Battlefield Preservation, Revisited

Battle of Bunker Hill
Howard Pyle
Source

Depicted above is Howard Pyle's beautiful painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The battle was fought on the 17th June in 1775. The painting has apparently been lost as it was stolen from a Delaware art museum back in 2001. Perhaps it's fitting as the battlefield itself has vanished underneath the city of Charlestown, Massachusetts. (See the map below.)

Source

While it would be nice to preserve every single historic place there is, at some point it becomes impractical to do so. People need places to live, to work, and to otherwise enjoy their own lives without being intruded upon by the legacy of dead warriors.

Or do they?

I have written about battlefield preservation once before, the subject of the area around the Bunker Hill monument came up there as well. I mean, I get it, both sides. Ancient history, get over it, there's land going to waste right there, let's build something on it so the people in this day and age can enjoy it. Damn what went before, who cares?

Well ...

There are people who care, people who understand the history of a place, what it means, and how it may relate to modern times. Not preserving history seems to me a bit like destroying all the photographs of yourself as a kid because you don't look like that any more. Who cares? Your great-great-grandchildren might look at those pictures someday, pictures of someone they never met, of what relevance are those photos to them?

Why bother taking photographs at all?

I was very, very young, a babe in arms literally, in a photograph of my great-grandfather, Alexander Bain holding his newest great-grandson, Your Humble Scribe. By the time I could understand such things and perhaps appreciate who the man was, he was dead, long dead. I had never known him to talk to him or to understand what his existence meant to me.

Still, when I see that picture I think of his daughter, my paternal grandmother, and remember just how much she loved me, and I her. I can still hear her voice and smell her kitchen when I haven't heard her voice or been in that kitchen for over fifty years. Half a century for crying out loud.

I have talked to my kids about their great-grandparents, hoping to somehow keep their memories alive. But will they pass that on to their own children, and they to theirs? I don't know.

I've never visited the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill. While I'm a big believer in "walking the ground" to understand a battle, there is literally no ground to be walked in the environs of the Bunker Hill Monument (which I suppose is actually on Breed's Hill?) So what would be the point?

Of course, Boston is now a major American city, should the city fathers have left the land adjacent to Charlestown, upon which stood the two hills, alone and undeveloped? Without leaving Boston in the same state, much would have been lost in leaving Bunker and Breed's Hills as they were in 1775.

How about the battles on Long Island and in the vicinity of New York City? Leave those as they were? While, as an historian, I think that would have been great, it would be exceedingly impractical and unrealistic to expect such a thing. Boston and New York are important port cities it was inevitable that industry would arise there and people would flock there to make their livings.

Battles often happen around key bits of terrain, like cities, and expecting future generations to preserve things as they were is probably asking too much. And if there's money to be made, expect a politician to chime in, just to get their taste, of course.

Progress is inevitable and merciless in many cases. But surely some bits can be saved?

What say you?