Marking the Knox Trail

BCHS welcomes historian Ben Haley to discuss the fascinating, but not well-known story of the creation of the Knox Trail.

The six-week endeavor by twenty-five year-old Henry Knox to haul artillery from Ticonderoga to Cambridge early in the Revolution is now a fairly well-known story, but was obscure until the early 20th century. In April 1925, the Massachusetts Legislature established a three-person commission to find and mark Knox’s route. By the end of the year, the commission determined that they had identified the route, and over the following two years undertook the process of commissioning commemorative granite markers and having them installed in twenty-six Massachusetts cities and towns from the New York line to Boston. 

The 1920s marker project generated the interest in Knox’s expedition that remains to this day. However, what remains unknown to many is that the markers are not necessarily along the route Knox took, nor were they intended to be. Despite a dedicated effort to find Knox’s route, what the Knox Commission wanted to mark was not that, but rather what their chairman described in a letter as “a new Knox Trail” catering to automobiles. This story—of why the markers were erected where they were—remains essentially unknown. The story, able to be told via the correspondence surviving at the Massachusetts State Library, has been ignored even while interest in finding the “real” Knox Trail has accelerated since the 1960s as a result of the 1920s marker project.

About Ben Haley
Ben Haley is a historian and Director of the National Register program for the Massachusetts Historical Commission. He serves on the board of trustees of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum in Hadley and teaches a course on historic preservation at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. An essay preliminarily titled “Commemorating Henry Knox and the ‘Noble Train of Artillery’ in the Automobile Age” will be published in the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar.

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This event is sponsored by The Feigenbaum Foundation,  Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Housatonic Heritage.