After our hotel breakfast, we continued on the proverbial road to Boston. We were on the road by 6:30, and the GPS in the phone said we had four and a half hours to drive, but we knew it was going to be longer than that from the stops we would make. Scott took the opportunity to continue reading the book that he had bought a few weeks ago on the way back from Florida-- David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winning history,
1776. He hadn't really read it since he read some on the way back from Florida, so it surprised and amazed him when he opened it to where the bookmark was and read the first paragraph:
On first arriving in Cambridge, Washington had been offered the home of the president of Harvard... The general moved a few days later to one of the largest, most elegant houses in town, a gray clapboard Georgian mansion half a mile from the college... For Washington who had a fondness for handsome architecture and river views, the house suited perfectly, and would serve as his command headquarters through the siege...
Cambridge was our first destination of the day, and we were planning on starting at Washington's headquarters! In fact, Scott had just enough time to finish that chapter and the next one about the cannons on Dorchester Heights and the day the British evacuated Boston. For him, it was a great introduction for the day.
Knowing it could be hard to find a place to eat later, we stopped at a McDonald's in one of the Massachusetts Turnpike rest stops. It was cutely decorated and had its dining area was divided up into lots of little areas that made it feel cozy. Scott and Julie ate at a two-person table while Abby ate from an easy chair nearby.
It was a good thing that we stopped for lunch earlier because much of the rest of the day was spent fighting traffic in Boston. This city is infamous for it confusing roads, its notoriously bad drivers and its nearly complete lack of public parking. The phone's GPS took us to Cambridge where we found Washington's headquarters. (It was also later the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) However there was no parking that we could find for it. Julie navigated the confusing streets and we eventually found a space at parking meter some blocks away. By that time, several of us needed a restroom, but they were even harder to find than parking spaces today. We were near the park called Cambridge Commons, and after asking a passer-by, we learned that our only choice was pretty much one grungy porta-john there. We used it because we needed to. Then Abby saw the playground there and wanted to play. She needed a break after being pretty good in the car, so Julie said she would stay with her while Scott took a walking tour of Continental Army sites in Cambridge.
Scott's first stop was to walk back to the house known as the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. It was here that Washington set up his residence for practically all of his time here for the siege of Boston. It was also here that he had his councils of war, meeting with his generals to plan the operations and strategies. His wife Martha also lived with him here for a while. The tour Scott was listening to didn't say much about the poet Longfellow's time here, but it did say that the house had previously belonged to a Loyalist/Tory named John Vassall. Some say Washington chose the house because he liked big houses with river views. They reminded him of Mount Vernon. As expected, the house itself was closed for the season, but Scott was able to walk around it and view the grounds. He was surprised when he came across a pair of wild turkeys, especially since there is so much traffic and so many people around here. Julie always says that seeing turkeys is good luck, but they didn't seem to be providing it today.
The next stop on the NPS tour that Scott was listening to via the phone was Cambridge Commons, the same park that he had left Julie and Abby at. That made sense because the big green area in the middle of town would have been an ideal place for soldiers to camp and drill. Boston Commons was certainly used that way by the British. Unfortunately, the NPS app didn't really give directions to the next stop. Scott typed the name "Cambridge Commons" into the phone and started off, expecting to find Julie and Abby. In fact, the phone was taking him towards a cafe called "Cambridge Commons" that wasn't actually by the park. By the time Scott noticed that he was not headed to the park he had gone a little ways out of the way. He did see Julie and Abby, calling to him from the car, but they were parked on the opposite side of the street. It was pretty cold today, so Abby had finished up at the playground and they were warming themselves up in the car. (We had checked the weather forecast a few days ago, and it had predicted high 50s and partly cloudy skies today and tomorrow. In fact the high was only in the low 40s and a steady wind made it feel even colder.) Scott pressed on with his walking tour.
In the Cambridge Commons park there are several monuments to different wars, but there was one group of several Revolutionary War monuments clustered together. As the tour's narration pointed out, they offered quite a contrast in the way the war might be remembered. The first was a group of two cannon (There were supposed to be three, but one was not there) that the British had left behind when they evacuated Boston. The second was a marker for the Washington Elm, where Washington was supposed to have accepted command of the Continental Army. The tour pointed out that the story was fictional and Scott knew that the tree that it was next to wasn't even the original tree anyway. The third was a very modern looking semi-circle of polished black stone memorializing an African American citizen of Cambridge named Prince Hall. The three monuments certainly presented three very different styles. Oddly, the tour didn't mention two large tablets on the fence nearby to the two Polish leaders who aided the colonists- Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski.
The next two stops on the walking tour were on the grounds of Harvard University. The first was the building that was the president's home and was where Washington originally stayed when he was here, but after only a few days, he moved out to the headquarters that was the first stop on the tour. The second stop was Massachusetts Hall, It is a Georgian-style building and is the oldest surviving building at Harvard and was used as barracks for 600 Revolutionary War soldiers. Scott initially got confused and photographed the wrong building, but the style of that one was obviously from the 19th century. Scott did get to see some of the other buildings in the Harvard Yard area. He had been to Harvard briefly once before back in 2002, but didn't get to this area. He got a quick picture of the statue of John Harvard, which was easy to spot because of the many tour groups around him.
That part of the tour was over and Scott headed back to where Julie and Abby were. When Scott had passed by them earlier, they probably thought that Scott was almost done, but he hadn't heard the narration for tour stop for the park yet and there were 3 more stops to go after that. Scott really didn't know how long it was supposed to take, and only knew that the audio parts were 18 minutes long. Julie assumed that the tour wouldn't be much more than that, but it took him over an hour and a half, almost two hours, to finish the tour and return to Julie and Abby. By that point they had an incident with someone in the porta-john. Julie didn't want to go into details, but the door wasn't locked and they walked in on someone who got pretty angry at them. Anyway, they were done with that spot and ready to go on.
We had to drive to the last stop on the tour. It was Fort Washington, which is the only surviving piece of the fortifications that were made by either side for the siege of Boston. The entirety of the small fortification was surrounded by a decorative
black iron fence but multiple openings allowed people to stroll into the
park. The park is next to MIT, and we parked briefly in one of their lots while we walked around the earthworks that were left. Several cannon point out to the direction of Boston and the Charles River. The guns would have been meant to keep the British from coming up the river, but there is no indication that the cannon here were ever fired during the siege.
By this point it was after 3:00 and Abby needed to find a restroom. We drove across the Charles River several times in a futile attempt to find a place to park that might have restrooms. We finally had to give up and set the GPS to where we wanted to go that evening-- the Dorchester Heights Monument in South Boston. We hoped that we would find a place to stop along the way. We crossed through Boston near the Public Garden where we saw the "Make Way for Ducklings" statue with 2-year-old Anna so long ago. There was no place to stop this time, though. We continued on to South Boston, and once we were there, we were able to find a Burger King that actually had a parking lot. We stopped there for a much needed break and dinner.
The big stop for the day was the Dorchester Heights Monument. This tower marks the high ground where Washington placed the cannons that Henry Knox had brought him from Fort Ticonderoga. Washington surprised the British by placing the guns here and fortifying the hilltop in one night, between the 4th and 5th of March. Not only were the guns placed in one night, but the Patriot soldiers also placed fascines and other pre-made fortifications to keep from having to dig in the frozen ground. The hill is higher than Bunker Hill and the guns here dominated the city of Boston. The British commander, Sir William Howe had previously judged the hill to be unfortifiable, When he discovered what the Patriots had done, he declared, "My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months." Howe considered attacking the position, but storms kept him from what would probably have been a repeat of the Pyrrhic victory he had after incurring tremendous losses at Bunker Hill the previous June. Instead, he ordered the evacuation of Boston. On March 17th, now known as Evacuation Day, the 120 British ships left with 8,906 British soldiers, over 1,000 of their family members and over 1,000 Loyalists that were from Boston or had taken refuge there from the surrounding area.
Scott had never been to the Dorchester Heights monument. He read online that the National Park Service was planning a Remembrance Illumination where thousands of electric lights mimicking candles would be placed along the pathways around the monument. It was this event that he really wanted to see. He knew he couldn't be here for the ceremony on Evacuation Day (a.k.a. "St. Patrick's Day") on Tuesday but it was this event that inspired his crazy idea to try to be in Boston today.
Finding parking at the Dorchester Heights Monument was the same story we had been experiencing all day. There just isn't any parking there. We tried to find parking at the high school that is immediately behind the monument, but that didn't happen. We drove around the monument's small park and found one spot that seemed to be open. No one could say for sure that we could park there, and in fact it looked like we might get a ticket, or worse, get towed. (There certainly were a lot of notices that cars couldn't park there on Sunday because of the South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade route.) It was about 5:30 and things weren't going to get dark for a while. It was also staring to get colder and the wind was making it feel quite chilly indeed. Julie and Abby stayed in the car for a long time while Scott explored the stairways up the hill to the monument. He was one of very few people there other than the many park rangers and volunteers who were setting things up.
The Remembrance Illumination at the Dorchester Heights Monument was nice and we're glad we went, but in many ways it seemed a little amateurish. For one thing, it was scheduled to go from 6:00 to 8:00, but the sunset didn't occur here until 6:48. It would have been better to schedule it from 7:00 to 9:00, and we wondered if someone had scheduled it without taking into account the start of Daylight Saving Time last week. The tea-light-like electric lights that they used were not heavy enough to hold down the bags so the wind kept blowing them over. This meant that many of the park rangers had to keep circling the pathways with the never ending job of standing them back up. The street lights were on over the walkways and stairways, which makes sense for safety, but the faux candles beneath them were already on the dim side and were overpowered by the normal walkway lighting. It was quite a contrast to things like the electric drone show that played for the crowds at the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride a year ago, but it probably had to be. There seemed to be more park rangers here than members of the public, but since there is virtually no parking around it and no shuttles running from elsewhere, that's not a surprise.
After sunset, the three of us got out of the car again and went up one of the sloping paths to the monument, which Scott had found to be easier than the steep stairs. Abby had been nervous about cannon fire, but Scott assured her that it wasn't going to happen tonight. She ended up running ahead of us. By then, the lights of the skyline of Boston could clearly be seen and Julie said it was a very pretty sight. She was glad we were there, but wished it wasn't so cold so we could linger and enjoy it. After a walk up the main path and around the monument, she and Abby went back to the car.
Scott had been planning on coming back to this monument tomorrow, on Saturday, because some re-enactors are scheduled to be there, but more importantly the tower itself is scheduled to be open for people to go to the top of it. That only happens during special events. As it turned out, Julie discovered that it was also open tonight, and there wasn't much of a wait, so naturally Scott went up. The park rangers were controlling the number of people because there was only room for about five people at a time at the very top. He waited at the base of the tower with maybe a dozen or so people in line. Then, he climbed 72 steps to the first level of the tower and waited again. The final 20 steps were then up a twisty little metal staircase that Julie would definitely not have liked, but he did get a better view of the Boston skyline to the north and the final red glow of the sunset to the west.
When Scott returned, we set the GPS in the phone for a hotel in Plymouth, which is 45 minutes south of Boston (but twice that in rush hour). It was a little ways out of the way, but the room rates were much more reasonable than anything Julie found in Boston. She had made the reservations here two days ago and liked the idea that it was on the beach. The hotel is called "Pilgrim Sands" because of its location. We were all too tired to go to the pool tonight, but Abby is sure to want to go in the morning.
Scott was thankful to be able to recognize the 250th anniversary of the siege of Boston in various ways today, and it was Washington's first important victory. As David McCullough wrote,
The siege had been a stunning success it was proclaimed, and Washington's performance had been truly exceptional. He had indeed bested Howe and his regulars, and despite insufficient arms and ammunition, insufficient shelter, sickness, inexperienced officers, lack of discipline, clothing, and money.
In the end, Scott had accomplished what he wanted to today,
thanks to Julie's driving. She had spent most of the day in the car,
though. Julie said that if she had been Washington, she would have let the British keep Boston. She is not a fan of the city, Abby agreed.
