Reliving the Bronx’s Biggest Battle
Glover’s Rock, a glacial erratic boulder in Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx, pushes through the tree branches around it like the prow of a beached ship. The Parks Department has put up an identifying marker next to a pullout on the road leading past the rock to Orchard Beach or to City Island. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the biggest battle ever fought in the Bronx began here. At dawn on October 18, 1776, four thousand British and Hessian soldiers marched along the narrow country road that followed the high ground the rock sits on. They had come ashore nearby and were trying to encircle Washington’s army from the east as he attempted to get out of a dangerous position on Manhattan and escape across the Hudson River to New Jersey.
A plaque on the rock says it was named for Colonel John Glover. He commanded four regiments, a total of eight hundred men, which occupied defensive positions along the road. The odds in this fight were five to one, at best. Glover came from Boston, and his New England troops not only fought as infantry but also provided Washington with whaleboats and oarsmen when he needed them. The boat in which he is standing in the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” was theirs.
As soon as Glover had light enough to see, he knew the enemy was approaching, and he wished a general could tell him what to do. Improvising, he ordered three of his regiments to hide behind stone walls that lined the road. An advance guard stood in formation near the rock, ready to meet the British. The fourth regiment he put farther back along the road, in reserve.
Sunrise, according to contemporary sources, was at 6:32 A.M. Two hundred and fifty years later, on Sunday, October 18, 2026, first light came at about 6:30. At that hour, Glover’s Rock is a lonely sentinel. A street light shaped like a “Y” casts bluish light over the boulder and an adjacent patch of lawn. Cars go by only occasionally. On the morning of the anniversary, four deer emerged from a reed thicket next to the lawn, and two Canada geese flew by. At 7:11, the sun came up blazingly over Long Island Sound, breaking through places in the previously all-dark tree line.
By ten o’clock, about a thousand people had shown up to watch a reënactment of the battle, sponsored by local historical societies, civic groups, and schools. For logistical reasons, it had to be held in Orchard Beach Park. Spectators crowded the beach’s promenade. A somewhat tall ship—a two-masted schooner called the Lynx—sailed in on the morning’s mild breeze and anchored offshore. Reënactors dressed as British soldiers got in a dory and rowed from the schooner to the beach’s edge. Then they rowed back and forth for a while. A member of the U.S. Coast Guard, who had been standing on the beach in a life vest to help them disembark, walked back to a tent on the promenade. “They don’t want to get wet,” he said. The dory rowed back to the Lynx.
Fortunately for the script, other British and Hessian reënactors had arrived via freeway and the incredibly vast Orchard Beach parking lot. These soldiers formed ranks—in numbers not at all near four thousand—and with bulletless muskets levelled began to march up a service road through the park’s lawns and picnic tables. Opposing them were Continental reënactors led by Sean Grady, of Westchester, who impersonated Colonel Glover impeccably, down to the Boston accent. “We cannot expect any rein-fahce-ments!” he said.
The two sides fired white, smoky volleys, their guns making a black-powder hiss-bang. Glover’s men retreated, then reformed; the determined British kept marching. An important thing had happened here, in what’s now the Bronx. If the British had been able to swing around to the west and trap Washington, the Revolution might have ended right then. Glover and his men held them up long enough for the whole army to get away.
As the reënactors moved, the spectators moved with them. The actual battle had ended with Glover’s men retreating across the Hutchinson River. The reënactment ended with a narrator, on a loudspeaker, saying it was over, and the reënactors and the attendees cheerfully mingling.
Four or five of the soldiers had “died” during the fighting. Even after the narrator announced the end, some of them stayed sprawled on the ground. One or two kids came up to them, but their spooky stillness kept most people away. The uniforms of these fallen were period authentic, except for the shoes. The patterns on their upturned rubber soles hurried the moment forward, time-travelling up to now. These reënactors seemed to be only teen-agers. They lay in uncomfortable-looking positions, pale and completely still. ♦