New York: Ticonderoga – Fort Ticonderoga

🏰 Fort Ticonderoga 

We pulled up to Fort Ticonderoga on a bright autumn morning, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I’d seen enough “historic forts” in my time that turned out to be a couple of damp walls and an enthusiastic volunteer in a tricorn hat. This was something else entirely.

Fort Ticonderoga — originally called Fort Carillon by the French, who presumably felt the name sounded less like a tourist trap — is a proper, full-scale 18th-century star fort, sitting at a narrow stretch of water near the southern end of Lake Champlain in northern New York State. And when they say “star fort,” they mean it literally. From the air, the thing looks like a giant stone asterisk, which is either impressive military engineering or a very dramatic way of making a point. Probably both.

📐 The French Built It

The fort was designed and constructed by Michel Chartier de Lotbinière — a Canadian-born French military engineer who also held the rather impressive title of Marquis de Lotbinière, because the French were never ones to underdo it on the nomenclature front. Construction began in October 1755 and wrapped up by 1757, slap bang in the middle of what was then kicking off across two continents: the Seven Years’ War.

Now, in Britain we call it the Seven Years’ War, which is what it was. Americans, showing their customary enthusiasm for rebranding things, tend to call it the French and Indian War, which admittedly does sound more dramatic. The North American theatre of this conflict was essentially a very expensive and bloody argument over who got to control the trade routes between the Hudson River Valley — British territory — and the Saint Lawrence River Valley, which was firmly in French hands. Trade, as ever, was the thing people were prepared to die for.

🌊 Location, Location, Location

The fort’s position wasn’t chosen by accident. It sat astride a crucial 3.5-mile portage — that’s about 5.6 kilometres for anyone who’s moved on from imperial — alongside the mouth of the La Chute River, a thoroughly rapids-infested stretch of water connecting Lake Champlain to Lake George. If you wanted to move goods, soldiers, or frankly anything of value between those two lakes, you had to go past this spot. The French understood this perfectly. The British understood it too, which is why everyone kept trying to take the wretched place from everyone else.

⚔️ The Battle of Carillon — Britain’s Finest Embarrassment

The fort’s most remarkable moment came in July 1758, during what became known as the Battle of Carillon. The British, in their wisdom, sent 16,000 troops — a genuinely enormous force for the time and place — to dislodge a French garrison of approximately 4,000 men. The French, to put it politely, did not oblige. The British assault was repelled with considerable losses, and the whole sorry episode went down as one of the more spectacular miscalculations of the North American campaign. One imagines the after-action debrief was somewhat uncomfortable.

The British came back the following year, 1759, this time rather more successfully. The French, with only a token garrison defending the fort, thought better of it and withdrew. The British took Fort Carillon, renamed it Ticonderoga — a word derived from the Mohawk language, meaning roughly “it is at the junction of two waterways,” which is admirably literal — and settled in.

🪖 The Revolutionary War: Things Get Complicated

By 1775, the American War of Independence was underway, the fort was in British hands, and a colourful collection of colonists had decided they wanted it back. On the morning of 10th May 1775, a force called the Green Mountain Boys — which sounds like a folk band but was in fact a Vermont militia — along with other state militia units, launched a surprise assault under the joint command of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold. Arnold, of course, would later become America’s most famous traitor, but at this particular moment he was very much on the right side of history, relatively speaking.

The raid was a success. The British garrison, caught entirely off guard in the small hours of the morning, surrendered without much of a fight. More importantly, the cannons captured at Ticonderoga were then hauled — with extraordinary effort and in the depths of a New England winter — all the way to Boston, where they were installed on the heights above the city. The British, suddenly staring down the barrels of their own artillery, decided Boston wasn’t worth it and evacuated in March 1776. Not a great day for the redcoats.

🏳️ The Americans Hold On — Just About

The Americans held Fort Ticonderoga until the summer of 1777, when the British came back under General John Burgoyne. Burgoyne, who had something of a theatrical streak — he was also a playwright, which tells you everything — made the rather sensible decision not to attack the fort head-on. Instead, he simply occupied the high ground above it, a ridge called Sugar Loaf Hill, which the Americans had inexplicably left undefended. Faced with British artillery looking down on them from above, the Continental Army quietly withdrew. You can’t really blame them.

That September, an American officer named John Brown led around 500 men in an attempt to retake the fort from a British garrison of roughly 100 defenders. He failed. Sometimes the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

🏁 The End of the Line

The British held the fort until the failure of Burgoyne’s broader Saratoga campaign — the turning point of the Revolution — after which they abandoned it for good. By 1781, Fort Ticonderoga had ceased to have any real military purpose, and the great stone star slowly began falling into ruin over the following decades. It was eventually restored in the early 20th century and opened as a museum, which is how we came to be standing in its courtyard on that autumn morning, squinting at the ramparts and trying to imagine 16,000 British soldiers getting thoroughly humiliated in 1758.

History, when you’re actually standing in the middle of it, has a peculiar weight. Even for a Londoner who’s seen a thing or two.