One of 1959’s great hits, Jimmy Driftwood’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” borrowed from an old bluegrass fiddle tune, “The Eighth of January.” On that date in 1815, Andrew Jackson and his mixed bag of 3,500 soldiers, sailors, citizen militiamen, smugglers, slaves, and Choctaw Indians repelled the final assault of 15,000 British regulars on the Crescent City, winning America’s greatest land victory of the War of 1812 two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed at Ghent.

Part of New York’s response to what was once called the Second War for Independence stands amidst the trees of upper Central Park’s Great Hill. Blockhouse No. 1, a masonry tower raised in 1814, still waits for the British to come.

After the Revolution, New York began fortifying the harbor: Castle Clinton at the Battery and Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton are only two of the defense works begun long before 1812. But authorities apparently did not anticipate an attack from Long Island Sound.

Around 4 p.m. on August 9, 1814, British warships and troop transports appeared off Stonington, Conn., roughly 130 miles east of New York. Their commander, Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, sent a message ashore to the town’s inhabitants that he intended its destruction and gave them an hour to leave. Stonington had no garrison.

Yet its residents defied Hardy’s ultimatum: “We shall defend the place to the last extremity; should it be destroyed, we will perish in its ruins!” Then, opening the arsenal on Main Street, they rolled cannon to the waterfront, threw up barricades, and raised a huge flag of 16 stars and stripes.

At 8 p.m., the British opened fire with explosive shells and Congreve rockets (whose fiery trails would later inspire Francis Scott Key’s line in the national anthem about “the rockets’ red glare”). Midnight saw Royal Marines attempt a landing, but Stonington’s artillerists, as historian Benson Lossing wrote, “so shattered the enemy’s vessels that [they] retreated in confusion.”

At dawn on August 10, the British started lobbing incendiary projectiles among the wooden buildings as the 22-gun brig HMS Dispatch tacked into Stonington’s harbor. Captain Jeremiah Holmes, an American ex-POW, fired his cannon into the warship’s hull. She replied with a house-shattering broadside of 24-pound cannonballs. Then the shooting really began. At 8 a.m., someone suggested surrender. Holmes roared, “That flag shall never come down while I am alive,” and he nailed it to the staff.

After an artillery duel of two days, Hardy conned his flagship, the 74-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Ramilles, into the harbor with August 12’s morning tide. At 8 a.m., she fired three broadsides into the town. Then Hardy’s ships went back to the Sound and over the horizon, never to return. The British lost 20 and more than 50 were wounded while expending 50 tons of cannonballs, shells, and rockets. The Americans lost two horses, seven men were wounded, and 40 houses were damaged.

Nine days after the attack on Stonington, on August 18, 1814, New York civilian volunteers, including the Tammany Society, the Tallow Chandlers, the Marine Society, the Sons of Erin, Free Masons, Columbia College scholars, medical students, lawyers, firemen, and “colored citizens,” began fortifying upper Manhattan as rapidly as possible. Even more workers joined them after Hardy’s ships appeared off Rye, N.Y., only 22 miles from the city, on September 8. They built a continuous line of trenches and artillery emplacements across upper Manhattan, from Benson’s Point (today’s Benjamin Franklin Plaza at 3rd Avenue and 106th Street) to Manhattanville (today’s Morningside Houses, near the northeast corner of 124th Street and West End Avenue). And they built Blockhouse No. 1, the sunken roof of which held “a single heavy gun traversing en barbette,” that is, a large cannon that could be swiveled to fire in any direction.

Nearly 2,000 militiamen garrisoned the fortifications.

And the British never came.

When news of the Treaty of Ghent reached New York in early February 1815, the fortifications were abandoned almost overnight. Although most were soon demolished for building materials, Blockhouse No. 1 somehow survived. The late 1850s saw Central Park’s architects transform it to a picturesque ruin romantically overrun with vines and shrubbery. In 1905, the Veteran Corps of Artillery, the state’s ceremonial military unit, hauled a fieldpiece up the Great Hill. They fired a salute as dignitaries unveiled a plaque inscribed, “This blockhouse was part of a line of fortifications extending from the Hudson to the Harlem River. Built for the defense of New York by its patriotic citizens during the War of 1812-1815.” That plaque vanished by the 1970s: until recently the Blockhouse was mere anonymous masonry. But during the late 1990s, when Henry Stern was Parks Commissioner, the old fortification was stabilized, a sign erected describing its history, and its rusty flagpole repaired. Today, the Stars and Stripes fly again above the Blockhouse on the Great Hill.