Crown Point, New York: Sentinel of the Revolution on Lake Champlain

Long before the first shots of the American Revolution echoed at Lexington and Concord, Crown Point occupied a place of outsized strategic importance in the geography of North American warfare. Perched on a narrow peninsula jutting into Lake Champlain, roughly ten miles north of Fort Ticonderoga, this windswept promontory controlled the great water highway connecting the St. Lawrence River valley to the Hudson. Whoever held Crown Point held the key to movement between Canada and the American colonies. During the French and Indian War, the British had recognized this fact by constructing one of the largest fortifications in North America there — His Majesty's Fort at Crown Point, a massive star-shaped work of limestone and earth that cost the Crown a fortune and garrisoned hundreds of troops. The main fort alone enclosed over seven acres and mounted 105 cannons, but the broader fortification complex — including three redoubts, a series of blockhouses and redans, all interconnected by military roads — covered more than three and a half square miles. A village had even grown up close to the fort walls, complete with a tavern, store, and apothecary shop. Israel Putnam, who would later become a Continental Army general, had supervised much of the fort's construction. Archaeologist David R. Starbuck would later call it "the greatest British military installation ever raised in North America." But on April 21, 1773, a catastrophic chimney fire broke out in the soldiers' barracks. According to testimony gathered at the subsequent court of inquiry, the blaze was traced to Jane Ross, wife of a soldier in the 26th Regiment of Foot, who had been boiling soap in the chimney where the fire started — a common practice not prohibited by any standing orders. The flames quickly spread to the fort's powder magazine, triggering an explosion that reduced the mighty stronghold to ruin. In May 1774, British military engineer John Montresor surveyed the devastation and described it as "an amazing useless mass of earth only," proposing that the British improve one of the outlying redoubts rather than attempt to repair the main fort. By the time revolution came, Crown Point was a shell of its former self — and yet it would prove indispensable to the American cause, serving alternately as a staging ground, a refuge, a shipyard, and a strategic pivot upon which the fate of the northern theater turned.

The revolutionary story of Crown Point begins in the electric days of May 1775. On May 10, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold famously seized Fort Ticonderoga in a dawn raid that captured the small British garrison without a shot. What is less widely remembered is that two days later, on May 12, Colonel Seth Warner led a detachment of about one hundred of Allen's Green Mountain Boys northward along the lake to Crown Point, where he seized the ruined fort and its skeleton garrison of a sergeant and eight soldiers, along with ten women and children. Warner's capture was bloodless and almost anticlimactic, but its consequences were profound. Together, the twin seizures of Ticonderoga and Crown Point gave the fledgling American rebellion control over the entire southern reach of Lake Champlain — and, critically, possession of a significant quantity of artillery. The Americans captured some 111 cannons and other heavy ordnance at Crown Point alone, a haul that dwarfed even the take at Ticonderoga. It was this artillery that Colonel Henry Knox, a rotund Boston bookseller turned military engineer, would transport overland in one of the war's most celebrated logistical feats. During the brutal winter of 1775–1776, Knox and his men dragged some sixty tons of ordnance across frozen lakes, through forests, and over the Berkshire Mountains to the siege lines around Boston. Of the fifty-nine cannons and mortars that reached Washington's army, twenty-nine came from Crown Point — nearly half the total, a contribution often overshadowed by Ticonderoga's more famous name. When those guns appeared on Dorchester Heights in March 1776, the British evacuated the city. Crown Point's cannons had helped liberate Boston.

Shortly after Warner's capture, Crown Point became a rallying point for the various patriot forces converging on Lake Champlain. On May 23, 1775, the fort served as a meeting place for Ethan Allen, the Green Mountain Boys, and Benedict Arnold and his small armed flotilla. Allen was returning from a brief and unsuccessful probe into Canada, from which British troops had driven him back. Arnold and his vessels would soon assume control of the lake, though within a month he would relinquish command to General Philip Schuyler's Northern Department of the Continental Army in a dispute over authority. During the summer of 1775, Arnold ordered repairs to the barracks, and Crown Point was steadily transformed into a forward base for an even more audacious operation: the American invasion of Canada.

Even as Knox's ox teams were hauling artillery south, Crown Point was serving as the launching point for that invasion. In the autumn of 1775, the Continental Congress authorized an advance into Canada, hoping to make it the fourteenth colony in rebellion. General Richard Montgomery's force of some 1,700 troops embarked from Crown Point, sailing down Lake Champlain toward Montreal. Despite initial success — Montgomery captured Montreal in November — the combined forces of Montgomery and Benedict Arnold were disastrously defeated at Quebec in December 1775, and Montgomery was killed in the assault.

The aftermath of the Canadian debacle brought Crown Point its darkest chapter. In the spring and summer of 1776, the shattered remnants of the American northern army came staggering back to Crown Point, ravaged by smallpox and demoralized by defeat. Men died by the hundreds in makeshift field hospitals and were buried in mass graves. When Generals Gates, Schuyler, and Arnold arrived at Crown Point, they found what Gates described to Congress as a scene where "the Camp had more the Appearance of a General Hospital, than an Army form'd to Oppose the Invasion of a Successful & enterprizing Enemy." A council of war was held at Crown Point on July 5–8, 1776, at which the general officers unanimously decided to abandon the ruined post and withdraw south to the stronger ground at Ticonderoga and Mount Independence. The decision ignited one of the war's sharpest strategic controversies. When General Washington learned of the retreat, he wrote to Gates on July 19 expressing his "exceeding great concern," noting that the withdrawal had been made "contrary to the opinion of all your Field Officers." Gates defended the decision bluntly, telling the commander in chief that Crown Point was worthless: "the ramparts are tumbled down, the casemates are fallen, the barracks burnt, and the whole so perfect a ruin that it would take five times the number of our army, for several summers, to put it in defensible repair."

Yet even as the main army withdrew to Ticonderoga, Crown Point had one more vital role to play. To stop the impending British invasion from Canada, Benedict Arnold began constructing a fleet of makeshift warships on Lake Champlain. The Americans established a sawmill at Crown Point and scoured the ruined fortress for any remaining cannons that could be used to arm the vessels. Arnold's ragtag fleet fought a crucial delaying action at the Battle of Valcour Island on October 11, 1776. In the fall of that year, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hartley and the 6th Pennsylvania Regiment, entrenched at Crown Point, could hear the thunder of the naval engagement rolling across the water. Though Arnold's fleet was destroyed, the delay it imposed proved decisive: the British army under Governor Guy Carleton occupied the abandoned Crown Point in October 1776, but the onset of winter — the first snow fell on October 20 — forced Carleton to withdraw back to Canada rather than press on to Ticonderoga. Arnold and his men had burned their surviving ships and the sawmill at Crown Point before falling back, denying the British any useful infrastructure.

Crown Point remained abandoned through the winter, but its strategic location ensured it would not be forgotten. In June 1777, British General John Burgoyne's army advanced south from Canada and once again occupied the ruined fort, using it as a staging ground for the campaign that would culminate at Saratoga. Burgoyne left a garrison of some 200 men at Crown Point and erected a hospital there to support his advancing army. Despite Burgoyne's catastrophic defeat and surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777 — the turning point of the war — the British retained control of Crown Point and their naval supremacy on Lake Champlain for the remainder of the conflict. A small British garrison held the post until the British finally abandoned the decaying fort in 1780, as their strategic focus shifted to the southern colonies.

In a fitting epilogue, George Washington himself visited Crown Point on July 23, 1783, while touring the northern frontier as the new nation awaited final word of the peace treaty from Paris. It was the furthest north that Washington would ever travel. Writing afterward to the Marquis de Chastellux, Washington described having "made a tour through the