cover of darkness and drive the British off.
Remarkably: It worked.
The war, of course, would go on. Washington would lose a lot of battles. But the Knox Expedition — also known as the Noble Train of Artillery, a phrase Knox invoked in a missive to Washington — showed the British, and the world, that these rebels were resourceful, capable, determined, that they might just have a chance.
It showed the rebels themselves something more. “It’s this key moment,” Matthew Keagle, the curator at Fort Ticonderoga, explained, when the colonial upstarts “are forced to work across their provincial boundaries, which in America in the 18th century are still very different.” It led many to think of themselves, for the first time, not just as New Yorkers or “Massachusites,” but as Americans.
So it makes sense that in 1926, the year of the sesquicentennial, those states decided to commemorate the expedition by installing markers at some 60 points along Knox’s 300-mile route. But the landscape, and the country, had changed a great deal in the century and a half that had passed.
It has changed even more in the century since.
Follow the trail today — it took me four days by car — and you are at once traversing three Americas laid atop one another. It’s a trek that will leave you with a strong sense of just how impressive Knox’s achievement was and, more significantly, of who and what we were. And are.
Following the Markers
The markers are humble, stones a few feet or so tall; they look alike (from the back, anyway — each state commissioned a distinct pictorial engraving for the front); and, with very few exceptions, have identical inscriptions. But the scenery is always different.
The trail starts with glorious natural vistas from the New York side of Lake Champlain, and ends overlooking Boston’s skyline. In between, it runs through cities, suburbs, small towns, countryside, forests and two mountain ranges; past small working farms and enormous defunct mills, multimillion-dollar vacation homes and sagging tenements, shuttered shops and lively boutiques and at least one casino. Some markers stand in the center of town, some in pocket parks, some along roadsides and some in traffic triangles that are tricky to reach safely on foot. There are lists of them online with locations that are not always accurate. Nevertheless, with the exception of two that have disappeared, I managed to find them all.
One sits on what is now private property. It’s at Sabbath Day Point, overlooking Lake George in New York. When I stopped by, the owners were away, but a neighbor who was out shoveling his driveway assured me that they wouldn’t mind my checking it out, if I didn’t mind tromping through knee-high snow to get to it. He was delighted that I was interested, and proud that his neighborhood had played a part in the Knox expedition. “They were bivouacked here,” he explained. Originally from Britain, he retired to the area after a long career in education. “It’s a privilege to live here,” he averred. Having recently watched Ken Burns’s documentary on the American Revolution, he’d really come to appreciate “how complicated that conflict was.”
The Revolution lingers like fog over parts of the trail, in bronze cannons and minuteman statuary, and street and restaurant names. I had dinner one night at the Burgoyne Grill in Ticonderoga, N.Y. The British general “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, a man of refined tastes, would have appreciated the bang bang shrimp.
It hangs most heavily in Schuylerville, N.Y., seat of the Patriot general Philip Schuyler (whom Washington had asked to aid Knox) and part of the Saratoga Battlefield, where in 1777 Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold stunned Burgoyne by capturing his entire army, immensely boosting Patriot morale and prospects. A metal marker in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant identifies it as the site of Burgoyne’s breastworks. One on the front lawn of the high school marks the site of his camp. When school lets out, students make their way across the road to the Revolution Cafe, which proffers paninis named for Gates, Arnold, Schuyler, Burgoyne and Thomas Paine.
Schuylerville’s Knox Trail marker stands among others in the town’s small Veterans Memorial Park. One reads:
HERE
1880 WHILE
EXCAVATING FOR
BULLARD PAPER
CHIMNEY, THE
REMAINS OF
AN UNKNOWN
SOLDIER AND
HIS HORSE WERE
EXHUMED
Visions of a Changing Country
Saratoga inserts itself into the narrative elsewhere along the trail — at a brick mansion near the Knox marker in Kinderhook, N.Y., where Gentleman Johnny was “entertained,” per a different marker, on Oct. 22, 1777, while being transported to Boston as a prisoner of war. It shows up on a green (site of another Knox marker) in West Springfield, Mass., where the German general Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, another Saratoga P.O.W., camped for a couple of days before crossing the Connecticut River.
Outside Fort Edward, N.Y., I passed a historical marker pointing to the original burial spot of Jane McCrea, a Loyalist who was abducted and scalped by Native Americans allied with the British, an incident that was exploited to tremendous effect in Patriot propaganda. (As the man said: complicated.)
I may have been the first person in years to regard some of these historical markers. Certainly, I never — not once — saw anyone else pause at, much less read, a Knox Trail marker. I don’t know what all the sites looked like a century ago, when those markers were installed, but the world around them has not stood still since then. The juxtapositions can be striking. One, in the town of Lake George, stands near an expansive leather outlet. The one in Mechanicville, N.Y., sits in front of the town’s squat, modern Community Services Center. The one in Latham, N.Y., is outside a squat modern Masonic Temple. I believe Knox, a Freemason, would have approved of the location, if not the architecture.
I found myself thinking about him throughout the journey, in weird ways. In Bolton Landing, N.Y., a summer destination on Lake George, the Knox marker sits in a waterside park (I spotted an older gentleman there sunbathing in a fuzzy hat, puffy parka and camouflage cargo shorts — it was 38 degrees) behind a charming little public library, which was pretty much the only thing in town that was open in winter. Where would Knox have gotten lunch? (I went without.)
In Framingham, Mass., the marker stands behind a big-and-tall store, which reminded me of a song I learned as a child that began, “Three hundred pounds of basso profundo was Henry Knox.” (Dr. Keagle insists he only weighed 280.) In Waterford, N.Y., the marker stands on a little memorial green near a bridge over the Hudson. Knox certainly could have used a bridge or two: He had a rough time getting cannons across insufficiently thick ice, having to dredge up several after they crashed through. One may still sit at the bottom of the Mohawk River in Cohoes, N.Y.
Some sites, though, seem fated, like in North Egremont, Mass., a village just over the state line, where the marker sits outside the Old Egremont Country Store, which looks and feels like something from a bygone Pepperidge Farm commercial. The woman who runs it pointed out, while making me a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, that it also serves as a post office. “When someone gets a package,” she explained, “we put a slip in their box and leave it on the floor.” There were several piles.
Her husband mused about the Knox expedition as he rang me up: “Can you imagine those guys doing that whole thing without maps? Without roads? But you know what they did have? A lot of taverns!”
A Different Kind of Battle
And from those taverns, word spread. By the time the expedition reached Westfield, Mass. — where the Knox marker stands across the street from a Brazilian jujitsu studio and a pierogi shop — the locals were ready for them. A great crowd swarmed the convoy, a ranger at the Springfield Armory, a National Park Service site, told me. “They wanted him to fire off the guns,” he said. “He kind of hesitated, and they said, ‘Come on, Henry, fire one off!’ So he picked a mortar and fired it, and they loved it.” Knox did it a few more times, and then he and his crew were plied with food and drink till bedtime. It’s not known if pierogies were served.
Perhaps the people of Westfield were already Patriots; perhaps this unlikely expedition’s unlikely progress won them over, giving them hope that this revolution might, somehow, succeed. What those travelers got, as they were feted and aided along the way, was a good picture of this nascent country they were helping to create.
When their trail was plotted and marked 150 years later, much of what Knox and his teamsters saw had changed. Former frontier settlements had started luring holiday rusticators. Small towns were becoming comfortable suburbs for a new middle class. Larger towns had grown into cities. And farming villages had become industrial centers. The same rushing waters that had once ground grain now powered textile looms and wood pulpers.
Another century hence, many of those rustic retreats are now conspicuously posh. Many of those suburbs have grown more comfortable than the middle class can afford, or have become clusters of big-box stores, fast-food franchises and automobile dealerships. The cities are still cities, if (excepting Boston) less vibrant, and relevant, than they were. But the upstate New York and western and central Massachusetts farm towns that bet on manufacturing appear, from our current vantage, to have lost that wager. In those places I found Knox markers beside splintering schoolhouses and crumbling commercial blocks; near shabby government assistance bureaus and seedy package stores; across from empty storefronts outside which people, hunched and shivering, waited in silence for a bus, or maybe for nothing.
Yet these same towns also have stately old public libraries that are still the heart of the community, and proud, historic homes where the paint may be peeling but the walls remain solid. You get the sense, even just passing through, that the residents, though they know their town will probably never again be anything close to what it was, haven’t given up — that they, understanding they are unlikely to prevail, fight on nonetheless.
Just like Henry Knox and George Washington did.
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Tony Cenicola is a Times photographer.
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