by Howard Coffin
JULY
28, 1776: Standing on Rattlesnake Hill, a rocky eminence
overlooking Lake Champlain, the colonel, once a member of the
British army, took a deep breath. Then he began reading Thomas
Jefferson's words, just arrived on horseback up the long, rutted
roads and trails from the Continental Congress in
Philadelphia:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ...
Before Colonel Arthur St. Clair stood the men of his American northern army, straining to hear every word. Across the Lake Champlain narrows stood Fort Ticonderoga, now a symbol of their rebellion after its capture by Ethan Allen, but long a bastion of European empire in America. St. Clair continued:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A Boston newspaper described the scene this way:
Immediately after divine worship the Declaration was read by Colonel Arthur St. Clair, and having said "God save the free and independent states of America!" the army manifested their joys with three cheers ... The language on every man's countenance was, "Now we are a people! We have a name among the states of the world. "
Ever thereafter, Rattlesnake Hill was known as Mount Independence.
This July, 220 years after the Declaration was read there, a $1 million visitors' center and museum will open on the historic ground of Mount Independence in Orwell. The 400-acre peninsula, jutting into Lake Champlain opposite Ticonderoga, will at last begin receiving long overdue credit for the important place in American history it earned long ago.
There is far more to the story than St. Clair's historic reading, for on Mount Independence's rocky acreage an American army stood in 1776 to turn back a British invasion of the newly declared nation. Then during the following winter hundreds of colonial soldiers, bravely manning the United States' northern defenses, suffered through a winter at least as bad and perhaps worse than that endured by Washington's men at Valley Forge. Walking the quiet landscape today, the imagination is tested by the knowledge that 12,000 soldiers were once encamped there. As many as 1,000 patriots may lie there now, in graves mainly unmarked.
"This was truly the site of American heroism as well as great suffering," according to the noted archaeologist David Starbuck, who has supervised digs at the Mount and other important Revolutionary War and French and Indian War sites in the Northeast. "While Valley Forge and other sites have gotten all the publicity, I firmly believe that what happened at Mount Independence was just as difficult and required as much perseverance as Valley Forge," said Starbuck. "Those people bought a year of time for the cause of liberty. For many people, there has to be a great battle to have a great historic site. Mount Independence is proof that greatness can come from those who wait, who persevere. Through their suffering and death, they held back the British for a precious year. The result was the decisive victory at Saratoga."
Edwin Cole Bearss, former chief historian of the National Park Service, is perhaps the leading authority on American military sites. "Mount Independence is a unique site, probably the great undisturbed Revolutionary War place," Bearss says. "It is wonderful."
Why? Early in the summer of 1776, American forces retreating from the failed invasion of Canada abandoned Crown Point, 15 miles to the north, and concentrated their defenses around Fort Ticonderoga. Following the advice of Benjamin Franklin and others, Rattlesnake Hill, just across the lake, was cleared of timber and fortified. Batteries, blockhouses, and a fort were erected. General Philip Schuyler wrote to George Washington that he found the place to be "so remarkably strong as to require little labor to make it tenable against a vast superiority of force, and fully to answer the purpose of preventing the enemy from penetrating into the country south of us."
The British, 8,000 strong under Sir Guy Carleton, came up the lake from Canada in the fall, after colliding with Benedict Arnold's small but feisty American fleet near Valcour Island. On Monday, October 28, 1776, an American militiaman wrote, "In the morning our advanced boat made the signals and the enemy were approaching, alarm guns were fired from our different batteries & in a few minutes every person able to carry a musket was at his post." Confronting the British was Mount Independence, bristling with cannon, flags flying, and with a garrison between it and Ticonderoga totaling some 12,000 men. Carleton took a long look, advanced a boat that was promptly met by cannon fire, and withdrew all the way to Canada for the winter.
Loving Brother,
I inform you that I am & have been in a low state of health for some time past ... I earnestly intreat you not to delay in coming for me. "
So wrote Matthew Kennedy, an American militiaman stationed at the Mount in the winter of 1776-77. Kennedy died before his brother arrived, and he was not alone in that fate. His letter, preserved at the University of Vermont, tells something of the suffering of the 2,500 men who wintered there. Cold and short of food, riddled by disease, raked by the chill winds howling up Lake Champlain, their ranks were greatly reduced before the return of warm weather. With summer came the British, now led by Gen. John Burgoyne. Ticonderoga and Independence were abandoned. A fierce rear guard action was fought at Hubbardton and a big British detachment was battered at Bennington. Then came the long engagement at Saratoga and the British surrender that was the turning point of the Revolution. At Mount Independence, the year's delay in British plans that was key to American independence had been bought at a dear price.
In the summer of 1996, near the 220th anniversary of St. Clair's reading of the Declaration of Independence, the new visitors' center/museum will be dedicated and opened with ceremony. The building, shaped like an upturned boat and set low and unobtrusively in the Mount's southern end, will be a dream come true for Mount Independence's many friends.
"A general recognition has developed that tourism based on history is important to the state's economy," said Louise Ransom, president of the Mount Independence Coalition, a group dedicated to helping the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation preserve and explain the site. "Since I dug here with David Starbuck I've been hooked on Mount Independence. I think a lot of other Americans are about to be hooked, too."
The Lake Champlain and Hudson River valleys are among the most historic regions in the United States, and were the focus of a series of strategic campaigns during the Revolutionary and French and Indian wars. Lately, interest has grown in establishing a history "trail"- a series of developed historic sites linked together thematically - throughout the two valleys, highlighting the momentous events that took place there. Mount Independence would be one of the most important places in such a trail, and would also attract visitors on its own.
"Together with Ticonderoga, Mount Independence was the most strategic point on Lake Champlain," said Townsend Anderson, of Vermont's Historic Preservation Division. "The new visitors' center will make the Mount accessible and allow for meaningful research and interpretation of a place described by several historians as the most significant, least disturbed Revolutionary War site in North America."
Noting that the collective 1776-77 Mount Independence-Fort Ticonderoga encampment of 12,000 soldiers rivaled the population of Colonial Boston, Anderson said that the visitors' center is a first step in developing the site for the public, as well as for researchers and scholars.
"It opens up extraordinary opportunities for a greater understanding of military life under the most arduous conditions, as well as the major campaign that shaped America's early history," he said.
The Historic Preservation Division's operations chief, John Dumville, first visited the Mount on a Boy Scout trip in the 1960s. "It is hard to imagine thousands of soldiers being here in a remote wilderness," he says, "gathered to defend their liberties. But this place forces you to become a kid again, it makes you use your imagination."
Vermont writer Howard Coffin is helping to write a book on historic sites in the Champlain and Hudson valleys.
How to See Mount Independence
The new visitors' center will formally open on the afternoon of Saturday, July 27, 1996, and Revolutionary War re-enactors will be encamped all that weekend. For information, call (802)759-2412.
From the visitors'center, trails marked by colored blazes crisscross the Mount,the southern half of which is owned by the State of Vermont, the northern half by FortTiconderoga. The Red Trail, six-tenths of a mile, leads to the stone foundations of the Mount's hospital, built to hold 600 patients. It passes on to a lookout with a view of rocky Mount Defiance across the lake. The British dragged cannon to Defiance's summit in the summer of 1777, placing Ticonderoga and part of Mount Independence in range.
The White Trail, eight-tenths of a mile, passes the stone remains of a blockhouse. At the base of a stony embankment is the massive foundation of what was probably the powder magazine. Farther along, surrounded by stone walls, is a well-preserved artillery battery that commanded the landward approach and the lake to the south. The view stretches up the narrow southern lake to the hills of New York, and across the fields of Addison County to the Green Mountains.
The 2.5-mile Orange Trail passes through the site of the star-shaped fort and its parade ground, still open due to the thousands of marching feet that packed the earth hard 220 years ago. At the tip of the Mount, a great horseshoe shaped battery where cannon once stood looks across the lake narrows to the stone ramparts of Fort Ticonderoga. Here the strategic importance of the Mount becomes readily apparent as one encounters one of the great historic views in all America.
The trail leads to the lake shore and the remnants of a road that led up from the long bridge that once connected the Mount and the old fort. Here once walked St. Clair, Benedict Arnold, John Burgoyne, John Stark, Seth Warner, Thaddeus Kosciuzko (who designed Mount Independence's defenses) and other giants of the Revolutionary War period.
The Blue Trail, 2.2 miles, follows a 1777 supply road along which American soldiers' stonework is still in evidence. The grassy areas by the lake were soldiers' gardens. Stone steps still lead down the side of a cistern, used by soldiers when dipping drinking water. None of the trails lead to the soldiers' graves. With few exceptions, the resting places of the hundreds who died on Mount Independence remain unknown and undisturbed. The many friends of Mount Independence are committed to keeping it that way.
Anyone interested in assisting the Historic Preservation Division in interpreting Mount Independence can join the Mount Independence Coalition by contacting Louise Ransom, P.O. Box 323, Williston, VT 05495.
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