In 1776, most Americans looked at the toppled statue of King George III in New York City’s Bowling Green and saw a shattered symbol of British tyranny.Oliver Wolcott saw ammunition.Four thousand pounds of lead.Enough, if properly gathered, hauled, melted, and molded, to help arm a revolution.SECRETS OF REVOLUTIONARY WAR BATTLEFIELDS EMERGE 250 YEARS AFTER AMERICA'S FOUNDINGThe statue had been erected in 1770, a gilded monument to imperial authority in America’s busiest port city.
King George sat on horseback, dressed in the Roman style, elevated above the city as a daily reminder of who ruled and who obeyed.But by the summer of 1776, that reminder had become intolerable.On July 9, George Washington had the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud to his troops and to the people of New York.The words did what words sometimes do in history.
They became action.A crowd of soldiers, sailors, and patriots surged down Broadway to Bowling Green.There stood the king: gilded, mounted, and untouchable.So they touched him.They threw ropes around the statue, pulled, and brought the symbol of British power crashing to the ground.The act itself was powerful enough.
A people who had declared themselves free had physically toppled the image of the monarch who claimed to own them.But Wolcott understood something deeper.Revolution required more than gestures.
It required supply chains.The Continental Army did not merely need speeches and declarations.It needed powder, guns, food, wagons, uniforms, and ammunition.
Liberty had to be manufactured.So Wolcott helped turn an act of protest into an act of war.The broken pieces of King George were gathered, loaded onto boats, and shipped to Connecticut.From there, ox carts hauled the royal wreckage more than sixty miles over rough roads to Wolcott’s home in Litchfield.Then the manufacturing began.In the Wolcott family orchard, furnaces were built and bullet molds prepared.
Laura Wolcott, her daughter Mariann, and local...