Fort at Number Four: Thirty-One Men and a Three-Day Siege

In the seventeen forties, this stretch of the Connecticut River in what is now Charlestown, New Hampshire, was the outer edge of the British colonial world. The nearest British settlement to the north was here. Beyond it lay Abenaki and French territory, and the border between them was the forest itself.

The settlers at Plantation Number Four, as the township was called, had been pushing north from Massachusetts since the sixteen eighties. By seventeen forty-four, anxious about French and Native raids, they voted to connect six of their houses together into a fortified rectangle, creating what became known as Fort at Number Four. It was a stockade of heavy timbers, not a professional military installation, built by farmers who intended to stay.

The test came in April seventeen forty-seven during King George's War, the North American front of a larger conflict between Britain and France. A French force under Ensign Joseph Boucher de Niverville arrived with Native American allies and besieged the fort for three days. Inside were thirty-one men under Captain Phineas Stevens. The attackers demanded surrender. Stevens refused. His garrison held the walls, trading gunfire with a force that substantially outnumbered them, until the French and their allies withdrew on April ninth.

The victory became famous along the colonial frontier. Captain Stevens was praised in London, and the British commander who learned of the defense sent him a commemorative sword. When the township incorporated in seventeen fifty-three, the settlers named it Charlestown in honor of the British naval officer who had recognized Stevens's achievement.

Today a reconstructed version of Fort at Number Four stands near the original site, operated as a living history museum. It remains one of the best surviving examples of what frontier defense actually looked like in colonial New England: not a stone castle but six farmhouses bolted together, held by thirty-one men who had nowhere to retreat to.