Fort Number Four: The Northernmost Post That Refused to Fall
New Hampshire
Charlestown, New Hampshire, on the Connecticut River's western bank, grew up around a stockade called Fort at Number Four, and the fort earned its place in history by surviving a siege it had almost no right to survive.
In seventeen thirty-five, the colonial governor of Massachusetts granted a new township at a bend in the Connecticut River as the fourth in a line of frontier settlements stretching up the valley. The settlers who came to cultivate Plantation Number Four were living at the absolute edge of the British colonial world. To the north and west lay territory contested between Britain and France, and the Native peoples allied with New France were a constant presence. The settlers built a stockade of upright logs, gathered their houses inside it, and tried to farm.
In the spring of seventeen forty-seven, during the broader conflict known as King George's War, a French and Indigenous force, reported at anywhere from about seventy to several hundred men, arrived to end the settlement permanently. They surrounded Fort Number Four and demanded surrender. Inside the walls, Captain Phineas Stevens had thirty-one militia men, a handful of women and children, and three days' worth of supplies.
For three days Stevens refused to surrender. The attackers attempted to burn the stockade by floating flaming carts of hay toward the walls. Stevens's men used long poles to push them away. The besieging force, unable to breach the walls and short on supplies of their own, withdrew. The thirty-one men inside had held.
The successful defense became famous in the colonies, and Captain Stevens's reputation spread widely. The settlement was rechartered as Charlestown in seventeen fifty-three, named for a British admiral who had sent Stevens a sword in honor of the defense.
A reconstruction of Fort Number Four stands in Charlestown today as an open-air museum, with the same style of upright-log walls that kept the attackers out nearly three centuries ago. The Connecticut River still runs just below, broad and unhurried, past the northernmost post that refused to fall.
