Glimpses of Revolutionary Camp Followers

In recent months Susan Holloway Scott at Two Nerdy History Girls shared a couple of artifacts that offer glimpses of the families who traveled with eighteenth-century armies.

In the collections of the Library of Congress is a panoramic view of the Hudson River in watercolor by Pierre L’Enfant. That includes a few vignettes of the American camp at West Point, New York, in 1782.

Scott notes:

A woman is shown holding a tin kettle for three soldiers to eat directly from it, while an interested (and likely hungry!) dog waits nearby. To their left are two girls climbing up the hillside. Again according to the exhibition’s notes, documents from 1782 list 150 women and children at West Point in addition to about 3,600 soldiers. Wives, daughters, and sweethearts, these women sewed, washed laundry, and supplied food for the men - important if often overlooked contributions to the military effort.

Go to Scott’s posting for close-ups of the relevant portions of the panorama.

Last year she shared an artifact owned by the New-York Historical Society, shown above: a ceramic lamb, a few inches long, that a child probably lost while camping with the British army near New York City.

Both these artifacts are on loan to Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, now offering an exhibit titled “Among His Troops: Washington’s War Tent in a Newly Discovered Watercolor.” L’Enfant is also credited with the long panorama at the center of that exhibit, which will be up until 19 February.