Fort Presque Isle and the French Foothold

Before Erie was Erie, this peninsula had a French name. Presque Isle means 'almost an island' in French, and when you look at the long curved spit of land reaching out into the lake, you understand immediately why they named it that. The French understood strategic geography, and in seventeen fifty-three they planted a fort right here to control the northern approach to the continental interior.

The man behind that decision was the Governor of New France, the Marquis Duquesne, the same man for whom Fort Duquesne, what is now Pittsburgh, was named. He sent Captain Paul Marin north with a large force to build Fort Presque Isle on the bluff overlooking the bay. The fort's purpose was to anchor the northern end of the Venango Path, a trail running south through the Allegheny Plateau that connected Lake Erie to the Ohio River Valley.

The French were building a chain of forts, from Lake Erie down to the Ohio, intended to box out British expansion from the east. It worked for a few years, but the Seven Years War turned everything. After the British victory at Fort Niagara in seventeen fifty-nine, the French burned their own fort and retreated north rather than let it fall.

The British rebuilt on nearly the same spot, and their version of Fort Presque Isle stood until seventeen sixty-three, when Ottawa war leader Pontiac organized a coordinated assault on British posts across the Great Lakes. Erie's garrison held off the attack for three days until someone figured out they could set the blockhouse roof on fire from above. The survivors were taken prisoner. The fort was never rebuilt.

The Venango Path that the fort protected became, in time, a road, then a highway. The route you drove to get here follows roughly the same corridor that French soldiers marched down two hundred seventy years ago.