Battery Park and the British Fleet

The park you're passing was once the front line of a war.

When the United States and Britain went back to war in eighteen twelve, Burlington found itself at the sharp end of things. The city sat on Lake Champlain, a natural invasion corridor running from Canada straight into the American interior. The federal government designated Burlington as the headquarters of the northern military department, and several thousand soldiers flooded into a town of only a couple of thousand civilians, overwhelming the supply of food, housing, and everything else.

Army engineers planted artillery along the bluff at the lake's edge, at what is now Battery Park. On August thirteenth, eighteen thirteen, British warships sailed south and directly attacked the gun positions here. American gunners, supported by the USS President on the water below, held the line. The British withdrew. Burlington had repelled a naval assault.

The war was brutal in other ways. Disease swept through the military encampment and killed soldiers faster than any British cannon. Vermont's relationship with the war was also morally tangled: the state's farmers sold cattle, grain, and even ship's masts to the British army in Canada throughout the conflict, feeding the very enemy their sons were posted to stop.

The defining American naval victory came in September eighteen fourteen, not at Burlington but across the lake near Plattsburgh, New York, where Commodore Thomas Macdonough's fleet destroyed the British squadron in a single morning-to-afternoon fight and ended Britain's last serious invasion of the northern states. Burlington's guns had helped hold the line long enough for that victory to happen.

Walk through Battery Park today and you'll find a decorative cannon pointed at the lake, a sunset view that attracts evening crowds, and almost no visible sign of the war that gave the park its name.