Mount Independence

Revolutionary earthworks that survived by becoming a sheep pasture

Mount Independence is a rocky peninsula on the east shore of Lake Champlain at Orwell, Vermont, facing Fort Ticonderoga a quarter mile across the water. It was first called East Point or Rattlesnake Hill, and long before any soldier came, Native people quarried its fine blue-black chert for tools and points traded across the Northeast. From July 1776 to July 1777 the fate of the newly independent United States rested in large part on this ground.

An American army had just come back from a disastrous ten-month invasion of Canada, beaten and ravaged by smallpox, when a council of war under Major General Philip Schuyler decided on 7 July 1776 to fortify the peninsula, so strong by nature that it needed little labour to hold against a far larger force. Work began on 11 July under the engineer Jeduthan Baldwin, and on 28 July, after Colonel Arthur St. Clair read the Declaration of Independence to the assembled troops, the hill took its new name. Baldwin, helped later by Thaddeus Kościuszko, laid out a three-tier defence: a shore battery of 28 cannon at the northern point, the horseshoe battery above it, and a star-shaped picket fort on the height, with a floating bridge to Ticonderoga, a two-storey hospital, storehouses and a gunpowder laboratory. By late October 1776 more than 12,000 troops held the two forts, among the largest gatherings of people in the new country, and the sight of them was enough to send Guy Carleton's fleet back to Canada for the winter.

The winter nearly did what the British had not. The garrison dwindled to under 1,200, the men burned empty huts for firewood, dysentery spread, and Anthony Wayne complained of every necessary lacking except flour and bad beef. In spring the work picked up again, and 22 caissons of stone-filled logs were sunk for a Great Bridge. But when John Burgoyne came south in 1777 with 8,000 British and German troops and the British hauled cannon up Mount Defiance above both forts, the Americans withdrew on 5 and 6 July. British and Hessian troops held the Mount until November, while Burgoyne marched on to defeat at Bennington and surrender at Saratoga.

Farming and forest then took the hill back for more than a century, and it has been called the least disturbed major Revolutionary War site in the country. Sarah Pell bought the northern 113 acres in 1911, and the state began buying the south in 1961. It is a National Historic Landmark and a state historic site, with a museum holding timbers from the Great Bridge and a 1690 Scottish cannon raised from the lake, and six miles of trails past the remains.