What’s in This Name? A Place in U.S. History

When I was a kid, Dad used to pile us into the convertible for the short trip up U.S. 1 to Putnam Pantry, an ice cream parlor at the birthplace of Revolutionary War Gen. Israel “Don’t fire ‘til you see the whites of their eyes” Putnam.

The menu there included an item called “The Battle of Bunker Hill.” It’s one of those kitchen-sink sundaes, with 17 scoops of ice cream and all the sprinkles, chopped walnuts, pineapple and homemade whipped cream you could cram into a plastic bowl.

We never ordered one.

The Breed brood was big enough that we could have drained the tub, no problem. But that would have been tantamount to treason.

You see, the June 17, 1775, battle -- the one that proved the upstart Americans were a match for the world’s mightiest army -- was fought on Breed’s Hill, not Bunker’s. It’s perhaps the greatest misnomer in American history, and we Breeds have been moaning about it ever since.

Cousins have fired off letters to the editor when some hapless columnist mistakenly calls it the Battle of Bunker Hill. My youngest brother briefly attended Bunker Hill Community College, and whenever a piece of mail from the school arrived at our home, Dad would scribble “and Breed’s” into the name.

Digging through the basement of my childhood home in Lynn -- where the first Allen Bread settled in 1630 -- I found a tattered pamphlet from an 1868 Breed family gathering. One speaker alluded to his connections in Washington and vowed legislative action to square the record.

In 1975, at the bicentennial battle reenactment in Charlestown, I watched with a 10-year-old’s mixture of pride and mortification as my father nudged his way up to the Bunker-laden reviewing stand, reached up and tugged on the sleeve of one of the town fathers. “The Breeds are here too,” he announced and, sure enough, the mayor told us to come on up.

To this day, I never cross the Tobin Bridge into Boston without gazing at that 221-foot granite obelisk rising in the distance and thinking, “That should be the Breed’s Hill Monument!”

A plaque on the monument’s visitor center tells tourists where they really are. And there’s hardly a history book anymore that doesn’t mention Breed’s Hill -- though it’s usually in parentheses or a footnote.

And we’re still a pretty big deal back in Lynn. There’s Breed’s End, Breed Street, Breed Junior High and Breed’s Pond, the town’s main water source.

But compared to the Bunkers, we was robbed.

Do an Internet phone directory search for businesses with “Breed’s Hill” in their names and you get two measly hits -- Breed’s Hill Insurance in Charlestown and its branch up the road in Salem.

But type in “Bunker Hill” and hundreds of businesses pop up. There’s Bunker Hill Lanes in Houston; Bunker Hill Amusements in Madisonville, La.; the Bunker Hill Chill & Grill in Dorr, Mich.; Bunker Hill Cattle Co. in St. Paul, Neb.

The Bunker Family Assn. website counts no fewer than 39 Bunker Hills around the country -- three each in California, Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas. There’s a Bunker Hill, Ill., population 1,722, and a Bunker Hill, Kan., home to 101 souls.

And don’t even get me started on the aircraft carrier and guided missile cruiser.

I set out not too long ago to find out how our family ended up a “Jeopardy” question. Turns out we’d lost the PR battle even before the smoke cleared.

Abigail Adams watched from a hilltop in Braintree as fire consumed nearby Charlestown. The next day, in a letter to hubby John, she described how their friend Dr. Joseph Warren had died in “our intrenchments upon Bunkers Hill.”

At the monument’s dedication on June 17, 1843, the great orator Daniel Webster gave an address from what he thought was “the summit of Bunker Hill.” Not once in his 39-page speech did he utter the name “Breed.”

Some historians have had the audacity to suggest that Breed’s Hill really didn’t exist.

Richard Frothingham, a Charlestown native who wrote extensively in the mid-1800s about the siege of Boston, noted that Bunker Hill was a “well-known public place” that had appeared in deed references for years before the battle. Breed’s Hill, on the other hand, was “not named in any description of streets previous to 1775, and appears to have been called after the owners of the pastures into which it was divided” -- in our case, Allen’s great-great-grandson, Ebenezer.

Frothingham even went so far as to argue that in the historical oomph department, Breed’s Hill “will not do near so well for patriotic purposes” as Bunker.

But the Breed family wasn’t without its champions.

In his 1850 “Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution,” Benson J. Lossing acknowledged Frothingham’s points. Nonetheless, he asserted that the battle “should properly be called the battle of Breed’s Hill, for there the great events of the day occurred.”

Alas, Frothingham and his ilk carried the field, and most historians have, as one angry Breed family chronicler put it, “followed like sheep ... apologizing for doing so.”

One group that refuses to apologize is the Bunker family.

With the anniversary and both families’ reunions coming up, I e-mailed BFA President Gil Bunker to propose a friendly little debate on the subject.

History, he acknowledged, “does say strange things.” But, in his opinion, the battle “was named correctly.”

“Sorry, Al,” wrote Gil, 71, a retired patrolman from Turnersville, N.J. “We’re not changing the name ... or giving you the monument.”

In the Breed tradition, I was unwilling to leave it at that. I called him.

I asked if his family was uncomfortable with its ill-gotten fame. Gil insisted that there was fighting “all over the peninsula” that day, and that much of it had belonged to his ancestor George Bunker. Never mind that George’s heirs had sold out long before the battle, and that there’s no evidence a Bunker fought on either side that day. (I found at least one Breed on the Colonial muster, though that’s beside the point.)

The engagement could just as easily have been named the Battle of Charlestown, Gil said. That sounded like a good compromise to me, and I suggested the families make a joint appeal to the academic community.

Gil just laughed.

“That’s probably what it really should be,” he said. “But I certainly wouldn’t recommend it from my point of view. I understand why you would.”

Gil sympathizes with us, but he doesn’t see history changing the name. Truth be told, neither do I. But if you folks out in Bunker Hill, Ill., are thinking about a makeover, drop me a line.