Fort Frederick: One Fort, Three Wars

Most frontier forts from the seventeen hundreds survived only as earthworks or faint depressions in the soil. Fort Frederick, standing above the Potomac River in western Maryland, is different. Its massive stone walls, built to last rather than to be abandoned, have endured nearly two hundred seventy years and three different wars.

Maryland Governor Horatio Sharpe ordered construction in seventeen fifty-six, at the outset of the French and Indian War, and named the fort after Frederick Calvert, the sixth Lord Baltimore and proprietor of Maryland. The design followed the geometric principles of Sebastien de Vauban, the French engineer whose star-shaped fortification style had shaped European military architecture for half a century. Rather than the log palisades typical of frontier defense, Sharpe insisted on stone walls nearly three feet thick, enclosing roughly one and a half acres of barracks and storehouses.

No battle ever came to Fort Frederick. It served as a staging ground and supply depot for British forces pushing west toward the French garrison at Fort Duquesne, and in seventeen sixty-three it sheltered seven hundred terrified settlers when Pontiac's pan-tribal uprising swept through the Ohio Valley. The fort then sat quiet for over a decade before the Revolution gave it a new purpose: prisoner of war camp.

After the American victories at Saratoga in seventeen seventy-seven and Yorktown in seventeen eighty-one, hundreds of captured British and German soldiers were confined within those same walls. The stone that had been meant to keep enemies out now kept them in.

The Civil War brought the fort back to life once more. Maryland Union soldiers garrisoned it in eighteen sixty-one and mounted artillery to protect the nearby Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, both critical supply lines for Washington.

In the nineteen thirties, Civilian Conservation Corps crews restored the walls to their colonial-era profile. What they uncovered still stands today, a rare stone witness to the colonial and early American West.