Location: 100 Fort Ti Rd, Ticonderoga, NY Map
Area: 21,950 acres
Tel. (518) 585-2821
Open: 9:30am- 5pm
Architect: Marquis de Lotbinière
+1 518 585-2821, e-mail: fort@fort-ticonderoga.org. Route 74. Daily mid-May to mid-Oct. 9AM-5PM. Restored 18th century fort with exhibits and reenactments. No pets, no camera tripods. Adults $12, seniors $10.80, ages 7-12 $6. World-renowned museum and historic restored fort on scenic Lake Champlain. Site of major victories in the French & Indian War and American Revolution. Restored King's Garden, Military Garrison Garden, Children’s Garden, and Native American Garden. Hands-on kids programs daily. Fife & Drum Corps and artillery demos daily July and August. Encampments and special events throughout the season. Museum store, restaurant, picnics, easy drive from Lake Placid.
Fort Ticonderoga is a French citadel constructed
in 1755- 58 in Ticonderoga, New York State in United States. Fort
Ticonderoga was designed by Marquis de Lotbinière and covers an area
of 21,950 acres. Fort Ticonderoga, called Fort Carillon from
1755 to 1759, is a large fort built by the French in the eighteenth
century at the southern end of Lake Champlain in New France, in
present-day New York, United States. It was built by Michel Chartier
de Lotbinière, lieutenant and ordinary engineer of the king, from
1755 to 1757, during the Seven Years' War. The name "Ticonderoga"
comes from the Iroquois "tekontaró: ken", meaning "at the junction
of two rivers".
Fort Ticonderoga controls a portage point on
the 6-km-long La Rivière River between Lake George and Lake
Champlain, which is followed by several rapids. It was a
strategically important portage on commercial routes between the
British-controlled Hudson Basin and the French-controlled St.
Lawrence River Basin. Nicknamed "the key of the continent", it was
the scene of several battles between French and British and between
British and Americans, during the American Revolutionary War.
The battle of Fort Carillon in 1758 saw 4,000 French
victoriously repel the assault of 16,000 British soldiers. In 1759,
the British hunt a symbolic French garrison, occupying a height
threatening the fort. In May 1775, during the American Revolutionary
War, the Green Mountain Boys militia and some other groups seized
the fort during a surprise attack led by Ethan Allen and Benedict
Arnold. The captured guns were transported to Boston, where their
deployment allows the capture of the city by the patriots in March
1776. The Americans hold the fort until June 1777, when the British
general John Burgoyne occupies again the heights surrounding the
fort, forcing the Continental Army to evacuate Ticonderoga and its
defenses. The only direct attack of the fort took place in October
1777, when John Brown, at the head of 500 Americans, tries to seize
it, against one hundred defenders.
Shortly after, the British
abandoned Fort Ticonderoga after the failure of the Saratoga
campaign and he ceased to have military utility after 1781 and the
end of the war. It is gradually falling into ruins, as its building
materials, such as stone, wood or metal, are reused by the
inhabitants of the region. It became a tourist attraction during the
nineteenth century and its owners restored it in the early twentieth
century. It now houses a museum and a research center, managed by a
foundation.
Lake Champlain, which forms the border between the US states of New
York and Vermont, and the Hudson River form an important route used by
North American Indians before the arrival of European settlers. The
route is relatively free of obstacles to navigation, apart from a few
portages. One of the strategic points of this road is the point formed
by the confluence of the La Chute River, by which Lake George flows into
Lake Champlain, and Lake Champlain. A rocky plateau controls all access
to the south of Lake Champlain, although Mount Defiance, rising to 260
m, and two other hills - Mount Hope and Mount Independence - dominate
the site.
Native Americans occupied the site before the French
explorer Samuel de Champlain arrived there in 1609. Champlain reports
that the Algonquins, with whom he was traveling, fought a group of
Iroquois near an Indian village called Ticonderoga. In 1642, the French
missionary Isaac Jogues was the first European to take the Ticonderoga
portage, wanting to escape a fight between Iroquois and Hurons.
At the end of the 17th century, the French, who had settled in the Saint
Lawrence valley to the north, and the British, who had taken over the
Dutch settlements to the south, fought over the region. In 1691, Dutch
settler Pieter Schuyler built a small palisade fort on Ticonderoga
Point, on the western shore of Lake Champlain. These colonial conflicts
reached their peak during the Seven Years' War, in the middle of the
18th century.
In 1750, a small palisade fortification was again built on the point.
It is named Fort Vaudreuil, after the Governor General of New France,
Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil.
After the Battle of Lake George in
1755, Vaudreuil sent his cousin Michel Chartier de Lotbinière to build a
permanent fortification on Ticonderoga Point, which the French called
Fort Carillon. The fort may take its name from Philippe de Carrion du
Fresnoy, a French settler who established a trading post there in the
late 17th century. However, it seems more likely that this name comes
from the La Chute River, whose sound of rapids would evoke the sound of
the bells of a carillon. The construction of the Italian fort, designed
by Lotbinière inspired by the military engineer Vauban, began in October
1755.
Work progressed slowly during the good seasons of 1756 and
1757, using the troops stationed at Fort Saint-Frédéric and in Canada.
The works of 1755 consist primarily in the construction of the main
walls and the Lotbinière redoubt, a work intended mainly to cover La
Chute. The following year saw the construction of the four bastions and
a sawmill near the river. The construction of the work slowed down in
1757, due to the attack on Fort William Henry by Montcalm which
mobilized the troops. The barracks and the half-moons were not completed
until the spring of 1758.
Walls and bastions
The French built
Fort Carillon to control the southern approaches to Lake Champlain. The
Germain Bastion faces north-west and the Queen's Bastion faces
north-east. These two important bastions protect access to Lake
Champlain by land. They are reinforced by two half-moons oriented
respectively to the north and to the west. The Joannes and Languedoc
bastions, facing south, protect the maritime access to the lake.
The walls are 2.1 m high and 4.3 m thick. The whole is surrounded by a
glacis and dry ditches 1.5 m deep and 4.3 m wide. These walls are
originally beams filled with earth, quickly replaced by stones extracted
from a nearby quarry, although this is never really done in full. When
the main defenses were completed, Fort Carillon was armed with cannons
brought from Montreal and Fort Saint-Frédéric.
Interiors and
exteriors
The fort houses three barracks and four warehouses. One of
the bastions houses a bakery capable of producing sixty loaves of bread
a day. A powder magazine was carved into the rocky escarpment under the
Joannes bastion. All constructions inside the fort were built in stone.
A palisade protects the area between the south of the fort and the
shore of the lake. This site was the docking point for the canoes and
housed several additional storage areas necessary for the operation of
the fort. When it became clear in 1756 that the fort had been built too
far west of the lake, an additional redoubt was erected at the end of
the point to cover the lake.
Analysis
The fort was completed
in 1758. The marquis de Montcalm, maréchal de camp and commander of the
French regular troops, and two military engineers inspected the
fortification and criticized almost every aspect of it: the buildings
were too large and therefore made easy targets for the artillery, the
powder magazine leaks and the masonry is of poor quality. It seems,
however, that emphasis has not been placed on the main weakness of the
position: the existence of three hills – Mount Hope to the northwest,
Mount Defiance to the southwest and Mount Independence to the southeast.
east, across the lake – dominate Fort Carillon, exposing it to enemy
artillery. Montcalm is notably accompanied by Nicolas Sarrebource de
Pontleroy, general engineer of New France, preferred in this function to
Lotbinière, suspected of taking advantage of his family ties with
Vaudreuil. Pontleroy wrote several particularly negative reports on
Lotbinière, whose career was ruined.
William Nester, in his
exhaustive study of the battle of Fort Carillon, notices other problems
in the construction of the fort. The fort is too small, about 150 m, for
a fortification inspired by Vauban and it can hold just over 400 men.
Warehousing capacities are too low, making it necessary to build
warehouses and stores outside the walls, in an exposed space. Its
cistern was small and the quality of the water was said to be poor.
In August 1757, troops commanded by Montcalm left Fort Carillon and
captured Fort William Henry, on the south shore of Lake George. This
victory, accompanied by a series of victorious actions by the French,
led the British to prepare a large-scale attack against Fort Carillon,
in their overall strategy of war against French Canada. In June 1758,
British General James Abercrombie assembled a large military force at
Fort William Henry in preparation for a campaign against the Lake
Champlain Valley. This army landed at the north end of Lake George, a
few kilometers from Fort Carillon on July 6. General George Howe, second
in command of the expedition and considered one of the best British
officers, was killed during a reconnaissance. Troubled, Abercombie then
showed hesitation and slowed down the march of his army. The failure of
Arbecombie to go directly to the fort on July 7 allows the Marquis de
Montcalm to improve the defenses of the fort. The French built in two
days a series of entrenchments around a small hill located about one
kilometer northwest of the fort and set up an abatis below these
entrenchments.
On July 8, 1758, Abercombie ordered a frontal
attack on the French defensive preparations. He decides to advance
quickly on the few French defenders, choosing to give up his artillery
and rely on the numerical superiority of his 16,000 men. But the 4,000
French, entrenched and benefiting from artillery support, inflicted a
severe defeat on the British. Although the fort's guns saw little use,
due to its distance from the battlefield, the Battle of Fort Carillon
gave it its reputation as an impregnable place, which influenced future
military operations in the area, including during the American
Revolutionary War. After the French victory, Montcalm, who anticipated a
new British attack, ordered the construction of two redoubts northeast
of the fort, the Germain and Pontleroy redoubts, named after the
engineers who built them. However, the British did not launch a new
attack and the French withdrew in November, leaving only a weak garrison
for the winter.
Fort Carillon was captured by the British the
following year during the Battle of Ticonderoga. On July 21, 1759,
11,000 soldiers commanded by General Jeffery Amherst approached the fort
with their artillery, meeting no French resistance. Indeed, Colonel
François-Charles de Bourlamaque evacuated the fort as soon as he learned
of the arrival of the British, in accordance with Montcalm's
instructions. He left only 400 men under the command of Captain
Louis-Philippe Le Dossu d'Hébécourt. On July 26, Hébécourt in turn
abandoned the fort, after blowing it up and destroying its cannons. The
powder magazine is destroyed but the rest of the fort is not seriously
damaged. Despite the work undertaken by the British in 1759 and 1760 to
restore it, the fort, now called Fort Ticonderoga, no longer played any
significant role in the aftermath of the conflict. After the war, the
British left a small garrison there which left the fort in disrepair. In
1773, General Frederick Haldimand, who commanded Fort Ticonderoga, wrote
that it was "in a state of ruins".
In 1775, Fort Ticonderoga, in ruins, was occupied only by a symbolic
presence. On May 10, less than a month after the start of the American
Revolutionary War in Lexington and Concord, this garrison of 48 men was
surprised by the Green Mountain Boys militia, aided by volunteers from
Massachusetts and Connecticut and conducted by Ethan Allen and Benedict
Arnold. Allen is said to have said to the commander of the fort, Captain
William Delaplace: “Come out, you old rat! (“Get out of there, old
rat!”). He later said that he demanded Delaplace's surrender "in the
name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress". Be that as it
may, his request for surrender was made to Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham
and not to the commander of the fort, who surrendered his sword a little
later39. Arnold remained at Ticonderoga until June 17, 1775, when 1,000
soldiers from Connecticut under Captain Benjamin Hinman arrived to take
over and rebuild the fort. Due to political maneuvering and
miscommunication, Arnold was not informed of Hinman's arrival and
refused to hand over command to him. A delegation from Massachusetts –
which had commissioned Arnold – is brought in to clarify the situation.
Benedict Arnold eventually hands the fort over to Hinman and leaves
Ticonderoga on June 22. During the winter of 1775-1776, the guns of Fort
Ticonderoga were led by Colonel Henry Knox to Boston, besieged by
insurgents. The use of these guns, deployed at Dorchester Heights, was
decisive, forcing the British to evacuate the capital of New England on
March 17, 1776.
With the capture of the fort, obtained without
the slightest exchange of fire, the patriots gained access to the
Champlain Valley and, from July, Fort Ticonderoga served as a rallying
point to prepare for the invasion of Canada launched at the end of
August with the aim of involving Canadians in the revolt. Under the
command of Generals Philip Schuyler and Richard Montgomery, men, weapons
and equipment were accumulated during the months of July and August. On
August 28, after being informed that the British were preparing to
launch an attack from Fort Saint-Jean, Montgommery launched his 1,200
men on Lake Champlain. Fort Ticonderoga continued to serve as a base for
operations in Canada, until the battle and siege of Quebec despite
Montgomery's death on December 31, 1775. In May 1776, the British sent
reinforcements to Quebec, broke the siege and repelled the Americans on
Lake Champlain. After the American defeat at the Battle of Valcour
Island in October, the Americans lost all chance of rallying Quebec to
their cause. 1,700 soldiers then wintered at Fort Ticonderoga under the
command of Colonel Anthony Wayne.
During the summer of 1776, American Generals Schuyler, commanding the
northern front, and Horatio Gates, commanding Fort Ticonderoga,
substantially reinforced the defenses of Fort Ticonderoga. On the
opposite shore of Lake Champlain, a kilometer away, Mount Independence
is fortified to prevent any attack from the north. Down the hill, on the
shore, trenches are dug and a pontoon bridge is thrown to reach Fort
Ticonderoga. At the edge of the rocky escarpment, a horseshoe battery
was emplaced while a small fort, called Fort Independence, was built on
top of the hill, protected by several redoubts. Mount Defiance, deemed
inaccessible, is not fortified.
In March 1777, American generals
expected a British attack on the Hudson. General Schuyler requests the
reinforcement of the Fort Ticonderoga garrison to 10,000 men and the
sending of 2,000 others to the Mohawk River. George Washington, who had
never been to Fort Ticonderoga, thought an attack from the north was
unlikely, due to its reputation as an impregnable fort. This idea,
combined with the relentless attacks on the Hudson by British forces
based in New York, led Washington to believe that any attack on the
Albany area would be from the south, cutting off the fort's supply
lines, with the consequent its evacuation. Thus, no action was taken to
continue the fortification of Ticonderoga or increase its garrison. This
garrison, made up of around 2,000 soldiers under the command of General
Arthur St. Clair, was too weak to cover all of the fortifications of
Ticonderoga.
General Gates is aware that Mount Defiance threatens
Fort Ticonderoga. Painter John Trumbull, then Gates' deputy adjutant
general, demonstrated this in 1776 when a cannon shot from the fort
reached the top of the hill. Several officers who inspected Mount
Defiance noticed possible approaches for artillery mounts. However, due
to Ticonderoga's weak garrison, the hill was undefended. When Anthony
Wayne left Fort Ticonderoga in April 1777 to join Washington's army, he
wrote to him that all was well and that "the fort could not be taken
without much bloodshed."
In June 1777, General John Burgoyne and
7,800 British and Hessians left Quebec heading south. After seizing
without resistance Fort Crown Point, built near the ruins of Fort
Saint-Frédéric, on June 30, Burgoyne prepared the siege of Fort
Ticonderoga. He understood the tactical advantage of the heights near
the fort: he bypassed the fort from the west and ordered his men to
hoist their guns to the top of Mount Defiance and Mount Hope. Finally,
it occupies the "French lines" built by Montcalm twenty years earlier.
Faced with imminent bombardment from these heights, General St. Clair
ordered the evacuation of Ticonderoga on July 5, 1777, before a cannon
had even been fired. The next day, Burgoyne took possession of it,
launching his advance guards in pursuit of the Americans. Upon learning
of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Washington declared that this event
had not been "envisaged, that it was beyond [for him] the limits of
understanding". The news of the capture of the "impregnable stronghold"
without a fight causes "the greatest surprise and the greatest alarm"
throughout all the colonies. Faced with public outcry, General St. Clair
was brought before a court-martial in 1778, which cleared him of all
charges.
After the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, the British left a garrison of
700 men there, commanded by General Henry Watson Powell. 500 troops
occupy Mount Independence while another 100 occupy Ticonderoga and the
remaining 100 build a stockade on Mount Defiance. George Washington
sends General Benjamin Lincoln in the New Hampshire Grants to "divide
and distract the enemy." Knowing that the British were keeping American
prisoners in the area, Lincoln decided to test the British defenses. On
September 13, he sent 500 men to Skenesboro, abandoned by the British,
and 500 others on either side of Lake Champlain towards Fort
Ticonderoga. Colonel John Brown led the troops to the West Bank with
instructions to free any prisoners he encountered and attack the fort if
it seemed feasible.
Early in the morning of September 18, Brown
surprised a group of British soldiers guarding American prisoners near
the start of the portage north of Lake George, while a party of his
troops sneaked up to the summit of Mount Defiance and captured the
slumbering stockade construction team. Brown and his men then descended
the portage towards the fort, surprising several groups of British on
their way and freeing their prisoners. The Fort Ticonderoga garrison was
unaware of the American advance until Brown's men and the British clung
to the French lines. Brown brings in two captured 6-pounders and begins
firing at the fort. The Americans also bombard Fort Ticonderoga from
Mount Defiance using a 12-pounder gun. The column in front attacked
Mount Independence, the British garrison at the site had time to
prepare, hearing the exchange of fire from across the lake. Their
defence, both their musketry salvoes and the fire from a few ships
anchored in the lake, discouraged the Americans from attacking Mount
Independence. The situation remains blocked and the two parties exchange
fire for several days. On September 21, one hundred Hessians arrived
from the Mohawk River valley to reinforce the besieged fort. Brown ended
up sending five parliamentarians to propose a ceasefire. Fort
Ticonderoga's defenders fire on them, killing three. Realizing that he
could not take the fort by arms, Brown retreated. He destroys several
barges and seizes a ship on Lake George, carrying out a few raids
against British positions on the edge of the lake. His action allows the
release of 118 Americans and the capture of 293 British, while losing
only less than ten men.
Following Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777, Fort Ticonderoga was no longer of strategic importance. In November 1777, the British abandoned the fort, as well as Fort Crown Point, 20 km away. Both garrisons destroy forts as much as they can before retreating. Fort Ticonderoga was sporadically occupied by isolated British groups in the following years and was finally abandoned after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781. After the war, the inhabitants of the region used the fort as a quarry and a reserve of materials for their own constructions, going so far as to melt down its cannons.
In 1785, the fort became property of the State of New York. He
donated it to Columbia University in New York and to Union College in
Schenectady in 1803 before the fort was bought by businessman William
Ferris Pell in 1820. In 1826, Pell built his residence in he summer in
the immediate vicinity of the fort, in the "king's garden" which he
rehabilitated, being passionate about horticulture. This residence,
called the Pavilion, became a hotel for tourists visiting the ruins of
Fort Ticonderoga, beginning in 1840. In 1848, Hudson River School
painter Russell Smith painted Ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, depicting the
condition of the fort.
The Pell family, which counts among its
members several American political figures – from William C. C.
Claiborne, first governor of Louisiana to Claiborne Pell, senator from
Rhode Island – restored the fort in 1909 and formally opened it to the
public. President William Howard Taft attends the ceremonies, which
commemorate the tercentenary of the first exploration of Lake Champlain
by Europeans. Stephen Pell, who spearheaded the restoration, founded the
Fort Ticonderoga Association in 1931, which has managed the fort ever
since. Funds for the restoration came notably from Robert M. Thompson,
philanthropic magnate and father-in-law of Pell. During the first half
of the 20th century, the foundation acquired most of the land
surrounding Fort Ticonderoga, including Mount Defiance, Mount
Independence, and much of Mount Hope. The British government provided 14
x 24-pounder guns to rearm the fort. These guns were melted down in
Britain during the Revolutionary War but were never sent to America due
to the end of the conflict.
Fort Ticonderoga is now a tourist
attraction, American military history museum, and research center. The
site has been listed since October 9, 1960 as a National Historic
Landmark. This ranking includes the fort itself, Mount Defiance and
Mount Independence. It was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in 1966. Due to the decaying state of some of the walls and the
Pell Pavilion, Fort Ticonderoga has been under close scrutiny by the NHL
since 1998. Restoration of the "King's store" destroyed by the French in
1759 was completed in 2008 according to Lotbinière's original plans. It
now houses a teaching and congress centre.
Fort Ticonderoga is mentioned in many novels. In 1887, Robert Louis
Stevenson published a poem telling the legend of Duncan Campbell, a
Scottish officer killed at the battle of Fort Carillon haunted by the
ghost of his cousin. This legend also gave rise to several songs. In the
cinema, two films tell the story of Fort Ticonderoga. Made in 1911, The
Capture of Fort Ticonderoga is about the episode of the capture of the
fort by the Americans in 1775. In 1951, George Montgomery is the hero of
Fort Ti, retracing the battle of Fort Carillon. In the movie Starship
Troopers, made in 1997, a space combat station is named "Ticonderoga".
The name Ticonderoga was given to five US Navy ships: a schooner, a
sloop, a freighter, an aircraft carrier and a cruiser. An entire class
of cruisers also bears his name.
The fort also gave its name to
the Dixon Ticonderoga company, founded at the beginning of the 19th
century and notably manufacturing Ticonderoga pencils.
In 1955, a
stamp was issued by the US Post Office to commemorate the bicentenary of
the construction of the fort.