Presque Isle: Perry's Fleet and the Almost-Island
Near Erie, Pennsylvania
French explorers named it Presque Isle, meaning almost an island. The name turned out to be more accurate than they knew. This three-thousand-acre sandy peninsula curving into Lake Erie west of the city of Erie has actually been fully separated from the mainland several times by powerful storms, reverting entirely to island status before erosion and wave action reconnected it. It formed after the last ice age some eleven thousand years ago and has been migrating eastward ever since, pushed by wind and current. The Erie people fished and hunted its shores long before any European set foot here.
The peninsula's shallow, sheltered harbor turned out to be precisely what the United States Navy needed in the summer of eighteen thirteen. The War of eighteen twelve was going badly on the Great Lakes frontier, and Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry was tasked with building an American fleet from scratch on Lake Erie. He chose Presque Isle because the restricted entrance to the harbor, too shallow for British warships to enter, made the construction site defensible. Through the spring and summer of eighteen thirteen, Perry's shipwrights felled trees and built a squadron of nine vessels. The two largest, the brigs Lawrence and Niagara, were built at Erie.
On September tenth, eighteen thirteen, Perry sailed his fleet to meet the British squadron near the Bass Islands in Ohio. His flagship Lawrence was hammered into a wreck, but Perry rowed himself through cannon fire to the undamaged Niagara and resumed the fight. The result was the first unqualified defeat of a British naval squadron in history. Perry's dispatch to General William Henry Harrison has become one of the most famous sentences in American military history: we have met the enemy and they are ours. The victory gave the United States control of Lake Erie, forced the British to abandon Detroit, and opened the path to American dominance of the Northwest.
Today Presque Isle is Pennsylvania's most visited state park, drawing more than four million visitors a year to its beaches, cycling trails, and birding grounds.
