Colonel Henry Knox, in charge of artillery for the Continental Army, was tasked with bringing cannon captured from the forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga to Boston. With ice barely able to support the sleds and cannons, Knox and his teamsters faced a difficult passage over the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. At Albany on January 7, 1776, as Knox and his men crossed the Hudson River into Rensselaer to continue east toward the Berkshires and Massachusetts, one of the cannons broke through the ice. Citizens of Albany came out to help Knox and his men, one of several times they directly aided Patriot efforts during the War for Independence. In diary entries from January 1-4, 1776, Knox wrote of having holes cut in different crossing places in the river to strengthen the ice and of being alarmed that one of the heaviest cannon had fallen into the river. In an entry dated December 8, 1775, he wrote that after proceeding cautiously on the ice, three sleds got over before night and the cannon was recovered from the river with the assistance of the good people of Albany, after which it was christened the Albany.
