Fort Laurens: Ohio's Only Revolutionary War Fort
Near Berlin, Ohio
A few miles west of I-Seventy-Seven, near the town of Bolivar, stands the only fort built in Ohio during the American Revolution. Fort Laurens was built in November of seventeen seventy-eight when Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh led twelve hundred Continental soldiers southwest from Pittsburgh with an ambitious plan: capture the British garrison at Detroit, neutralize their Native American allies, and push the western frontier under American control.
McIntosh never made it to Detroit. His supply lines were too thin, his men too few. He built a fort on the bank of the Tuscarawas River as a forward base and named it for Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress. Then he left behind a garrison of one hundred fifty men and headed back to Pittsburgh.
What followed was one of the hardest winters of the war. Beginning in February of seventeen seventy-nine, British officers and warriors from the Wyandot, Mingo, and Munsee nations surrounded the fort. Food ran out. By the time the siege lifted in late March, the defenders had been reduced to pulling roots from frozen ground and boiling their rawhide moccasins into soup.
The siege ended not from victory but from mutual starvation. Both sides were starving. The attackers withdrew. A relief column eventually reached the fort, but the new American commander, Colonel Daniel Brodhead, recognized the position was untenable. On August second, seventeen seventy-nine, the last Continentals departed. The fort was never rebuilt.
Today the site is a state memorial. The outline of the fort is marked in the grass, and the museum preserves the artifacts and the story of the forgotten Ohio soldiers who held on through an impossible winter.
