Big changes ahead for Revolutionary War site
By Tim Rowland
For the nation as a whole, America’s 250th anniversary rolls around in July 2026. At the Crown Point Historic Site it will happen 14 months earlier.
“We of course think of July 4 as the major milestone, but the war started in 1775,” said Site Manager Sam Huntington. On April 19 of that year, colonial forces beat back a British advance on Lexington and Concord, and 23 days after that, Seth Warner and the Green Mountain Boys captured the British fort at Crown Point.
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As captures go, it wasn’t one for the scrapbook. Two years prior, the fort had been reduced to, in the words of one engineer, “an amazing useless mass of earth” when a chimney fire spread to the fort’s stockpile of gunpowder, with predictable results. They blamed a woman, of course, pointing a finger at a soldier’s wife who had been boiling soap — she shot back that soap production was standard operating procedure, but the net result was that at the time of its “capture” the fort had been largely abandoned, the nine remaining British soldiers being quickly overwhelmed by the colonists.
Still, the action was significant in that 29 cannons were still stashed away inside the remaining stone walls, artillery that would come in handy to George Washington after Henry Knox miraculously dragged the cache all the way to Boston the following winter.
Updates coming for Crown Point Historic Site
Crown Point will commemorate both the fort’s capture and Knox’ adventures in artillery transport, beginning in early May. It’s also a significant year for Crown Point in the development of a new Unit Management Plan, which will be a roadmap for improvements at the park and adjacent campground going forward.
Anticipated changes expected to be up for public comment include a new or expanded museum and visitor center, a revamped trail system, archeological studies and plans for managing vegetation and invasive species. The state parks department refused to discuss specifics of the plan, but said the public will have a chance to comment in the future.
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The May commemorations will reflect the multifaceted interests of the Crown Point peninsula, which in the mid-1700s had a population of more than 12,000 people, close to the population of modern-day Glens Falls, Huntington said.
The peninsula is also an important throughway for migratory birds, and this will also be the 50th anniversary of an annual bird-banding project at the park. The banding, which occurs each May, will be open to visitors at the same time as the 250th anniversary of the fort’s capture.
Sifting through previous excavations
Also occurring at the same time will be a Syracuse University archeology project sifting through windrows of dirt piled up in the mid-20th century by a well-meaning but untrained archeologist who excavated around the stone walls of an earlier French fort on the site.
The French fort had been built in the 1730s, where it remained a constant thorn in the side of the British as the two nations battled for control of Lake Champlain. As the British finally closed in from the south in 1759, the French torched the fort to keep it out of enemy hands. By the 20th century, little was left but some stonework, and the excavator thought he was doing history a favor by exposing more of the stone walls.
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MORE TO EXPLORE: Crown Point – for history buffs, birders, and skiers
What he apparently didn’t know was that each backhoe bucket of earth he sent away to be dumped was a bedding ground of story-telling artifacts. While the context of these artifacts has been lost, many of them remain in the till that’s being sifted by student archeologists.
Students have turned up shards of pottery, glass and a button older than the nation itself. “We know this is artifact-rich soil,” Huntington said. “There are (professional) archeologists that have worked all their lives without finding a button in this condition.”
The public can watch this work being done, and not only that, volunteers may at some point be able to try their hand at archeology as well. Because the soil has already been disturbed once, the digging/sifting process need not be as fastidious as it otherwise would — meaning “civilians” may get to try their hand in search of history.
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Additional storytelling
Huntington said the bicentennial is also a chance for the fort to tell the story of people from the time period who have previously been overlooked. The Revolution is typically told through the eyes of the belligerents, but not everyone felt strongly one way or the other. They might even cast their lot against whichever army had just stolen their potato crop or ripped up their fenceposts for their campfires. And still others, such as indigenous or enslaved peoples, might not have felt they had much of a stake at all.
“We want to tell a more nuanced story,” Huntington said. “That means including people and voices who have been left out of the historical record.”
Fort Saint Frederic is the name of the “French fort.”
I’m surprised the name is left out of the article given the remnants of the fort are such an important part of the site.
My first time there was in the 1960s when a fantastic and ‘backward thinking’ history teacher brought a few of us kids there to the state campsite. I’m sure we had fishing poles but his main objective was to let us see and experience the ruins. I visited there in the mid 1990s and watched a NYS archeologist from Peebles Island dig up the stem of a wine glass near Fort St. Frederic. I remember it was twisted and squarish. Had she brought up a complete glass I think I would have fainted.