High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Elisha Leavitt (1714–1790) was a Hingham, Massachusetts, Loyalist landowner who owned several islands in Boston Harbor. During the Siege of Boston in 1775, Leavitt encouraged British forces to use one of his islands to gather hay for their horses, triggering a waterborne raid by Continental militiamen and sparking one of the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War. The largely forgotten Grape Island Alarm followed the battles at Lexington and Concord by a month, and preceded the Battle of Bunker Hill by less than a month.