About 40 years after the Battle of Bunker Hill, all New England was deeply stirred by a pamphlet published by Major General Henry Dearborn who had taken part in the engagement. The pamphlet accused General Israel Putnam, one of the most revered of the Revolutionary heroes, of incapacity and cowardice in the battle. Thereupon, the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought over and over again, at the wharves, sail lofts and ropewalks of Boston, and in all places where men gathered to work and to talk about the events of the day. Crowded nine inside and five on top of the jolting four-in-hand stagecoaches from Boston, friends and foes of the popular Revolutionary hero would wrangle over his conduct at the battle. It would be a long argument, at five miles per hour, with little room for gestures. With tankards in hand, by the warm fireplace in the low-ceilinged tavern of the village where the coach would stop for the night, the passengers could express their convictions more forcefully, and the Battle of Bunker Hill would become a very live topic indeed. The furor over the Putnam-Dearborn controversy became secondary, however, as the bald fact was realized that, aside from a small wooden column, no memorial existed on the site of one of the most famous military engagements of American history.

In the good Yankee fashion a group of prominent citizens conferred over their Madeira wine and coffee on ways to correct this humiliating situation, and in the year 1823, these men formed the Bunker Hill Monument Association, to solicit private contributions sufficient to build a monument on Breed’s Hill, where the battle had been fought, in the town of Charlestown, now a part of the city of Boston, Mass.[1]

[1] From the start, the site of the battle seems to have been called Bunker Hill, although it was actually fought on Breed’s Hill. The probable reason for this inaccuracy is that Bunker’s Hill was then 110 feet high, and the adjacent 62-foot-high Breed’s Hill was considered only a spur of the higher summit. Certainly, a contemporary British military map is entitled, “A Plan of the Action at Bunker’s Hill.”

Unlike the Washington Monument, which had to be completed by government funds, the Bunker Hill Monument was financed practically wholly by private means. Our independent ancestors did not count much on government aid in the building of a memorial to relatives or neighbors who had died in the battle; such monuments were personal matters. Of the total collected amount of about $134,000, only $7,000—a grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—came from other than private contributions. (The amount raised to build the monument is roughly equivalent to $1,000,000 in modern money.) Aside from two donations of $10,000 each, the individual gifts ranged from a few at $1,000 to many at $0.25 each. Naturally, such a scheme of financing took a long time, and 18 years elapsed before the monument was dedicated. At a critical period, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association, started by Paul Revere and others, years earlier, joined with the Bunker Hill Monument Association to raise funds and help direct operations. At a still more critical period, the women of New England held a fair which brought in over $30,000, and the completion of the monument was assured.

Surely, the record of no other national memorial provides such a true cross section of American democracy as exhibited in the roster of the rich, those of moderate means, and the poor but independent citizens whose contributions made possible construction of the monument.

The magnitude of American structures of the year 1825, when the cornerstone of the monument was laid, was largely limited by the physical strength of those who had to build them—men, horses, and oxen. To raise the huge stones of the monument to such dizzy heights was a tremendous undertaking with the crude construction methods of the day. The builders of the monument had much to inspire them to devise better methods, however, in the examples of other enterprises in this virile period of American development. Steam navigation had already made notable progress in America, and while the lower courses of the monument were being laid, the first steam locomotives began to appear on the young American railroads. Canals, waterpower developments, and many new industries were being started in the young democracy.

A great contribution of the builders of the monument to the record of achievements of this period was their demand for granite in huge quantities to build it. This demand inspired the construction of the Granite Railway at Quincy, Mass.—America’s first railroad.

The story of the promotion, design, and construction of the monument is therefore doubly intriguing. It gives a vivid picture of the status of construction methods of the period, when America stood on the threshold of the age of machinery. It also reveals the spirit of audacious determination of our construction forebears as they developed their unprecedented processes from which our present marvelously efficient methods of construction have sprung. The spirit of the builders of the monument is worthy of that of the heroes of the battle, which their masterpiece has now commemorated for over a century.

The Obelisk

Few modern architects, engineers, or contractors are privileged to work in such distinguished company as did architect Solomon Willard, engineers Loammi Baldwin and Gridley Bryant, and contractor James Sullivan Savage, who designed and built the obelisk which is called the Bunker Hill Monument. They were associated with Daniel Webster and young Edward Everett, both of whom later became Secretary of State; with Thomas Handasyd Perkins (still revered in Boston as the man who endowed the Perkins Institution for the Blind), merchant prince of Boston, with the famous artists, Washington Allston and Gilbert Stuart; and their monument followed the classic lines of the model submitted by Horatio Greenough, a Harvard student, who later became a noted American sculptor.