Edward Herbert Cameron

“ 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.) ”

“ Like the Egyptians, the modern engineer would also call the monument easy to design and build. Today’s light, thin-walled chimneys of comparable height, pose much harder problems of stability against wind, and their designers feel fortunate when a chimney can rest on as firm a foundation as the glacial drumlin soil of Breed’s Hill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Modern architects call the part around which a circular staircase winds, the “newel.” Baldwin’s newel is a hallow wall, 10 feet in diameter at the base, about two feet thick.
Thus, the monument was designed by an engineer, not an architect. Baldwin violated a common rule for the proportions of ancient Egyptian obelisks, that the pyramidion should be as high as the base is wide, which is one reason why the Washington Monument is so beautiful. One regrets that architect Willard, who picked up where Baldwin left off, did not see fit to modify the Baldwin lines. ”

“ Naturally the stones broken from the Quincy ledges and boulders were not always of the dimensions planned by Willard for the lower courses; many were of sizes needed for the upper courses. Economical Willard dressed the stones as they came out; setting aside those which could not be erected for some time; and the piles of such stones grew larger at Quincy and on the ground about the monument, while the monument itself rose at a snail’s pace. A more spectacular progress was needed for a project that was started on a shoestring, and depended on more and still more public contributions. ”

“ To climb a few score steps would be an easy task to our sturdy forebears, and to say that one has “climbed the Bunker Hill Monument” is a boast that hundreds of thousands of tourists to Boston have been proud to make for over 100 years. Baldwin may have been right again, as he usually was.
Baldwin specified that the monument should be square with the compass, a common Egyptian practice. As built, however, it is oriented to fit the redoubt (southeast corner) of the battle fortification. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Solomon Willard, architect and superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument, developed the methods for the quarrying, dressing, transporting, and erecting the huge stones of the monument that started granite on its way to becoming a principal material for massive structures in America for half a century, until reinforced concrete took over. (Today, granite is used extensively as a protective facing for concrete, for highway curbing, and for memorials.) ”

“ 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.) ”

“ Those who knit stockings, crocheted in worsted of various colors, who were skilled in embroidered work, or who were merely good at plain sewing strove industriously to get ready for the Fair that was to earn money for the Bunker Hill Monument. ”

“ Today
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.12 Very few Bostonians are among these visitors.13 They 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A self-educated man, who had learned architecture with sufficient thoroughness to become a teacher in the subject, he had also become proficient in the various sciences. Starting as a carpenter, Willard had proved both his craftsmanship and artistry by becoming an adept carver of ships’ figureheads and models, including a model of the Capitol at Washington.
At the time the monument was begun, Willard was one of the leading13 architects of Boston. ”

“ Here, an endless chain allowed the loaded, descending cars to pull up the empty ascending ones.
The standard gauge of American railroads is now 4 feet, 81⁄2 inches, measured between railheads, a standard adopted after many years of confusion before the present gauge dimension was adopted. Although Bryant described his track gauge as 5 feet, this dimension was measured between the “bearing points” of the wheels on the tracks. If the bearing points are assumed to be the center of the treads of the wheels, his gauge is found to match closely the present standard gauge. ”

“ If the modern structural designer wishes to investigate how near the safe limit the monument has been tested by Boston’s occasional hurricane winds, he has available the major dimensions given in the Baldwin Report, and the drawings of Willard’s classic Plans and Sections of the Obelisk from which to make this simple computation. ”

“ Typical of an architect’s versatility, he had played an important part in the change from the heating of buildings by wood-burning fireplaces and Franklin stoves, to hot-air furnaces, using either wood or coal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this surface, the stonecutter laid out the other faces, including the “build” (top) , by his good mason’s square or template. The texture of the visible face was “tooled,” that is, the marks of the chisel remained visible. Quincy granite is a quality product, taking a high polish, but the builders of the Bunker Hill Monument desired no polish on their monument. ”

“ Such computation shows that the monument is so heavy that a hurricane wind has an almost imperceptible effect on its stability. When it is subjected to a 100-mile-per-hour wind, the resultant force is displaced only a fraction of a foot from the center of the 50-foot-wide foundation. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The building fund dwindled to such a low sum that in February, 1829, work had to be suspended for lack of funds to pay the wages of quarrymen, stonecutters, derrickmen, blacksmiths, and teamsters, and the cost of the good hay for the hard-working horses and oxen of the project. ”