Site Hours
Grounds
- Open
- 8am - Sunset
Facilities
- Facilities Closed
for the season.
Historical Notes
War of 1812
Make use of the Battlefield Historic Site for a picnic or ramble the battlegrounds.
Enjoy the grand view westward and linger at the end of the day to watch the sunset.
Historical Notes - War of 1812
Militia, Mud and Misery
by Dr. Gary M. Gibson
In the late summer of 1814 fears of another British attack on Sackets Harbor reached a crescendo. Most of the American regular army was still on the Niagara Frontier so their place was taken by the militia from central and northern New York. One who arrived in late September from Madison County was Nathaniel Stacy, the chaplain of the 65 th Regiment of New York infantry.
Rev. Stacy discovered his new post was “one of the most filthy mudholes I ever was compelled to wallow through.” The weather that fall was awful. As Stacy later wrote in his memoirs, “there were not five fair days during the whole of our two months campaign.” Torrents of rain turned Sackets Harbor into one vast morass. The soldiers were fortunate if they “could walk from one cantonment to the other without sinking above the tops of our boots in the mud.”
Stacy was better off than most of the men in his regiment. The commanding general at Sackets Harbor, Oliver Collins, was a friend and Stacy received comfortable quarters outside the village, a soldier as a personal servant and a horse to ride from place to place. He was kept busy “visiting the sick, in attending at the burials, and following the poor fellows who died to their place of interment.” The weather, however, was so bad that Stacy was only able to give one public sermon in two months.
Late in November, the “disheartened and exhausted” militia were relieved by Major General Jacob Brown’s regular army. They “marched into our quarters, and a more besmeared set of reptiles were never seen crawling out of the mud.” They had come on foot from Niagara and “their tattered and filthy garments looked more like the habiliments of beggars — much more, than like the neat uniform of regular troops.”
To everyone’s relief the militia were then discharged “and those who had escaped the ravages of death were permitted to return once more to the bosom of their families.” Seven years later, Stacy was invited to return to Sackets Harbor but the thought of doing so “was appalling, and actually made my frame shudder.” To his astonishment, the village “had undergone a most thorough renovation. The mud had given way to spacious and handsomely graveled streets, with flagged side-walks, ornamented with handsome shade trees.” It is likely his attitude was further improved by the sight of “the spires of several churches.”