THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR. 2 8q 



In reply to this, four days afterwards, on the sixteenth 

 of June, twelve hundred men marched under Colonel 

 Prescott to Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill in Charlestown, 

 intending to plant their heavy guns upon these heights 

 and to worry the British out of their metropolis. 



Several Cohasset * men were among them, and in that 

 famous battle of Bunker Hill the next morning, June 17, 

 they helped to withstand those three furious assaults 

 of British regulars, and poured hot shot into the gleam- 

 ing redcoats. The situation of the patriots in receiving 

 the last charge when their ammunition gave out was piti- 

 ful in the extreme. It was one of our Cohasset men, 

 Joseph Bates, who stood his ground while the British were 

 pouring over the barricade, and when he no longer had 

 anything to shoot he seized stones and hurled them at the 

 enemy in his desperate helplessness. The belief in the 

 minds of some P^nglishmen that Americans could not or 

 would not fight was that day dispelled forever.f 



In a few days, July 2, 1775, General Washington took 

 charge of the patriot army under the old elm in Cam- 

 bridge. 



Soldiers had to be drilled, the commissary department 

 had to be organized, and an efficient body of staff officers 

 had to be trained to aid the general in his command of 

 the army. 



Cohasset may have had something to do with furnish- 

 ing food for this army, for in the town records at the close 

 of the war, March 11, 1782, there was a vote not to pay 

 a certain "committee for purchasing and driving beef to 

 Roxbury " 



One of the times at which Cohasset served in supply, 

 ing food for Washington's army is well assured. It was 

 in the year 1775 during the month of August ; one hun- 



* Besides Joseph Bates was Isaac Tower (not in the line of Ibrook). 



t Alexander Williams, of Beach Street, remembers stories told by Aunt Betsey 

 Briggs about her going up on top of the hills to listen to the firing ;it the battle of 

 Bunker Hill. 



