 February, 1998 issue
Midway through the War of Independence, on April 30, 1778, the American Revolutionaries succeeded in stringing a massive floating chain across the Hudson River at West Point, N.Y. Quickly dubbed "General Washington's Watch Chain" by the Continental soldiers, the unusual obstruction denied use of this strategic waterway to the British for the remainder of the war. The chain's 800 wrought iron links, supported by a connecting forty huge log rafts, were hastily forges at nearby Sterling Furnace in the Ramapo Mountains. Each two-foot-long link weighed about 125 pounds. Installation of the chain was supervised by a thirty-three-year-old artillery engineer Thomas Machin of Boston. He had "gone out with the Tea Party" in 1773 and, two years later, laid out overnight on Breed's (Bunker) Hill. Lieutenant Machin was a well-educated English immigrant with practical experience in civil engineering. In the spring of 1777, he had succeeded in stretching a light chained boom across the Hudson River near Bear Mountain. Within six months, that obstruction was outflanked and destroyed by British forces under Sir Henry Clinton. Racing against a manufacturing deadline, Machin had the new and far heavier replacement at West Point strung like pearls on a necklace, 1,500 feet across the river between cannon batteries on the west shore and Constitution Island. Early each winter for the next four years, the West Point garrison hauled the 300 tons of wrought iron chain and log rafts out of the clutches of tidal river ice and restrung them the following spring. It was always a freezing, back-breaking job.
The chain was so effective in blocking the Hudson that it was never directly challenged by a British ship The chain survived an unsuccessful sabotage attempt by Benedict Arnold in 1780, but, most significantly, it was never directly challenged by a single Royal Navy warship. So perfectly did it perform its function of blocking the Hudson River and Valley, and, by extension, the entire Northeast, from further British incursion that it effectively drove the next five years of conflict to the Southern states, unquestionably shortening the war. Indeed, it was no accident that the final Northern battle -- an enemy delaying action in New Jersey -- came only three months after the West Point Chain was successfully installed. When the war ended, the chain represented too much valuable scrap iron to be allowed to simply rust in peace. A handful of its links were saved and set aside, thirteen of which, one for each original state, are still on display at the Military Academy. Refreshed each year by a coat of shiny black enamel, the section of preserved linkage continues to intrigue untold numbers of Military Academy visitors. The remainder of the chain was relegated to the West Point Foundry furnaces near Cold Spring, New York, to be melted down for other uses. Considering that the iron left from Captain Machin's Hudson River barrier represents the United State's most famous Revolutionary War memento, it is not surprising that a pair of enterprising bunco artists attempted -- and succeeded at -- stealing it for their own. John C. Abbey was a thirty-five-year-old New York "odds-and-ends man" with a keen sense of history. This New York City junk dealer customarily went under the more colorful Christian appellation of Westminster. "For fifty years," said The New York Times, "it was a byword along the East River waterfront that you could get anything from a nail to a cannon at Westminster Abbey's old place" -- including fully authenticated links of the West Point Chain. His was certainly one of the heaviest con games ever practiced, in its own way the equivalent of selling the Brooklyn Bridge. How Abbey claimed he obtained his links made a colorful story. In the 1880s, he said, they had surfaced from the innermost recesses of the 300-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard. In fact, they were eighty-six links of a heavy contemporary rolled-steel mooring ground anchor chain. This type of chain, manufactured exclusively in Great Britain, was used to stabilize large steamship mooring buoys in ports around the world without mooring facilities.
A junk dealer began to sell scrap metal as the real thing to unsophisticated buyers Although the genuine links of the West Point Chain were easily available for comparison at the United States Military Academy only fifty miles up the Hudson, the junk dealer began to peddle his scrap metal as the real thing to unsophisticated buyers across the country. It was a startling parody of what Van Wyck Brooks once characterized as America's "search for a usable past," or, as a more recent writer suggests in a hagiographic study of George Washington, it answers "a specific human need to achieve a measure of material intimacy with great events." In 1900, a former New York City mayor, Abram Hewitt, purchased some of the links from Abbey. Twenty-six of these still grace the front lawn of Hewitt's former estate at Ringwood Manor, now a northwestern New Jersey state park. Ringwood's smooth, neatly chamfered links are not only three times heavier than the rugged links hurriedly forged in 1778 at Sterling Furnace; they are also on average sixty-five percent longer and an additional three and three-quarter inches in circumference. Hewitt, himself an experienced ironmaster, lived only a few hours carriage ride from West Point. Eventually the ex-mayor got around to comparing his links with those on Trophy Point at the Military Academy, and was soon loudly (and unsuccessfully) demanding his money back. Hewitt complained that Abbey had "sold the chain to me on false representation." Some of Hewitt's links eventually found their way to Orange County's Museum Village, a historic restoration at Monroe, New York, where they are still displayed (unlabeled) on the village green. Almost a half century later, Hewitt's son Edward wrote in a private memoir how a visiting "English iron manufacturer recognized [the Abbey chain] as one of the Admiralty buoy chains made by his firm, which had been used in New York harbor." (An Admiralty chain had to pass prescribed strength tests at a British naval testing facility.) The younger Hewitt also related how he quietly "analyzed the iron of the links and found it to be Lowmoor iron from England." For several decades, Edward Hewitt kept those embarrassing identifications to himself. Contemporary metallurgical evidence now supports his assertion that Westminster Abbey's so-called "West Point Chain" was never wrought in the Ramapo Mountain Furnace in 1778, but was manufactured more than a century later at Brown, Lenox & Co.'s Newbridge Chain and Anchor Works at Pontypridd, fifteen miles north of Cardiff, Wales, along the Glamorganshire Canal.
The counterfeit chain enterprise was taken over by Francis Bannerman, owner of Bannerman Island In the early 1900s, Abbey's counterfeit chain enterprise was taken over by a neighboring business man Francis Bannerman. Born in Scotland in 1851 and brought to America as a youngster, Bannerman had become one of the country's major surplus arms dealers. As the new and better organized proprietor of the false West Point Chain, Bannerman celebrated his takeover by publishing a little pamphlet, "History of the Great Iron Chain Laid Across the Hudson River in 1778, by Order of General George Washington." Bannerman spun his own fascinating story, still naively recited by a few historians, about how the bulk of the West Point Chain links finally ended their days at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Much of the chain, according to Bannerman, had actually escaped the scrap furnace to lay stored at West Point for almost a century. Then in March 1864, near the end of the Civil War, a hundred or so chain links were barged down the Hudson for display at the famous New York Metropolitan Fair. The event was a great success, raising over one million dollars to care for the Union wounded. At the Fair's conclusion (Bannerman recounted), the Great Chain links were not returned to the United States Military Academy, but were ferried across the East River to the Brooklyn Yard. Bannerman's pamphlet then leaps ahead two decades, to the time when his "Revolutionary relics" could be safely exhumed. During Grover Cleveland's first administration, says Bannerman, the Navy Department took steps to consolidate all its various quartermaster installations into one vast General Storekeepers Department. "In time," Bannerman continues, the Navy "found this old chain and without either knowing the history or having any appreciation for such a valuable relic, ordered it sold by auction, September 4, 1887." Bannerman tells how, twenty-two years after the Civil War, the unusual links were bid by his own father, Francis, Sr., from whom they were subsequently purchased by Westminster Abbey. Abbey, relates, Bannerman, then sold sections of his West Point Chain to the public "for about 10 years." Having bought Abbey's chain, Bannerman continued to peddle it on a much wider scale. Two links, his pamphlet notes, were sold to Colonel Robert Townsend of Oyster Bay, New York, a credulous great-grandson of the original Sterling Furnace ironmaster. Three others went to Townsend descendants in Danbury, Connecticut, and Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
The counterfeit links made their way to the Smithsonian, Chicago Historical Society and the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Another of Bannerman's links, sold to Daniel Jackson Townsend, a descendant in Niagara Falls, was subsequently presented by his heirs to the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, which currently lists it as "one of the most historical articles in our museum." During the 1933 commencement exercises at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, six links which Bannerman sold many years before to still another Townsend descendant were presented to the Academy by the ironmaster's great-grand-daughter. Originally mounted on the stone wall of the Academy's athletic field, the links now rest on the floor inside the front entrance to the Academy's museum. Thirteen of Bannerman's remaining links were sold to millionaire Edward F. Searles, a Massachusetts interior decorator who married Mark Hopkin's widow, there by gaining control of her Central Pacific Railroad fortune. Searles came to Bannerman seeking additional decoration for an elaborate statue of George Washington that already graced a corner of his Metheun, Massachusetts, estate. The rear of the overladen marble and bronze monument was soon bedecked with thirteen Bannerman links -- again, one for each original state. Sixty years later, in 1958, a Seales descendant sold that huge statue plus seven of its "West Point" links to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California. The links, now separated from the statue, are installed in a mislabeled niche in the cemetery's Glendale "Court of Freedom, beyond the Mystery of Life Garden, where Cathedral Drive becomes the High Road." At the time of Searles's purchase, Bannerman also sold four links to Westchester executive John H. Starin, who then donated them to the Glen Island Museum in Pelham, New York. When the museum was demolished in 1921 by the Westchester County Park Commission to make way for a casino and recreational park, the links were auctioned for $500. Their new owner was a British businessman, Sir Henry S. Wellcome, who outbid the New York Historical Society. Within a year, Wellcome donated his prize to the Smithsonian Institution. By then, the New-York Historical Society's secretary had begun to suspect the provenance of the Bannerman links, and relayed his doubts to the secretary of the Smithsonian -- who did not respond. (Today those Smithsonian links are quietly stashed in a Maryland warehouse.) Twenty additional links passed, through the hands of an insatiable midwestern antiques collector, to the Chicago Historical Society, where they are now unceremoniously dumped, like a gigantic monkey-puzzle, in the shrubbery outside the Society's back door.
Bannerman sold broken links of the counterfeit chain as "handsome souvenir desk weights." To close out the inventory of "Great West Point Chain links," Bannerman hit on an ingenious and lucrative scheme to dispose of all the "damaged" opened links left behind whenever chain sections were sold. Bannerman carved up all his leftovers into "handsome souvenir desk weights." Each link yielded several hundred blanks; the pieces were machined, polished and engraved "SECTION OF CHAIN / USED BY GENL. GEO. WASHINGTON / WEST POINT, N.Y. 1778." A round "handle," actually a surplus one and one-quarter inch Civil War canister shot, was welded to the desk weight. Bannerman charged $2.75 for the finished weight, and threw in his eight-page pamphlet. Chopped into such tiny bits, each chain link brought Bannerman a total of almost $350, a considerable improvement over Abbey's original wholesale price -- "five (5) cents net cash per pound."
Few researchers seriously challenged the authenticity of the counterfeit links Without exception, writers on the West Point chain swallowed any misgivings regarding the illogical size, shape, and appearance of the Abbey/Bannerman links. A few researchers were willing to acknowledge some problems with certain details, but no one cared to sail into the wind of "received historical fact." One of the country's most respected civil engineers wrote shortly after World War II: "The appearance of some of the large links is certainly a bit suspicious," but he still refused to acknowledge their obvious manufacture in a 19th century rolling mill. He even went so far as to assert that in the midst of a desperate revolution, the neat "chamfers on the 3-1/2" bar [almost forty feet of chamfering to each of several hundred links] were done with a hand hammer." Around the same time, a Columbia University engineering instructor requested permission from the Hewitt family to conduct a metallurgical experiment on one of those Ringwood links. Approval was refused, but the instructor machined and polished a Bannerman paperweight instead, and published eight photomicrographs in an iron trades magazine. Ken Holloway, retired Chain and Smiths Manager of the Welsh Pontypridd works, assisted me in interpreting those photomicrographs, describing the traditional 19th century Brown, Lenox processes for manufacturing ground mooring chain links: Iron scrap of known quality was piled into box piles, risen to a welding temperature, and forges into slabs under the steam hammer. Those slabs were again raised to welding temperature and forges into a larger slab, which was passed through rolls to reduce it to bar size and shape. I was able to watch this process of making a square chain right up to the second World War. The Columbia instructor independently determined that the "iron was forged first in several pieces, then bundled together and welded into one large piece." Such an analysis in no way describes the original Sterling West Point Chain raw materials, or any forging process known in 1788. The instructor still failed to draw the obvious conclusion. Bannerman died in November 1918, at the end of World War I, exhausted, said The New York Times, from his dedicated efforts to supply the British government with second-hand armaments "worth almost three million dollars." The Times added, somewhat uncharitably for an obituary: "It was charged in Congress last summer that Mr. Bannerman was trying to sell the United States Government for $450,000, thirty six-inch guns bought by him from the Navy for about $78 apiece." Westminster Abbey outlived his more enterprising associate by four years. "WESTMINSTER ABBEY DEAD," read the headline over his obituary in The New York Times on 11 June 1922. The subheadline read: "Old Front Street Ship Chandler Whose Warehouse was Famous." But it took three more decades for truth to overtake the Abbey/Bannerman chain myth. Not until the late 1980s did my enjoyable research in Wales finally make it clear that, if you want to look upon Captain Machin's wonderful West Point Chain, you must skip all those curious sections of Welsh mooring links at Forest Lawn, Ringwood Manor, Museum Village, Oyster Bay, the Coast Guard Academy, the Smithsonian warehouse, and the Chicago, Buffalo-and-Erie-County, and Metheun Historical Societies. Go to West Point instead, and marvel at the real thing - while whistling "Yankee Doodle."
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