“Breed’s Hill, about half a mile from the ferry”

Yesterday I started to dig into a recent social-media post by the City of Boston Archaeology Department about when the term “Breed’s Hill” arose.

The department has used claims from Charlestown residents seeking compensation for their damaged property in 1776 to produce a terrific website about the town one year earlier, just before it was destroyed in battle.

It looks like those locals didn’t label the height where the provincials dug their redoubt as “Breed’s Hill.”

The social-media posting went on to say: “It’s possible some may have called it Breed's at the time, but deeds & other official documents do not start using that name until the 1790s, long after the battle.”

Outside of legal documents, however, we do have examples of people describing the provincial redoubt as having been on “Breed’s Hill” very soon after the battle on 17 June 1775. Examples include:

• Letter from Isaac Lothrop, delegate to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress from Plymouth, 22 June 1775, copied by Thaddeus Burr and published in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer on 29 June: “took possession of Breed’s hill, about half a mile from the ferry”
• Extract of a letter from Hartford, 23 June 1775, printed in the 28 June Pennsylvania Journal: “The Provincials were entrenched at Breed’s Hill, & were there first attacked;…the Regulars are entrenched at Bunker’s Hill”
• Extract of a letter from Cambridge dated 12 or 21 or 22 July 1775 [the scan is blurry], printed in John Pinkney’s Virginia Gazette on 3 August: “The Enemy are situated on Bunker’s and Breed’s hills, both on the peninsula . . . every man in Boston, and at Bunker’s and Breed’s Hill must fall”

Thus, by the summer of 1775 some people were making a distinction between Breed’s Hill, center of the fighting on 17 June, and Bunker’s Hill, fortified afterward by the British army. None of those correspondents were from Charlestown, though. 

It’s notable that no newspaper in Boston or elsewhere mentioned Breed’s Hill by that name before the battle. There are some mentions of the Breed family of Charlestown, and of Samuel Swan, who owned part of the hill, sold wine, and hired out a horse. But the hill didn’t attract journalistic attention.

For that matter, neither did Bunker’s Hill. Not until war broke out and the British column ended their march there on the night of 19 Apr 1775. Then the newspapers referred to “Bunker’s Hill.”

But as to whether everyone agreed that that label did or didn’t also include what people would soon write about as “Breed’s Hill” is foggy.

TOMORROW: An alternative name.