john-laurens:Left: The Attack Upon the Chew House by Howard Pyle, depicting an attack during the Bat

john-laurens:Left: The Attack Upon the Chew House by Howard Pyle, depicting an attack during the Battle of Germantown in October 1777Right: Cliveden (Chew House) in June 2021This was the house that John Laurens tried to set on fire:“Stretching for two miles along both sides of Shippack Road, Germantown could be approached by four different routes.  On 4 October, the American army divided into four columns that each marched on one of the four roads.  If the plan went according to schedule, the columns would enter the town at 5:00 a.m.  Traveling with the Major General John Sullivan’s main column on Shippack Road, John Laurens eagerly anticipated experiencing the thrill of battle for the second time in three weeks.  At around 5:00 a.m., the army encountered the British pickets.  After an exchange of fire, the pickets retreated, with the Americans in hot pursuit.  As the shooting began, Laurens was hit ‘by a Musket Ball, which went through the fleshy Part of his right Shoulder.’  Ignoring the slight wound, he pressed on with the other troops.  A dense fog, blended with smoke, reduced visibility to less than fifty yards, making it difficult to distinguish friend from foe.  About an hour after the initial shots, Sullivan’s troops came upon a large stone house owned by Benjamin Chew.  Over one hundred redcoats had slipped inside, closed the shutters, and blocked the doors.  From the second story, they fired on the approaching Americans with deadly accuracy.At this point, Washington and his officers discussed their next step.  They could either neutralize the house and press on or demand that the British surrender, and launch an assault if they refused.  Brigadier General Henry Knox, the chief of artillery, favored the latter course, and Washington deferred to his opinion.  When an officer approached the dwelling with a white flag to summon the garrison to surrender, the redcoats responded by shooting and fatally wounding him.  The Americans then brought up six-pound cannon to reduce the temporary fortification to rubble, but the balls merely bounced off the sturdy stone walls.The stalemate called for desperate measures, or so concluded a vigorous and impetuous young Frenchman, the Chevalier de Mauduit Du Plessis.  Out of the group of American officers, Du Plessis singled out John Laurens, another man more amenable to action than deliberation.  Du Plessis proposed to Laurens a daring plan.  Why not gather straw from a nearby stable, pile the straw against the front door, and set it ablaze?  If cannon proved ineffectual, the young men reasoned, perhaps the redcoats could be forced out by fire.  As John gathered the straw, Du Plessis forced open the shutters of a ground floor window and climbed on the sill.  Inside the house, a British officer, armed with a pistol, demanded to know what Du Plessis thought he was doing.  ‘I’m only taking a walk,’ the Frenchman replied with bravado.  As the officer commanded Du Plessis to surrender, another redcoat walked in the room and fired a shot, but hit his comrade by mistake, whereupon Du Plessis quickly made his escape.  John, who had approached the door with sword in hand, also withdrew, but received ‘a Blow in his Side from a spent Ball,’ a minor injury that only caused swelling.”John Laurens and the American Revolution by Gregory D. Massey More fun facts from the tour:The Chew family lived in the house until ~ early 1970s except a brief, 20-year interlude directly after the war when the son of Benjamin Chew convinced his father to sell the property. The family was loyalist and avoided the Philadelphia area during the aftermath of the war, wanting to stay away from politics. When the house went back on the market, they bought it back and passed it down through the family.Because the family lived in the house so recently and it remained continuously functional as a home, much of the furniture is either furniture that belonged to the family in the 20th century or items returned to the house by relatives when it joined the National Trust.The family added several additions including a kitchen extension on the kitchen dependency in 1765,  a colonnade between the kitchen dependency and the main house in 1775, an estate office and residence in the washhouse dependency, a two-story kitchen renovation behind the colonnade from 1867-1868, and an upstairs bathroom which sits on columns in the rear of the house in 1921. The roof of the house has massive stone urns which Benjamin Chew had imported as decorations. In order to support them, the front of the house is ~20″ thick of stone facing which prevented the cannonballs Massey is mentioning from having desired effect. If the Americans had attacked the side of the mansion, their canons may have breeched the house, but there were not likely sappers on site to determine that the house was constructed that way because the French engineers that were assisting the American army at the time were focused on the Delaware River defenses at the time of the battle.The Chew family kept some pieces of original furniture and carriages in a carriage house in the rear of the property which was set on fire in 1970 by arsonists, creating a diversion for a nearby church fire. Included in the damage was the original doors of the house which the Americans attempted to breach through.Howard Pyle, the artist of the painting that @john-laurens added, also painted The Death of Colonel John Laurens and Man of the Hour about John Laurens’s contributions during the war.Massey’s references for his description of the battle come from Washington by Freeman, The Glorious Cause by Middlekauff, War of the Revolution by Christopher Ward, Travels in North America by Chastellux, and an anonymous writing in the South-Carolina and American General Gazette.  -- source link

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