“The Continental Barracks on Noddle’s Island”
On 6 Apr 1776, the lower house of the General Court formed a “Committee for fortifying the Harbour of Boston” and told those members
immediately to take a View of Noddle’s-Island, and report to this Court what Time it will probably take a Regiment, consisting of Seven Hundred and Twenty-eight Men, to perform the Business of Fortifying said Harbour.Twelve days later the house empowered that committee
To purchase on the best Terms they may be had, eight Hundred Feet of the Continental Barracks (provided their Cost, with the Expence of removing and rebuilding them, shall in the Opinion of the Committee, be less than the Value of new ones) and cause them to be removed to, and re-built on Noddle’s-IslandThe Council approved that plan the next day. Until John Hancock took office as an elected governor in 1780, the Council would serve as both the upper house of the legislature and the executive branch of the state government, carrying out legislative policies.
The barracks were assembled on Jeffries’s Point, the southwestern corner of the island. It looks like that building housed provincial soldiers while they built the harbor fortifications, but not year-round.
Those barracks were put to another use in 1780, after French warships started arriving in Boston harbor. That summer Thomas Chase, the state’s deputy quartermaster general, wrote to the Council:
The Commanding Officer of the French Troops has applyed to me for a Hospital for the sick, and as there is Continental Barrack on Noddles Island, suitable for that purpose, and as Mr. [Henry Howell] Williams owns the Soil, and I suppose he will make Objection to their going into Barracks, I pray your Honors would be pleased to give Orders that they shall not be molested in said Barracks.Chase’s colleague from the “Loyall Nine” fifteen years earlier, John Avery (shown above), had become the state secretary. He reported this action by the Council on 15 July:
Read & Ordered — that Col. Thomas Chace, D.Q.M.G., be, and hereby is directed to take Possession of the Continental Barracks on Noddle’s Island for the Use of the sick Soldiers on Board the Ship Le isle de France, arrived this morning from France, belonging to his most Christian Majesty.The local historian William H. Sumner, having accepted family lore that Gen. George Washington had given Henry H. Williams barracks from Cambridge before leaving New England in April 1776, concluded that these barracks converted into a hospital must have been a second building. But, as I wrote yesterday, there’s no evidence for such a grant. Nor any mention of multiple barracks on Noddle’s Island.
Furthermore, Chase didn’t write about Williams as having a home on the island, only as protective of his “Soil” there. Chase clearly expected Williams to interfere with turning the barracks into a hospital for the French, so the state explicitly approved his plan. That action suggests the Patriot government still didn’t trust Williams to cooperate with the war effort.
TOMORROW: Where was Henry Howell Williams during the war?