Fort Ticonderoga

This narrow point had been a crossroads long before any European fort. It lay in country long traveled by the Haudenosaunee and by the Abenaki and other Algonquian-speaking peoples, whose canoe routes ran the length of Lake Champlain between the St. Lawrence and the Hudson. Control of the narrows meant control of the whole water corridor.

The French began building the fort, which they called Carillon, in 1755 during the French and Indian War. In 1758 a small French force here repelled a far larger British army in a bloody battle, but the British took the fort the next year and renamed it Ticonderoga, from a Haudenosaunee word describing the place where the waters meet. For the next years it stood as a British stronghold guarding the northern frontier.

When the Revolution broke out in the spring of 1775, the fort's cannon suddenly mattered a great deal to the new American cause. Before dawn on May 10, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, joined by Benedict Arnold, crossed the lake and swarmed the sleeping British garrison. Allen is said to have demanded the fort's surrender in the name of a higher authority, and the small garrison, taken completely by surprise, gave it up without bloodshed.

The prize was the fort's artillery. That winter, a young officer named Henry Knox organized the extraordinary feat of hauling roughly sixty cannon on sleds and boats through snow and over frozen rivers all the way to Boston, hundreds of miles away. Mounted on the heights above the city, those guns forced the British to evacuate Boston, one of the first great American successes of the war. The fort changed hands again later in the war, but its 1775 capture had already done its work.

After the Revolution the fort was abandoned, its stone quarried by local builders and its walls left to crumble. Through the 19th century it stood as a picturesque ruin above the lake, drawing sightseers and painters to its broken ramparts.

In the early 20th century a private family who owned the land undertook a careful reconstruction, rebuilding the fort using original French plans and turning it into a museum. The work continued for decades, and today Fort Ticonderoga holds a remarkable collection of 18th-century military artifacts, along with restored barracks, a working powder magazine, and interpretive programs. It stands as one of the earliest and most thorough historic restorations in the country.

Below the ramparts lies the King's Garden, a walled formal garden first laid out in the early 20th century on ground gardened since the fort's earliest days, now planted with heirloom flowers and vegetables. Trails lead up nearby Mount Defiance, the heights that overlook the fort and once decided its fate, for a sweeping view over the narrows toward Vermont's Green Mountains.

The point itself sits in a landscape of lake, marsh, and mountain woodland. Ospreys and eagles fish the narrows, herons stalk the shallows, and deer move through the fields at the fort's edge. In every season the water and the mountains frame the stone walls, a reminder of why armies once fought so hard to hold this single point of land.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.