Henry Knox’s artillery train passed through the Latham area during the winter of 1775–1776 on its way from Fort Ticonderoga to George Washington’s army outside Boston. After Americans captured the Lake Champlain fortress in May 1775, its heavy guns remained far from the siege. Washington assigned the young Boston bookseller Knox to inspect the ordnance and organize the difficult task of moving it across roughly three hundred miles of northern roads and waterways.

Knox selected dozens of cannon, mortars, and howitzers weighing nearly sixty tons. Boats carried them south on Lake George, while wagons and sledges moved the pieces toward the Hudson and Albany. The route through what is now Latham formed part of the transition from the river corridor to the eastward roads across the Rensselaer Plateau and Berkshire Mountains. Marker NY-20 identifies that regional passage rather than the precise position of every gun.

Winter offered both assistance and danger. Snow allowed ox-drawn sledges to carry weights that would mire ordinary wagons, and ice could shorten crossings, but thaws stripped roads and weakened frozen rivers. Guns broke through ice, sledges overturned, animals tired, and teams required replacement. Knox coordinated soldiers, boatmen, farmers, teamsters, craftsmen, and local officials, demonstrating that the famous expedition depended on an extended civilian and military labor network.

Albany County provided food, forage, lodging, repairs, draft animals, and knowledge of routes. Each community’s contribution linked captured artillery to strategic use. The convoy was not a single picturesque line moving without interruption; pieces and teams could spread over miles and regroup as conditions permitted. Route markers simplify that complicated motion, but together they allow the scale of the journey and its dependence on local infrastructure to be understood.

The train reached the Cambridge area early in 1776. On the night of March 4–5, American troops fortified Dorchester Heights and placed heavy guns where they threatened Boston and British shipping. General William Howe considered the position untenable and evacuated the city on March 17. The cannon did not fire a decisive bombardment from Latham or Albany, yet their successful movement through this corridor made the strategic threat at Boston possible.

This marker commemorates logistics rather than combat. Its value lies in connecting Lake Champlain, the Hudson, the overland turn toward Massachusetts, and the final deployment above Boston. The surrounding modern road system can obscure how difficult winter transportation once was. Reading the site as one point in a long chain restores the animals, laborers, weather, repairs, and repeated local assistance behind Knox’s achievement and the first major American strategic success of the war.