To Repel the Enemy

American forces chose Mount Independence in July 1776 as the strong ground opposite Fort Ticonderoga and spent nearly a year building extensive defenses there under the direction of engineer Jeduthan Baldwin and with assistance from other officers and volunteers, including Thaddeus Kosciusko in 1777. They cleared roads, dug wells, built water batteries, a horseshoe-shaped citadel, long breastworks, a laboratory, storehouses, hospitals, a wharf, an eight-pointed picket fort, blockhouses, and additional cannon batteries as British forces under John Burgoyne advanced from Canada. The site’s height and position made it highly defensible, and British observers recognized the strength of its fortifications. Yet as the Americans evacuated on the night of July 5 and 6, 1777, they left the defenses largely intact to avoid revealing their withdrawal. British and German forces then added fortifications before abandoning the mount on November 8, 1777, burning the structures as they left. During 1776, disease also devastated the American Northern Army at Mount Independence and Fort Ticonderoga, overwhelming hospitals and doctors as typhus, typhoid, malaria, smallpox, dysentery, and other illnesses spread through unsanitary camps and crowded wards. Treatments such as bloodletting and purgatives often weakened patients, and some soldiers sought furloughs home to escape contagion, though not all survived. Long before these military events, Native Americans had used the mount’s chert outcrops for toolmaking. After the war, scavenging and reuse continued as damaged military iron was sold in 1785, while farming and amateur collecting altered the landscape. In the twentieth century Vermont undertook surveys, mapping, excavation, and preservation work, and Mount Independence came to be regarded as one of the largest and best preserved archaeological sites of the American Revolution.

Orwell, Vermont · United States