Bolivar, Ohio
Near Berlin, Ohio
Just outside the village of Bolivar stands Fort Laurens, the only Continental Army fortification built within what would become the state of Ohio during the Revolution. Continental Army soldiers completed it in December of seventeen seventy-eight on the banks of the Tuscarawas River, naming it for Henry Laurens, then president of the Continental Congress. The plan was to use it as a staging point to strike the British garrison at Detroit.
It never got that far. British forces and their Native American allies besieged the fort through the winter of seventeen seventy-nine. Twenty-one soldiers died before the army abandoned the post in August.
Today the Ohio History Connection preserves the site. You can walk the original footprint, see excavated artifacts, and read the names of the men who endured one of the Revolution's most isolated outposts.
