Battery Day will be held this year on Saturday, May 4, 2019. Battery Day will start off with the sound of cannons reverberating across the West Passage. Festivities begin at 11am with the Jamestown Band playing patriotic music and the Newport Artillery firing its cannons from inside the protective earthworks that were originally built by the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1776.

Battery Day is held at the Conanicut Battery Historic Park on Battery Lane, Jamestown, RI.

The Rhode Island General Assembly ordered the building of the Conanicut Battery in 1776.  The original fort was probably a simple, crescent-shaped earthwork designed to house and protect six to eight heavy cannon and their men. The British captured the fort in December 1776 and occupied it until October 1779.  They rebuilt the battery in the shape seen today. A ditch surrounds the earthen barricades on all sides. The fort could house heavy cannon to defend the West Passage, and the bastions on the north and south protected it from land attack.

French forces coming to the aid of new United States manned the Conanicut Battery in 1780 and 1781.

During the 19th century, the land was farmed.

In 1916, the military re-acquired the land and built six underground observation posts on the top of Prospect Hill, just east of the 1776 battery.  From there, military observers had an unobstructed view of the approaches to Narragansett Bay and of the mine fields laid in the East and West Passages during World War I and  World War II.

In 1963 the federal government gave the property to the Town of Jamestown, and in 1972 Conanicut Battery was added to the National Register of Historic Place. 

Since the restoration of the park in 2002, the Jamestown Historical Society has worked with the town to maintain the historic elements within the Conanicut Battery Historic Park.  Ever other year, the society sponsors Battery Day to celebrate the history of the park.

The park is open from sunup to sundown every day.