“Marble devotes just one paragraph to the Revolutionary War…” — Jenk, Milano & Remer (3/10/2008)

Paul Schopp, Historian, A.D. Marble wrote (March 2007):

“According to Scharf and Westcott (1884:2150), much of the land along the river in Kensington was originally marshy. This marshy ground extended from the confluence of the Delaware River and Cohocksink Creek near Green Street up to Point Pleasant near Shackamaxon Street. When British forces occupied Philadelphia during the American War for Independence, Kensington proved a strategic location for defensive positions, guarding the city against any attack from the north or northwest. Germantown Pike, Old York Road, and Frankford Road all converged nearby. Using the Cohocksink Creek as a natural barrier to sorties, British engineers dammed the stream, flooding the adjacent marshlands. The occupying army firebombed any plantations, orchards, woods, or estates that impeded an unobstructed view of the north and northwestern horizon. During the fall and winter of 1777-1778, British Major John Simcoe, along with a contingent of the Queen’s Rangers, a group of Tory militarists, bivouacked in Kensington and made frequent foraging raids and guard patrols. The group guarded the Penn Treaty Elm from damage, but the very same forces pillaged the nearby Eyre Mansion. Despite the departure of British forces in June 1778, reportedly no new ship construction occurred in Kensington until 1783 (Remer 2002a:11).”

Torben Jenk, Ken Milano & Rich Remer wrote (2008/3/10):

History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884. John Thomas Scharf & Thompson Westcott. 

The [A.D. Marble] Phase IA bibliography references this three volume, 2,399 page compendium. Most historians recognize Scharf & Westcott as an accessible compendium, full of information, not all of it accurate. Scharf & Wescott devote 166 pages to “Philadelphia During the Revolution.”

Marble devotes just half a paragraph to the Revolutionary War  and seems to attribute that information to Rich Remer.

Yet Scharf & Westcott clearly state:

“At Kensington a battery was built on a wharf above Cohocksink Creek” (p. 1027); and

“Battery No. 1, east of Front Street, above Cohocksink Creek, of a square shape, commanding the river and the Front Street road, with a small two-gun battery south of it. Intrenchments and abates extended nearly along the line of the present Maiden Street to Germantown Road. Saw-shaped redans, each calculated to hold three men, were at the northwest angle of Germantown road and Maiden Street.” (p. 1028).

Scharf & Westcott includes an inaccurate map of the defenses showing British Fort No. 1 south of the Cohocksink Creek (opposite p. 360).

 Marble & Co. reference Scharf & Westcott in their IA & IB bibliographies but failed to investigate the British Revolutionary War fort until the IB/II Report — why?

“Their only road and gate of egress and ingress northward”

 John F. Watson, “Annals of Philadelphia” (1830):

“While the British army occupied Philadelphia, in the year 1777 and ’78, they damned in all the Cohocksinc meadows, so as to lay them all under water from the river, and thus produced to themselves a water barrier of defence in connection with their line of redoubts across the north end of the city. Their only road and gate of egress and ingress northward, was at the head of Front street where it parts to Germantown, and by Kensington to Frankford.”