“Intrenched on the southerly part of Charlestown Hill”

In his History of the Siege of Boston, Richard Frothingham published a letter about the Battle of Bunker Hill written by Samuel Gray in Roxbury on 12 July 1775.

That letter was addressed to a “Mr. Dyer.” I agree with Bernard Knollenberg’s guess that Samuel Gray was from Windham, Connecticut, probably the man born in 1751 who served as a Continental Army commissary, and “Mr. Dyer” was his uncle Eliphalet Dyer, or another maternal relation.

Gray provided an account of the battle that gives us a different name for where the provincials dug their redoubt:

Friday night, after the 16th of June, a large part of the Continental army intrenched on the southerly part of Charlestown Hill, on the height toward Charles River. North of this hill lies Bunker Hill, adjoining East or Mystic River. Between these two is a valley. North of Bunker Hill is a low, flat, narrow neck of land, the only avenue to the hill and town. The low neck and the valley (both which must be passed in advancing to or retreating from the intrenchment) are exposed to a cross fire from the ships and floating batteries on each side, and the valley to the fire of the battery on Copps Hill, in Boston.

About sunrise, the 17th, our intrenchment was discovered, and a heavy fire immediately began from the ships and batteries, which continued with very little cessation till about one o’clock, when a large party of the ministerial troops landed on a point of land S. E. from the intrenchment, about 4 o’clock. The savages set fire to the town, beginning with the meeting-house. A heavy fire from the cannon and musketry was kept up on both sides till about five o’clock, when our men retreated:…

Gray thus referred the high spot above the Charlestown waterfront as “Charlestown Hill,” different from “Bunker Hill” to the north. And he apparently thought Dyer would recognize those designations.

I haven’t found “Charlestown Hill” in any newspaper, but some other eighteenth-century sources use the term:

• Isaac Winslow, 10 July: “We were alarmed by the firing of guns the morning of the seventeenth of last month and found the country people had erected a work on Charlestown Hill.”
• James Jeffry, 7 July, in Québec: “This day four or five topsail vessels arrived, a transport or two from Boston. The report off the Capt. of one of the transports is that the battle was at Charlestown hill; that a party of Provincials were on the evg. of the 17th. entrenching themselves there & a party of the Regulars were sent out to dislodge them.”
• William Cooper, 3 Jan 1776 letter: “an attested Copy of the account of the Battle on Charlestown Hill”

But of course that nomenclature isn’t entirely clear for us. Decades earlier, Judge Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary on 5 Oct 1709, “As came homeward went over Charlestown Hill on the Neck of Land; and came into the Rode again by Mr Emerson’s.” That appears to use the same term to refer to Bunker’s Hill.

And in a 26 Jan 1776 letter from Boston, Lt. William Carter twice used “Charles-Town Hill” to mean Bunker’s Hill since he was writing about the promontory that the British army had fortified against the Continentals.

At the very least, these sources offer more evidence that “Breed’s Hill” hadn’t yet solidified as the name of the place where the provincials built their redoubt.

TOMORROW: The choice.