THE DEATH OF GENERAL WARREN AT BUNKER HILL, by John Trumbull
In little more than a year and a half after the June 1775 battle of Bunker Hill, Springfield was selected as the site of the major US arsenal in the northern states.
The Revolutionary War origins of Springfield Armory
Springfield Armory’s origin can be traced to Henry Knox, chief of artillery for the Continental Army, as he passed through Springfield in January of 1776, six months before the declaration of independence at Philadelphia the following July. He commanded a force of teamsters and soldiers bringing the heavy cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga, N.Y., to General George Washington to use in the siege of Boston in the winter of 1775-6. During his short visit to Springfield, Knox was impressed with the town’s strategic location on the Post Road, central to the northern theater of war and on a major waterway, yet above the Enfield Falls and therefore out of reach of enemy warships. It was largely because of this that, a year later, Springfield became the site of the principal arsenal for the northern states during the War of Independence.
Throughout the Revolution, the site was used for producing and repairing small arms, making fuses and cartridges, wagons and saddles, and storing powder and various war materials. Construction was ordered for a magazine sufficient to contain ten thousand stands of arms and two hundred tons of gunpowder, and also for erecting an elaboratory adjacent to the magazine.
In the language of the day, a magazine was a storehouse, not necessarily for powder alone but for any class of supplies, provisions, forage, etc. An “elaboratory” was an establishment for the manufacture of munitions. New construction on the quadrangle of present-day Springfield Armory NHS allowed the elaboratory to move in 1778 to a complex of purpose-built structures.
The earliest known records of the “elaboratory” at Springfield, apart from references from Continental Army and Congressional documents from 1777 to 1782, are for a week in February 1778 when 8,448 musket cartridges were produced. They are part of a recently found set of three volumes of original “elaboratory” work records, found in the Massachusetts Archives in 2002 and documented by Springfield Armory NHS through an Eastern National research grant starting in 2003, that describe the daily work by close to forty men over nearly nine months of the period from February 1778 to January 1780. An examination of the newly-recovered “elaboratory” work records reveals that nearly 17,500 musket cartridges were manufactured in the first week of March 1778 and more than 25,000 made the second week of August 1779. During mid-1779, production averaged 3,000 to 4,000 daily, occasionally toping 5,000 cartridges.
Prior to this discovery, the only known production record of the “elaboratory” at Springfield was for April 1778 of a single week’s output of 7,584 cartridges. This single page was noted in the mid-19th century Springfield Armory records as remaining at the Armory [It has since been lost.]. When the three volumes were recovered in 2002, a break in the strings at the binding of the first volume was found at the spot where the missing April 1778 record had apparently once been secured.
After the signing of the peace treaty in 1783, the Federal Arsenal at Springfield remained one of the new nation’s main repositories of military supplies. Eleven years later, in 1794, Knox, now Secretary of War, once again recommended the site to Washington, then President, and the National Armory at Springfield was established.
