Bunker Hill Day
Dorchester Illustration 2621
Bunker Hill Day was yesterday. It marks the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle in the Revolutionary War, which took place on June 17, 1775, in Charlestown. The British won the battle.
Lemuel Clap served as a captain in the Revolutionary War, and during the siege of Boston and the Dorchester Heights campaign some of his men were stationed at his house. The house still stands on Boston Street.
Elizabeth (Clapp) Withington kept a diary and wrote on June 17, 1839, what her paternal grandmother, Rebecca (Dexter) Clap – Lemuel’s second wife whom he married in 1768 – had experienced.
The diary reads:
“Today commemorates the anniversary of the battle of Bunker hill, a day to ever be remembered by the children of the soldiers of the revolution. This morn at the breakfast table, the conversation was on the subject of this battle. My grandmother Clapp went out of doors & ascended a little hill not far from home to see the smoke of the burning of Charlestown & listened to the report of the cannon. What emotions filled her heart, her husband absent, the probability that they must abandon her home, making their Indian meal into bread, ready for their departure.
How little can we of the present day form any just conception of the labours & toils of our grandfather? When my grandmother, deprived of sleep by the sickness of one of her children, in going from one room to the other, was obliged to step between the bodies of soldiers who lay in unconscious sleep on the floor, ready at a moment’s warning for the march.”
Although the Dorchester Historical Society’s Lemuel Clap House was altered in the early and mid-eighteenth century, it is still the same as it was during the revolution. It was moved to its present location on Boston Street in 1957.