10She was editor ofGodey’s Lady’s Bookfor 30 years, and is credited with promoting the establishment of the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
10She was editor ofGodey’s Lady’s Bookfor 30 years, and is credited with promoting the establishment of the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
The success of the Quincy Fair was phenomenal. The net sum of $30,035.53 was realized and turned over to the directors of the Bunker Hill Monument Association toward the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. This amount was nearly one quarter its total cost. The Yankee ladies did not know that two contributions of $10,000 each, with several smaller donations, were available by now. The gift of $10,000 by Judah Touro was peculiarly heartening, as an example of the expression of the gratitude of the son of an immigrant to the country of his adoption. The father of Touro had been rabbi of a synagogue in Holland. The younger Touro was born in Newport, R. I., in 1776; he had sailed to New Orleans with an assortment of New England commodities and had made money in their sale. A soldier in the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, he had been given up for dead in the battle. He had become a millionaire and, learning of the proposed gift of $10,000 by Amos Lawrence, toward the completion of the monument, Touro had matched it. Thus, in the year 1840, the success of the Bunker Hill Monument was assured. It could now be built to the full height planned by Baldwin and Willard—about 220 feet.
Contractor James Sullivan Savage would have no trouble finding good men for the ticklish job of raising and setting the heavy stones of the higher courses of the monument; able sailors, who would take a shore job for a change. Maritime Boston was full of these good riggers, who were used to dizzy heights, and to whom the half hitches, square knots, guys, slings, and tag lines would be easy. Up to this time the monument had been built by day labor, not by contract. Now, Savage had taken a contract to finish the monument for $43,800, from the elevation of 85 feet to the top. He was well trained in masonry, for he had worked on the job since the start under Willard, whose rigid ideas would not let him take a contract himself for profit on such a patriotic project, but who agreed to superintend the work of Savage to the finish. Savage had the traits of a good contractor—energy, resourcefulness, honesty—and the sense that knew how each detail must be executed toward the end of producing a job to be proud of.
Savage replaced the one-horse capstan of the hoist by a six-horsepower steam engine, an innovation that speeded up progress. The steam engine as aprime mover in land and water transportation had become well established, and its use to drive textile machinery had proved successful. Steam power in the construction industry, however, was a novelty. Shouts and wigwag signals from the setting gang at the top to the engineer on the ground were replaced by a bell-wire signaling system. This must have been a pull bell, for many years would pass before electric bells came into common use.11
11Joseph Henry had developed the electromagnet at about the time of the laying of the lower courses of the monument, and, a few months after its dedication, Morse would operate the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, but the transmission of electric currents by insulated wires even for a few score feet was still too new to receive serious attention on a construction job.
11Joseph Henry had developed the electromagnet at about the time of the laying of the lower courses of the monument, and, a few months after its dedication, Morse would operate the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, but the transmission of electric currents by insulated wires even for a few score feet was still too new to receive serious attention on a construction job.
As its lighter stones would be easier to handle, the granite inner cone (newel) around which the stairs wind was erected a few courses ahead of the walls of the monument. It thus served as a support for the derrick which raised the heavier wall stones. Through apertures in the hollow walls of the newel, a heavy beam (wood?) was passed, upon which the derrick was set.
It is interesting to compare our modern hoisting derrick with the apparatus used to raise the stones for the monument. The derrick of today consists of a guyed, vertical mast, an adjustable boom hinged to the base of the mast, with boom falls, and hoist falls, each with their cables and pulleys, or blocks. At the base of the mast, a bull ring serves to turn the mast by power. The whole combination is called the derrick. When we get accustomed to the old English or American custom of calling the mast the post or derrick, and the boom either the gaff or derrick, a little study enables us to comprehend how the monument was built.
The lower courses were raised by the “Holmes Hoisting Apparatus,” designed by a practical seaman of Boston. This device could command a circle 100 feet in diameter. Except that it had no bull ring to turn the mast, it appears much like the derrick of today. With steam power available for the upper courses, Savage seems to have modified the boom of Holmes to serve as a nearly horizontal “lever,” on which a “wheel carriage” drew the stone inward, to its desired position for placement. In other words, apparently, the boom became today’s monorail. A somewhat obscure, English description of the means used to hoist masonry 100 years ago, tells of two devices. One was a “movable derrick crane,” with a vertical post, supported by two timber backstays, and a movable hinged “jib or derrick,” which could be today’s boom. This assembly, of course, corresponded to today’s stiff-leg derrick, in which the back guys are replaced by timber members. The other English device for raising stones was practically exactly like today’s traveling crane, and that was the name it went by in England, 100 years ago.
Our construction forebears of over a century ago had to use ropes and chains for all purposes; there were no wire ropes. About the time Savage set his first stone, John A. Roebling was making the first American wire rope cable, in a largely outdoor plant located on a level meadow on his farm inSaxonburg, Pa. Wire rope had real advantages in construction work, because of its superior strength and its much less stretch under load. A crude sketch, dated 1837, shows that the derrick for the monument was guyed by chains, which attached to the top of the mast and passed over timber brackets at the staging level, and thence vertically down to weights at the ground. In his long length, the stretching and shrinking of a rope under rain, load, and temperature changes would be difficult to control.
Every four courses of the wall stones (about 11 feet) the derrick was raised, perhaps by unshipping the boom and using it as a lesser mast to raise the mast proper. Square timber sticks were then beginning to be used for staging, instead of the round trunks of small trees and saplings previously used. A sketch of the monument shows a squared timber stage for pointing the joints. Such a stage could be much more easily erected, and was more reliable than the round sticks, tied at the joints by cords.
On paper, Willard had performed the painstaking task of dimensioning every stone, each with its top (the build) a little narrower than its bottom (the bed), so that the true taper of the obelisk would be maintained. To set the stone to line was the chore of the erecting force. On the top of the stone already in place lime mortar was spread, enriched with hydraulic cement, and with a sprinkling of iron filings. (A popular, modern, commercial waterproofing compound utilizes the fact that, upon oxidizing, iron particles mixed with the cement mortar expand, thus reducing the voids and producing a denser mass when the mortar sets.)
Temporary wooden wedges would be placed at the corners of the stone already in place, to support the heavy new stone until the mortar had hardened. When the ponderous stone had been speedily raised from the ground to a level a few inches above the mortar, the engine would be stopped; the derrick adjusted to right or left, and in or out, until the stone was very closely in line. Next, riggers would push on the bridle chain which attached to the two lewises in the stone’s top surface, guiding it to its true position in its gentle descent as the engine lowered it the few inches needed to bed it. A tiny fraction of an inch “out-of-line” would be serious, for such errors if repeated, or if not compensating, would visibly throw the monument out of line. On a light stage high above the ground, bracing themselves against gusts of wind, the riggers would be intent on the necessity for such accuracy, but not forgetting their own safety, for no careless workman could work for Savage. They would remember that, while laying the last stone of the 12th course, at the southwest corner, one man had been pushed off (the only death on the project).
Happily, the good riggers raised their monument, course by course, to the top. They were under a boss who knew his trade, and he was making money—thesign of content on any construction project. (Savage made some more money after the monument was finished, when he retained the steam engine that had been used for hoisting stone, for the purpose of raising a passenger car to the top. For the car ride he collected $0.20, as against the $0.125 for visitors who climbed the stairs.)
The practical riggers would not be disturbed at the proposal, advanced when the monument neared its top, that the apex be modified to form a platform to accommodate visitors. Aesthetic Bostonians were much disturbed at this proposal. Happily, the Bunker Hill Monument Association voted down this architectural atrocity.
On Saturday, 23 July 1842, several hundred of our early rising Bostonian ancestors rose earlier than usual to arrive at the monument at 6:00A.M.On the ground at the base, they studied the capstone; a small stone pyramid, three feet, six inches high, stoutly lashed to the derrick hook, and with an American flag at the top. Standing on the capstone, firmly grasping the hoisting rope, Colonel Charles R. Carnes waited for the signal to hoist. When the clock struck six, a signal gun was fired, and the capstone, bearing the good colonel, started up. In 16 minutes it had reached the top; at 6:30A.M.it had been bedded, and a national salute announced to all Boston that the Bunker Hill Monument was completed.
By railroad, great multitudes came to Boston for the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument, nearly a year later, on 17 June 1843. Unlike the time of 18 years earlier, when the cornerstone had been laid, stagecoaches were not the main conveyance for visitors to Boston. Indeed they were decidedly on the way out, and would soon be but symbols of an era of traveling discomfort, as the railroad completely took over. President Tyler and his cabinet attended; Daniel Webster matched with sonorous eloquence his famous speech at the laying of the cornerstone, and there were still 13 very aged surviving veterans of the battle able to attend.
Seven years later (1850), two Harvard professors checked with elaborate apparatus, paid for by members of the Bunker Hill Monument Association and the Massachusetts Charitable Association, the famous experiment of Foucault which used a long pendulum to prove the daily rotation of the earth. Suspended in the newel by an annealed wire, 210 feet long, the oscillations of a pointer, attached to a 31-pound British cannon ball relic of the battle, were observed; and its plane of swing was seen to revolve during the day from right to left of the observer. A sudden shower on a previously bright day complicated the experiment, until Professor Eben N. Horsford discoveredthe reason. Cooled by the rain the monument’s exposed face contracted; its apex moved correspondingly and carried the point of suspension of the pendulum with it. As observed years later on the Washington Monument, Horsford deduced that the side of an obelisk, exposed to the hot sun, expanded, and that its apex followed the sun in the sun’s travel from east to west. Such motion is tiny, and the ingenuity of the apparatus to observe it was notable. The path of the orbit of the bob, registering both the earth’s rotation and the effect of varying heat on the monument’s sides, was described as an irregular ellipse with major axis of one-half an inch.
Two hundred thousand persons visit Bunker Hill every year. Of these visitors 20,000 pay their $0.10, and presumably climb the 294 granite steps to the top.12Very few Bostonians are among these visitors.13They are of various types: honeymooners and casual tourists, whose list of the sights to be seen in historic Boston includes the monument, and historically minded youngsters, one of whom was recently caught in a heated argument with his father as to where the order was to “wait ’til you can see the whites of their eyes.” Surely, the stout young man who recently lugged 25 pounds to the top—his young daughter—was not typical.
12Estimate of custodian from a review of his register, 1951.13“Those pangs of conscience he feels every June 17 are as close as the average Bostonian ever comes to climbing Bunker Hill Monument.”—Boston Globe, 18 June 1951.
12Estimate of custodian from a review of his register, 1951.
13“Those pangs of conscience he feels every June 17 are as close as the average Bostonian ever comes to climbing Bunker Hill Monument.”—Boston Globe, 18 June 1951.
The evidence that the monument is probably the most popular of the historic shrines of old Boston would be as pleasing to the charter members of the Bunker Hill Monument Association as to the present members of this venerable society, which lists among present and past members, 30 generals, 12 admirals, 12 Presidents of the United States, a score of Massachusetts governors, 20 mayors of Boston, and 6 presidents of Harvard University. It is a healthful society to belong to, the 1949Proceedingssay, in the mention of 46 half-century members of whom 16 were then living.
Many years ago, the Association voted to hold patriotic exercises every year at the monument, and this resolution has been faithfully fulfilled. The annual ceremonies today are very different from those of the earlier years; they have followed the varying pattern in which American citizens have celebrated their national anniversaries during the more than a century since the monument was dedicated in 1843. They were solemn occasions during the earlier years. In what better spot could the Yankees of the trying days of the Civil War compare their convictions with those who fought for similar principles than at the monument, as they listened to the stirring eloquence of their War Governor, John A. Andrew. In later years the holiday spirit took over, with a fireman’s muster to please the older folk, while the youngsters of Greater Boston made Bunker Hill Day on 17 June a parallel in firecrackernoise and casualties to fingers and eyesight, to the Fourth of July, of which it was a preview. Today, Bunker Hill Day is a huge neighborhood festival, with block parties and a skillfully routed parade which seems to pass every house on the hill. They who enjoy things most are the children of working people, not of the wealthy families that once lived in the sightly dwellings of Bunker Hill. Each boy or girl can give a visitor the story of the battle in detail, and recite the precise dimensions of the monument. (They collect from tourists for this information, for it is one way by which Charlestown youngsters get their spending money.) These children would rarely answer to the old names: Prescott, Warren, Putnam, or similar Yankee names. They are mostly of second or third generation European families: proud Americans, fortunate to live near the site of one of America’s most famous historical shrines. Their festival is a heartening occasion to witness, for it is American democracy at its best.
Through it all the monument rises above its unadorned settings; except that the crown of the hill has been removed, it could still be the New England hilltop farm on which the battle was fought. The obelisk rises in the simplicity of its straight lines and clean angles, with no curves, and with the somber gray of its harsh-textured masonry unrelieved by any greenery of foundation shrubbery. The rugged monument is symbolic of the stern spirit of those who fought in the battle, and of the determination of those who solved the problem of building this massive memorial to them, in the pioneer days of American architecture and engineering.