Fort Crown Point - (1759-1783) - First established in 1759 by British troops under General Jeffery Amherst on Lake Champlain near the site of the French Fort Saint-Frédéric following the capture of French Fort Carillon, later renamed Ticonderoga, in 1759.
Rather than rehabilitate the ruins of the French fort, General Amherst embarked on the construction of an enormous earthen fort. Amherst used the construction of the fort as a means of keeping his men working through the winter of 1759 after pushing the French into modern-day Canada. It is said that Israel Putnam, who would later become a major general in the American Revolution, supervised much of the construction. Fort Crown Point was at least one-third larger than Fort Saint-Frédéric had been, and it was intended to be the new center of British military power in the region. The renamed “His Majesty’s Fort of Crown Point” has been described as a large pentagon shaped fort with five bastions and over 100 cannons, three additional redoubts, a blockhouse, and redans.
The Fort was never directly assaulted, being built after the threat of French invasion had ended. After the Seven Years War, the British left a small garrison force at the fort and it was used largely as a staging area.
In April 1773, Fort Crown Point was destroyed. A chimney fire in a barracks building spread to a nearby powder magazine, leading to an explosion that reduced the mighty log and earthen fort to, in the words of engineer John Montresor, “an amazing useless mass of earth.” A court of inquiry was held to determine the cause of the fire, and testimony pointed the blame as Jane Ross, the wife of a soldier in the 26th Regiment of Foot, who had been boiling soap in the chimney where the fire started. Ross herself testified that such practices were common, and not prohibited by any orders. A tiny number of soldiers were to garrison the surviving buildings.
On May 12, 1775, after Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold led the Green Mountain Boys to seize Fort Ticonderoga, they sent Captain Seth Warner and a force of about 100 men to capture Crown Point. The British soldiers at the ruined fort numbered less than a dozen men, and they were quickly overwhelmed and taken prisoner. While the stone barrack buildings of the fort were in ruins, it still housed a large number of military supplies, including artillery. The 111 cannons captured from the British at Crown Point proved valuable as part of the “noble train of artillery” that Henry Knox took to the Siege of Boston in March of 1776.
Crown Point was also the launching point for the ill-fated American Invasion of Quebec in December 1775. After the failure of the American invasion of Canada in the winter of 1775-1776, the weary and battered American army retreated to Crown Point, some badly wounded and others suffering from Smallpox. When General Horatio Gates decided to withdraw further south to Fort Ticonderoga, General George Washington wrote to Gates disapproving this move.
Crown Point remained abandoned, with the American army making Fort Ticonderoga the centerpiece of their defenses on Lake Champlain. In 1777, when British General John Burgoyne’s army advanced south from Canada, they once again occupied the abandoned fort without firing a shot and used it as a staging area for their siege of Fort Ticonderoga. A small British garrison would remain at Crown Point until after the Battles of Saratoga, when the British withdrew back into Canada once more with the surrender of Burgoyne’s Army. As the British strategy for the war shifted geographic focus from the Northern Theater to the Southern Theater, the British abandoned Crown Point for good in 1780 which had fallen into decay and disrepair. George Washington, traveling through the northern colonies while awaiting news of the peace treaty negotiations in Paris, visited Crown Point on July 21, 1783. This would be the furthest north that Washington would ever travel