Existing comment:
On To Yorktown
Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail
Coming from their camp at White Marsh in the early afternoon of Wednesday, 12 September 1781, the First Brigade of French forces consisting of the infantry regiments Boubonnais and Royal Deux-Ponts marched into Baltimore on Pulaski Highway [US Route 40]. Once they were joined the next day by the Regiments Soissonnais and Saintonge, close to 4,000 French soldiers were resting in three campsites in and around Baltimore; at Ridgely's Delight (today's Camden Yards), the largest of the three encampment sites, at Howard's Woods on the northwest corner of North Charles and Mulberry streets, and along Hartford Run in Jonestown on the western outskirts of Fells Point/eastern side of the Inner Harbor area. On their way they passed the recently completed Friends Meeting House, now the oldest religious meeting place in the city. In 1781, Baltimore's first Quaker meeting house was led by the famous Abolitionist Quaker Elisha Tyson.
One of comte de Rochambeau's units was the German-speaking Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment. In his Reisebeschreibung von America, his account of 30 months of service in America, Private Georg Daniel Flohr fondly remembered his days in Baltimore. "On the 12th we made 20 miles to Baltimore, a German city of respectable size, very much determined by trade because of its convenient harbor which via a wide river reaches all the way to the city. We set up camp very close to the city on a large open plain. Here the approach of the fellow countrymen was again as strong as in Philadelphia. There we rested, very joyfully, until the 16th."
Though it was too late for Mary Katherine Goddard to announce the arrival of French forces in the Tuesday edition of her Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, she carried the news in her next issue of 18 September:
"Early on Sunday Morning last his most Christian Majesty's Forces, consisting of several Thousand choice Troops (who arrived here on Tuesday last) attended by several Generals and other Officers of Distinction, marched for Annapolis, where they are to embark with all possible Expedition, for Virginia. -- The Behaviour of every Corps during their stay here, deserves universal Applause."
Ten days later, on 28 September, these same troops and their American allies laid siege to Lord Cornwallis before Yorktown. |