Fort Ticonderoga, The Fort That Changed Hands Four Times

The strategic value of the narrows between Lake Champlain and Lake George was obvious to every army that ever looked at a map of northeastern North America. Whoever held the narrows controlled the water corridor between Canada and the Hudson River Valley, and whoever controlled that corridor controlled the movement of armies across the entire northeastern theater.

The French built a fort there in seventeen fifty-five and called it Fort Carillon. The British captured it four years later and renamed it Ticonderoga. In the spring of seventeen seventy-five, before the Declaration of Independence, before the Continental Army, a Connecticut militia colonel named Ethan Allen arrived before dawn with a force of Green Mountain Boys from Vermont and demanded the British commander surrender. The commander came out in his nightshirt. The fort was taken without a battle.

The cannons inside, nearly sixty bronze and iron pieces, were the most valuable military hardware on the continent at that moment. A young officer named Henry Knox was sent to retrieve them. Knox moved fifty-nine cannon on sleds across the frozen Berkshires and the Hudson River through the winter of seventeen seventy-five and seventy-six, covering roughly three hundred miles. The cannons arrived at Dorchester Heights above Boston in March of seventeen seventy-six. When British commanders woke up on the morning of March fifth, they found American artillery staring down at every ship in the harbor. They evacuated Boston twelve days later without firing a shot.

Fort Ticonderoga itself changed hands one last time. In seventeen seventy-seven, British general Burgoyne retook it as part of the same campaign that would end at Saratoga. The fort fell, and then Burgoyne fell, and the cannons from Ticonderoga were already in Boston.