The Copp's Hill Battery

The Copp's Hill Battery was a British gun position on the summit of Copp's Hill in the North End, near the south-western corner of the burying ground, aimed across the mouth of the Charles at Charlestown. Admiral Samuel Graves had it thrown up in the spring of 1775 to cover his ships. A City of Boston history of the burial ground describes the works as hastily built and never completed, a few barrels of earth arranged as parapets with an earthwork behind for infantry. On 17 June 1775, the battery fired through the morning and into the battle on the American redoubt alongside the warships in the river, and the Americans sent a few shot back that lodged in the face of the hill. Generals John Burgoyne and Henry Clinton watched the battle from Copp's Hill. Burgoyne wrote that word came by boat from General William Howe asking them to set fire to Charlestown, and that the battery threw a parcel of shells and the whole town was soon in flames. William Cockran, who was on the hill that day, swore in August 1775 that the first carcass, an incendiary shell, set fire to an old house above the ferry ways, and that the meeting house and others followed. Clinton, seeing troops confused on the beach below Breed's Hill, took a boat across and joined Howe as a volunteer. The guns were left spiked when the British evacuated Boston in March 1776. The summit was cut down from 1806 to fill the Mill Pond, and with it went the last traces of the works.