Chapter 23

“The White of Their Gaiters”

It is perplexing to stand on the heights of Charlestown almost two and a half centuries later and fully appreciate the geography at work there in 1775. So much changed as the peninsulas of both Boston and Charlestown swelled with landfills. The distance in 1775 between Copp’s Hill in northern Boston and the town wharves of Charlestown—essentially the route of the Charlestown ferry—was then about twelve hundred feet, slightly more than the distance it is today over the Charlestown Bridge.

The Charlestown peninsula was almost a small-scale mirror image of Boston but with a narrow neck, low rolling hills, and an ever-expanding girth as one moved southeast from the neck to the point where the Charles River separated the peninsula from Boston. This ground was a little over a mile in length and varied in width from mere yards at the neck to roughly three-quarters of a mile between the Charlestown wharves and the Mystic River to the northeast.