Asked to name the lions of the American Revolution, the average person will reel off figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.
Not many get to Gen. Henry Knox. A Boston-born, self-educated son of a Boston shipmaster, Knox was the man who traveled to Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York, and in December 1775, loaded more than 200 cannons onto barges and sleds, and hauled them overland back to Boston.
Those cannons, installed by Washington’s army on the Dorchester Heights, looming over the British in Boston, would compel the British to pack up and sail out of Boston Harbor in March 1776. Knox would serve as Washington’s artillery chief throughout the war and later in Washington’s cabinet. He died in Maine in 1806.
But that trip from upstate New York to Boston [in the dead of winter] is what cemented Knox’s legacy. Belmont resident David Webster knows: He’s visited every monument marking the route.
Webster became intrigued with Knox’s 250-mile path after seeing a monument to the trip on Cambridge Common, the spot where Knox delivered the cannons to Washington on January 25, 1776.
“The story of Henry Knox is incredible. It’s not as well-known as I would have thought,” he said.
Webster kept a travelogue of his own adventure, chronicling an effort that took parts of two summers for him to complete.
“I endeavored to find each marker, tracing the historical route of Henry Knox for six days during the summers of 2024 and 2025. I biked the New York section starting at Fort Ticonderoga during the summer of 2024 and the Massachusetts section in August 2025,” he writes.
The first marker is in Ticonderoga itself. The British fort fell to Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold in early May 1775. The fort guarded Lake Champlain, a key trade route with Canada, and the real prize for the militia was not the fort, but those guns.
Webster completed the entire trip, section by section, on his bicycle. The monuments themselves are unassuming stone markers with bronze plaques that explain what people are looking at.
“The one in Wayland is unique,” he said. “But there are 80 others along the way.”
Webster is not a historian. He’s a retired Environmental Protection Agency worker. Before that, he taught high school biology.
“If I wasn’t retired, I wouldn’t be taking these trips,” he said.
Webster, who was born in South Dakota but has lived in Belmont for decades, first became interested in tracing historic routes while serving as a camp counselor in Maryland. There, he and his campers would trace routes, such as the Mason-Dixon Line, mile by mile, until it was time to return to camp.
In college at Middlebury in Vermont, he cycled across Lake Champlain and headed west to Ohio, where he met a friend. Together, they rode back to Washington, D.C.
Tracing the Knox trail was largely successful. In his essay, he notes that one monument, in Schuylerville, New York, is persistently missing.
“Other markers have been moved to new locations to make way for more recent development. However, each segment of the route that ended at a marker was an adventure with its own story, a sense of awe, and often a conversation with a local resident,” he writes.
Webster notes in his chronicle that there will be events and celebrations along the route starting in December to mark the 250th anniversary of the Revolution. The closest monuments to Belmont are in Watertown along Mt. Auburn Street, in Waltham on Main Street, and on Cambridge Common.