|
PHILIPSTOWN POTPOURRI
The Enemy Restrained (Part 4 of 4)
by Don McDonald
Pollopel’s Island, known more famously as Bannerman’s Island, just south of Newburgh Bay on the Hudson’s east shore, was the site of the fourth river hindrance. Here was adopted a variation of the “cheval-de-frise” mode of construction. In place of the traditional “c.-d.-f.” obstruction of a line of either timbers or barrels overlaid with ominously protruding spikes and barbed wire set above the water line, the Pollopel barrier was composed of hefty timbers fashioned into box like cribs. Filled with rocks, the cribs sank into the river, affording support to countless numbers of stout, pointed wooden shafts, tipped at the ends with iron barbs. Slanted obliquely above water, the shafts, or spears, faced south toward the potential enemy, issuing a threatening posture of defiance!
Scant little is to be found of this particular Pollopel impediment, other than its having been strung west across the river to the vicinity of “Murderers Creek”, near Cornwall, four or five miles north of West Point. The barrier was supposedly completed in early 1778, leading one to the conclusion that the life of the Pollopel hindrance lasted but a short few months, being as it was the precursor of the last, and great, West Point chain.
Dire measures toward assuring colonial survival of independence were, to an enormous degree, inclusive of the Hudson River obstructions. Though cosmetically ungainly and stubbornly ponderous, these chains, or barricades,would lay, as if a serpent, relishing an encounter with the abhored enemy. having to fight a war with little more than sheer determination, ingenuity, brawn, and a hitherto unknown spirit of tenacious courage.
What afterwards would become symbolic, as an expression of unadulterated will and valor, was the raw iron of all the links, barbs, spikes, shafts, and wire combined to make up the Hudson River obstructions. Their worth, in welded in the history of each chain was the crude primitiveness of countless ways, was immeasurable.
| Click ads below
for larger version
|
