Burlington park was military base
- By Wilson Ring
On a sunny summer morning Battery Park offers one of the most spectacular views of Lake Champlain: the city waterfront in the foreground, sailboats and ferries in the open lake and New York's Adirondacks beyond.
Despite the single decorative cannon, it looks nothing like a fortress, but 190 years ago the bluff was bristling with cannon and Burlington housed about 3,000 soldiers mobilized for the War of 1812.
On Aug. 3, 1813, the fortress showed its worth. Burlington came under attack from a British raiding party commanded by Lt. Col. John Murray that had sailed south out of Canada to plunder commerce and sack government buildings.
"It was my kind of raid. No one was killed," said Paul Searls, an assistant professor of history at the University of Vermont, who has studied Vermont's role in the War of 1812.
What became known as Murray's Raid is a largely forgotten footnote to the War of 1812. But the five-day foray into American waters by Murray and his forces prompted Washington to pour military resources into the lake and it angered many Vermonters enough to fight when, 13 months later, the British moved south again and were defeated at the Battle of Plattsburgh, leading to a negotiated end of the war.
The role of the Burlington garrison in Murray's Raid was a 20-minute artillery duel between the guns on the bluff and the British vessels 1 miles off shore. Most of the shells fell harmlessly into the water, but one ball from a British gunboat did hit a house.
"There is a myth that the shell crashed into the house where (U.S. Naval Commodore Thomas) Macdonough was shaving," Searls said. "These things do tend to become mystical."
During the same foray out of Canada, the British sacked Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Swanton. They burned or took back to Canada eight or nine vessels captured elsewhere on the lake.
One vessel that was burned was the sloop Essex, owned by Burlington businessman Gideon King, for whom the city's King Street is named. The Essex was trying to reach the safety of Burlington harbor -- protected by the cannon in the battery -- when it was becalmed on the lake and captured.
Artifacts from the raid have been found. About 25 years ago Art Cohn, now the executive director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, was leading a scuba diving class near where the Coast Guard station on the waterfront is located now.
He found a 24-pound mortar ball just covered with sand. It was still packed with gunpowder. He can't say for sure, but he said it was most likely fired by the British gunboats off shore.
Throughout the early history of the American colonies and the United States, Lake Champlain was a vital waterway, as strategic then as the Panama Canal in 1940 or the Persian Gulf today.
"The water avenue there going from Montreal to New York City is the key to the empire," Searls said.
The War of 1812 was a conflict that grew out of the British practice of taking seamen off American merchant ships to serve in Royal Navy, interfering with American trade, and American fears the British were stirring up the Indians on the western frontier.
When the lake thawed in the spring of 1813, the Americans, under Macdonough's command, had three armed sloops and a schooner.
"They were masters of the lake," Cohn said.
But in early June Navy Lt. Sydney Smith, disobeying Macdonough's orders, sailed the vessels Growler and Eagle into the Richelieu River, and Canada, in pursuit of a smaller British vessel. It was a trap.
Stuck in the narrow river, Smith surrendered after a four-hour fight. In a day the naval balance of power on the lake was reversed.
About six weeks later, Murray headed south. The Growler and Eagle were now called the Broke and the Shannon. He also commanded three gunboats and 47 bateaux that carried about 1,000 troops.
The raid was intended as a diversion to draw American forces away from other actions on the Great Lakes.
The Americans had been alerted to the British advance and the U.S. commander in Plattsburgh, Gen. Benjamin Moorers, who had several hundred militia troops under his command, sent an urgent message to Burlington asking for reinforcements.
Gen. Wade Hampton, the Army commander in Burlington, didn't send help. Moorers then withdrew his troops.
July 30, the British anchored off Chazy Landing. The next day they landed near Plattsburgh and marched into the town. The soldiers were under orders not to destroy private property, but the orders were forgotten. Much of the town was burned.
The next day Murray split his force. He took about half of the force back north and marched into Swanton. There, government buildings were burned but private property was respected.
Royal Navy Capt. Thomas Everard, sent to Lake Champlain from the St. Lawrence River, commanded the three vessels that sailed to Burlington.
He was trying to lure Macdonough's remaining vessels out into the lake to fight.
"Macdonough refused to accept the challenge, quite wisely," said David Curtis Skaggs, a Michigan historian who wrote a biography of Macdonough.
Everard then sailed south to Shelburne Bay and beyond where he started burning or capturing commercial vessels before then heading back to Canada.
The raid was over.
"Murray's Raid from a British perspective was very easy," Searls said.
But it spurred an arms race. Over the following winter Macdonough built a fleet at Vergennes, led by the flagship USS Saratoga with 26 guns. The British were building ships in Canada. The British frigate HMS Confiance with 37 guns was the largest warship ever to float on Lake Champlain, Cohn said.
In September 1814 the two fleets met at the Battle of Plattsburgh. Macdonough outfought his opponent in Cumberland Bay. The victory in the bay caused the British ground forces to withdraw; the British move south had been thwarted.
Back in Burlington, the battery on the bluff remained in federal hands until 1840, when it was turned over to the city and became the city's second park. City Hall Park was the first, said Bob Whalen, the city's superintendent of park planning.
The cannon in the park today isn't from the War of 1812. There are a half-dozen cannon pads in the park. The other guns were hauled away during World War I to be recycled for the war effort, Whalen said.
"People just don't even think of the historical context of the part it played," Whalen said.
A plaque commemorating Murray's Raid was restored to the park two years ago, but it hasn't attracted much attention.
"I think its primary function now is as a scenic vista," Whalen said. "We really don't get any calls from the public to ask about the history of the park."
Shell likely from Murray's Raid
spurred interest in lake history
An underwater military artifact that was probably fired as part of a War of 1812 attack on Burlington helped lead one of Lake Champlain's most prominent historians into his study of the lake.
In 1977 or 1978 diving instructor Art Cohn was leading a class of Middlebury College students out into the lake in Burlington not far from where the Coast Guard station is today when he noticed the shell -- about the size and shape of a bowling ball -- lying in the sand.
He and his students wrestled it to shore and Cohn said he realized what it was, but he didn't know why it was there.
It didn't take long for historians to point him to Murray's Raid, the 1813 attack on Burlington by the British.
"It was almost destiny, really," Cohn said.
He's still not sure the shell was fired during Murray's Raid, but most likely it was a British shell from about 1 miles offshore that didn't reach land, or possibly it's an American shell that fell short after being fired from what is now Battery Park.
Holding the shell underwater, Cohn drilled out a wooden plug and found gunpowder inside. He said he didn't test the powder to see if it was still explosive.
At the time he didn't know it was illegal to remove historical artifacts from the lake. It didn't take long for him to find out.
Within a few days he received a call from the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation.
"It was through those discussions that we realized we were entering a new world of underwater resource management," Cohn said.
A year later the division hired him to do archaeological work on the lake. He remains an employee of the division, responsible for managing the archaeological resources hidden under the water of the lake -- and there are plenty.
Cohn has helped find debris in front of Plattsburgh from the War of 1812 Battle of Plattsburgh; he has found an intact shipwreck from the Revolutionary War Battle of Valcour Island; and he's discovered numerous commercial vessels resting on the bottom of the lake.
It all stems from the shell that probably came from Murray's Raid. The shell sits on his desk at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Ferrisburgh.
The Associated Press