Fort Edgecomb: The Embargo Blockhouse on the Sheepscot

On a small island where the Sheepscot River narrows, you can still see the octagonal wooden blockhouse of Fort Edgecomb exactly as it looked when soldiers first climbed its stairs in eighteen oh eight. It is one of the best-preserved War of Eighteen Twelve-era fortifications in the United States, and its real story is less about battle than about a town's fury at its own government.

In eighteen oh seven, President Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act, cutting off all American trade with Europe in retaliation for British and French interference with American shipping. The law was a disaster for seaport towns. Wiscasset, just across the Sheepscot from this fort, was at that moment one of the busiest ports in all of New England. Merchants here shipped timber, fish, and furs across the Atlantic and had grown wealthy doing it. The Embargo stripped them overnight.

The federal government built Fort Edgecomb not to keep the British out, but first to keep Wiscasset's merchants in, enforcing the unpopular embargo against local smuggling. The two-story octagonal blockhouse was completed in eighteen oh nine, sitting on Davis Island with its cannon aimed at any vessel trying to slip past without authorization. The cannon was fired in anger exactly twice during the fort's active life: once to celebrate President Madison's inauguration and the lifting of the Embargo, and once to mark the peace treaty ending the War of Eighteen Twelve.

When the war came in earnest, the fort became a genuine military post. Soldiers garrisoned here watched the mouth of the Sheepscot and the neighboring Kennebec and Damariscotta rivers, and the fort held British prisoners of war in eighteen fourteen when a British squadron threatened the mid-coast.

The blockhouse never fell, never burned, and was never modernized into obsolescence. It stands here still, its hand-hewn timbers intact, a monument to a trade war that ruined a prosperous town before a real war even began.