Bernie Drew and Rob Hoogs trudged uphill in the midst of a heavy January snowstorm in the whisper-quiet woods of the southern Berkshires.
There wasn't a house in sight when they reached a snowy patch in Beartown State Forest, and the two men ventured off the footpath to make their way to a hole in the ground with vestiges of a stone foundation.
Drew and Hoogs are local historians, and they've been trying to retrace the steps of a pivotal expedition during the American Revolution. Henry Knox, a young bookseller from Boston, led hundreds of men and dozens of teams of oxen to come to General George Washington's aid by hauling artillery across the commonwealth.
"This is the site of Chadwick's Tavern," said Hoogs, a retired civil engineer and board member of the Monterey Historical Society and museum.
Hoogs is nearly certain that Knox stopped at this tavern in January 1776, seeking warmth and food for his men and hay for exhausted oxen.
Hoogs is also thrilled by the day's weather on a recent frigid January day, a true taste of what Knox and his expedition faced.
"Cold, snowy, hilly, difficult," he said, catching his breath on the hike.
But what sent Knox, this 25-year-old brazen bookseller, west from Boston?
Hoogs boiled it down. After the Battle of Bunker Hill, Washington's Continental Army lacked artillery.
"Henry Knox stood up and said, 'Hey, you know, there's this artillery that Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen and Berkshires militia captured at Fort Ticonderoga six months earlier at in New York, 300 miles away. I'll go get them,'" said Hoogs. "General Washington presumably said, 'Cool. What do I have to lose?'"
An arduous winter pass
Knox made his way to the fort in upstate New York where he assembled hundreds of men, dozens of large wooden sleds and 80 teams of oxen to haul about 60 tons of artillery to Boston, where the British Crown had hunkered down. The journey took three months.
Once they crossed the frozen Hudson River, Knox's caravan pushed into the southern Berkshires, communities like Great Barrington and Monterey, where Chadwick's Tavern once flourished.
But Knox was not much of a diarist. His log entries were scant, leaving historians like Hoogs, Drew and a handful of others in these Berkshire communities to puzzle out exactly where Knox maneuvered his staggering train of artillery.
Pinpointing the trail
Retracing the sites of their research, Hoogs and Drew drove east of Great Barrington and scanned the landscape, plucking clues to Knox's trail from the most mundane scenery.
"There's actually a tree line right about there. It comes up and it angled up. So this was one of the steep hills that they had to go up," said Hoogs. "We've located the old maps, the old roads, the old surveys, the old atlases."
Drew wrote a book on Knox in 2012 and is collaborating on a new book that delves into the latest research on the trail, including information that led town leaders to relocate two markers for accuracy.
The book will also unpack 18th-century military roads — some used by British forces — which may have aided Knox's expedition.
"How can you live here and not want to know what that building was used for, or why that wall was there?" he said.
Throughout his childhood in the Berkshires, Drew's father taught him about local history and archaeology.
Hoogs, who worked as an engineer and surveyor in Pittsfield, marvels at Knox's feat of moving so many cannons up and down steep mountain slopes — long before anyone dynamited the granite peaks for transportation like the Mass Pike.
"It was a huge challenge. At the end of [Knox's] diary entry in Blandford, he says, 'Now we're facing the huge Glasgow Mountain.' It's arguably almost harder to go down with a heavy load. They had to attach ropes and have the oxen pulling against [the load], holding them from running away," said Hoogs.
Hoogs has no doubt about the significance of Knox's trail: Those cannons delivered to Dorchester forced the British to flee Boston.
"It was a huge victory for General Washington. All of a sudden now the war moves to the mid-Atlantic states, and the other colonies realize it really is a regional conflict that they need to be involved with. It's in their backyards and it is more than just these fiery Massachusetts Patriots who are inflaming this," said Hoogs. "Three months later, the Declaration of Independence is signed."
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