Page 139.
The following description of the Bunker Hill Monument and Square is from
Mr. Frothingham's History of the Siege of Boston, pp. 355, 356.
"Monument Square is four hundred and seventeen feet from north to
south, and four hundred feet from east to west, and contains nearly
six acres. It embraces the whole site of the redoubt, and a part of
the site of the breastwork. According to the most accurate plan of
the town and the battle (Page's), the monument stands where the
southwest angle of the redoubt was, and the whole of the redoubt
was between the monument and the street that bounds it on the west.
The small mound in the northeast corner of the square is supposed
to be the remains of the breastwork. Warren fell about two hundred
feet west of the monument. An iron fence encloses the square, and
another surrounds the monument. The square has entrances on each of
its sides, and at each of its corners, and is surrounded by a walk
and rows of trees.
"The obelisk is thirty feet in diameter at the base, about fifteen
feet at the top of the truncated part, and was designed to be two
hundred and twenty feet high; but the mortar and the seams between
the stones make the precise height two hundred and twenty-one feet.
Within the shaft is a hollow cone, with a spiral stairway winding
round it to its summit, which enters a circular chamber at the top.
There are ninety courses of stone in the shaft,--six of them below
the ground, and eighty-four above the ground. The capstone, or
apex, is a single stone four feet square at the base, and three
feet six inches in height, weighing two and half tons."
[Footnote 1: William Tudor died at Rio de Janeiro, as Chargé d'Affaires
of the United States, in 1830.]
[Footnote 2: William Sullivan died in Boston in 1839, George Blake in
1841, both gentlemen of great political and legal eminence.]
[Footnote 3: William Prescott (since deceased, in 1844), son of Colonel
William Prescott, who commanded on the 17th of June, 1775, and father of
William H. Prescott, the historian.]
[Footnote 4: See the Note at the end of the Address.]
[Footnote 5: See the "Records of the Company of the Massachusetts Bay in
New England," as published in the third volume of the Transactions of
the American Antiquarian Society, pp. 47-50.]