Gage's Lines

Gage's Lines were the British fortifications across Boston Neck, the narrow strip that was then the only road into the town, during the siege of 1775 and 1776. At high tide the Neck was about 120 feet wide, and the road over it, Orange Street, is today's Washington Street in the South End. General Thomas Gage began fortifying it in September 1774, and by the summer of 1775 there were two lines. The inner one, at the old town gate near Dover Street, now East Berkeley Street, mounted 23 guns behind a gate and drawbridge, and a ditch dug in front of it flooded at high tide, for a time making Boston two islands. The main work stood further out, between today's Dedham and Canton Streets, with bastions, a mortar battery and lines carried across the marshes to the water on each side. William Dawes rode out past the guards on the Neck on the night of 18 April 1775 on his way to Lexington, carrying the same warning as Paul Revere by the land route. Through the siege the Americans faced the lines from Roxbury, about three quarters of a mile away. On 8 July 1775 they surprised the British advanced guard and burned the guardhouse in front of the works, and on 30 July a British sally burned the George Tavern, the American forward post. After the British evacuated Boston on 17 March 1776, George Washington had the works made useless before the army marched for New York. Samuel Adams Drake recorded that traces of the main work could still be seen in 1822, and timbers from a bastion were later found in a cellar at Canton and Washington Streets.