First View Inside Restored FortressBy ED BARNA
Correspondent
Photos by Caleb Kenna
ORWELL - More than 1,000 state officials, historical reenactors, local residents and New England history-lovers gathered Saturday for the dedication of the Mount Independence visitor's center more people than had been together on the hill across Lake Champlain from Fort Ticonderoga since the Revolutionary War, Gov. Howard Dean said at the ceremony.
As the exhibits in the unique, boat-shaped center explained, Rattlesnake Hill, as it was then known, had been fortified in 1776 to help ward off a British invasion from Canada. By that July, about 6,000 men and women had gathered there, a number that reached 9,000 in -September, a month -be the new fortifications and those of Fort Ticonderoga turned back a British fleet that October.
On July 28, 1776, Col. Arthur St. Clair acted on an order that had arrived from Commander-in-Chief George Washington, saying the new Declaration of Independence should be read to all soldiers. The next day, Col. Jeduthan Baldwin, chief engineer of the fortifications, started calling the promontory Mount Independence, the name the 400-acre National Historic Landmark and State Historic Site bears today.
The Declaration of Independence was read once again, this time by Gen. David Bernier Sr., commander of the re-enactors' 25th Continental Regiment. A musket volley and cannon shot, by the Living History Association followed.
Few of those present were more moved than 93-year-old Marjorie Pierce of Shrewsbury, whose great-great-great-grandfather Matthew Kennedy, left his wife and children in Goffstown, N.H., to come to Mount Independence in the summer of 1776, and died there that October. He and perhaps a thousand others lie on the hillside still., in areas archaeologists have identified as likely to hold graves but have left undisturbed.
Like most of the other dead, Kennedy was felled by hunger and disease. A plaintive letter to his brother in early October of 1776, asking for someone to come with a horse to carry him home, ends with a warning for his rescuer to bring food for the horses, too.
"There is hardly any sustenance to be had for man or horse between this place and Number Four (the fort at Charlestown, N.H.)," Kennedy wrote. And that was before the dreadful winter of 1776-77, when the almost literally skeleton crew left on Mount Independence fought cold, hunger and disease worse than at Valley Forge, and more often than not lost.
Yet in that winter, the soldiers under Baldwin, one of the Revolution's unsung heroes, built a floating bridge across the lake that one of their enemies later called "one of the seven wonders of the world."
Had Kennedy returned this July, would have found 11 companies of re-enactors on hand, dressed in the colors he would have recognized. Knowing how often the men of different states fought each other in Revolutionary times, he might have been amazed at, for instance, the cooperation between New York and Vermont that has helped facilitate the opening of the visitor's center.
At the dedication, Dean acknowledged the key role the Pell family has played through the years in preserving the area, having had the foresight to acquire Fort 'Ticonderoga and half of Mount Independence. The Fort Ticonderoga Association, led by Tony Pell, and Vermont's Mount Independence Coalition, headed by Louise Ransom, had both played major roles in urging legislative support for the $1 million visitor's center, he said.
Virginia Westbrook, coordinator for the Champlain Valley Heritage Network in Essex County, New York and the wife of Fort Ticonderoga executive director Nicholas Westbrook, agreed later that relations between the two states had become more than cordial. "It's good to have the other half of the chokepoint occupied again," she quipped.
Jeffords told the crowd that he views the opening of the visitor's center as a signal event in the development of a Lake Champlain Historic Corridor, which would attract so-called "heritage tourists" by linking related sites on both sides of the lake. For instance, in Vermont, the Hubbardton Battlefield commemorates a rear guard action that allowed the bulk of the American forces fleeing from Fort Ticonderoga to escape and later help defeat the British invasion at Saratoga.
Bobbe Maynes, Vermont Commissioner of Tourism and Marketing, welcomed the center because statistics show that more than 60 percent of Vermont's 8 million annual visitors stop at a historic site, and almost half of callers to the state's 800 number ask about historic attractions.
Invasions on that scale would 'have astounded Kennedy, but he might have been even more surprised to learn that Orwell's fourth graders had written and illustrated their own account of what happened at Mount Independence. Teacher Joan Dundon said later that she was among the many Orwell residents who had been pushing for years to have the site developed -- in her case, about 20 years.
For Richard Ketchum, former editor at American Heritage Books and co-founder of Country Journal magazine, said such awareness among members of a new generation was exactly what Mount Independence should ultimately signify. Those who risked and gave their lives there had four unshakable faiths, he said -- devotion to their families, reverence for their Maker, love of their country, and an awareness of liberty - and "part of what's wrong with this country is that we have lost sight of those ideals."
ORWELL
- The hardships and suffering endured by the men who served on
Mount Independence during the Revolutionary War would have been
unimaginable -- except for the journals and letters left
behind. It is a life almost unbelievable, almost unlivable. And
all the more horrifying because it was real. It was all being
reenacted Saturday at the grand opening of the new Mount
Independence Visitor Center & Museum. One participant
described Army life circa 1776 this way: "99 percent boredom
and 1 percent terror."
No
modern amenities, to be sure. Participants live in so-called
wedge tents, which resemble tiny A-framcs, covered with flimsy
white linen or cotton canvas. The tents are lined with hay.
They cook over open fires with heavy iron skillets. Their
muskets, more properly called firelocks, are never out of
reach.