NEW YORK — The British were coming, only this time amid a large crowd of spectators and more mobile phones than muskets.
Canon fire blasted on Sunday, Oct. 18, from a wooden warship sailing off the northeastern Bronx's Orchard Beach. Red-coated soldiers boated ashore. And regiments of outnumbered Patriots fired muskets to try to repel them.
It was the 250th-anniversary reenactment of the Revolutionary War's Oct. 18, 1776, Battle of Pelham/Pell's Point. The re-enactment got under way about 10 a.m. The tall ship Lynx periodically fired a canon, as a smaller boat bearing British troops floated offshore.
As if arriving by time machine, the two militaries battled on grassy expanses but amid a backdrop that included an occasional New York City parks
department sign, a long boardwalk and a concessions area.
The actual battle is believed to have been a fought in an area of Westchester County's Pelham Manor, perhaps a mile or so from the site use for Sunday's reenactment.
Westchester County in the 1770s included parts of today's Bronx, including Orchard Beach.
The battle, fought about a year into the war,is credited with helping George Washington and his soldiers evade the British and and make it north through Westchester.
Washington was fleeing disastrous late-August defeats in by the British under Sir Gen. William Howe's command in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the war’s largest clash where hundreds of British warships filled the city harbor. Three-hundred Americans had been killed in that clash, 800 wounded and many more missing or captured.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: 'Fight' erupts between militaries at Orchard Beach. See what happened
