SIGNIFICANCE

Chain Battery Cove served as a good physical location for the Great Chain to be secured on the West Point side, offering some physical protection for the expanse of the iron links on log rafts that stretched some 500 yards across the Hudson to Constitution Island. Chain Battery itself was equipped with cannons to defend the chain, which sat almost directly beneath Fort Clinton which offered additional cover.

Captain Thomas Machin was the engineer who supervised all elements of the design and production of the massive chain weighing some thirty-five tons. The Great Chain took the Sterling Iron Works three months from February to April to complete using “seven fires at forging and ten at welding.”

According to Lincoln Diamant’s account in Chaining the Hudson, “On the slack tide of April 30, 1778 the chain- made fast to a huge rock crib in Chain Cove between Horn Point and Love Rock on the west bank – was slowly winched across the 25-fathom-deep Hudson to a similar structure on the east bank by exuberant teams of soldiers straining at the Constitution Island capstan.”

General Washington’s ongoing concern for strengthening the fortifications at West Point had taken a great step forward as the Great Chain was now the centerpiece of the fortifications designed to deny warships of the British Royal Navy free passage on the Hudson River.

Thirteen links, a clevis, and a swivel from the Great Chain are displayed at Trophy Point at West Point. Two salvaged logs from the West Point boom can be seen at Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh.

In  The River and the Rock, former Superintendent General Dave R. Palmer describes the complexity of installing the Great Chain as heavy links had to be maneuvered onto treated logs:

“Machin returned right away to New Windsor where he resumed putting everything together….Swivels and anchors lay nearby in a separate pile. Forty straining men took four days to drag and roll and float the massive, treated logs into position. Once at the site the logs were combined by fours into rafts and held together by 12-foot timbers. Then followed the back-breaking task of connecting sections of chain and tugging them onto the rafts. That done, the whole affair was floated down to West Point and beached in front of Moore’s house [site of the current West Point Rugby fields] on 16 April.” On 30 April, Machin and his soldiers floated the Great Chain across the Hudson.

There are very few authentic links of the Great Chain still in existence with the majority of them remaining on Trophy Point at West Point. While most of the links of the Great Chain sat for years at the Ordnance Compound at West Point – near what is now the Firstie Club – during the Jackson presidency the U.S. Army sold most of the chain for salvage. The Academy kept thirteen links, a swivel and a clevis in honor of the thirteen colonies, and they have been displayed at West Point since 1857. As noted in “The Chain and the Boom,” by former West Point physics instructor Merle Sheffield, the average weight of the links was at 105 pounds each, which makes the effort by the Revolutionary soldiers to install the almost 1700  feet of chain in the spring and remove it each fall all the more remarkable.