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. Designed to house up to 4,000 men and withstand attack by enemy artillery, the fort's pentagonal walls rose over twenty feet high. 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 the very next day, on May 11, Captain Seth Warner led a detachment of the Green Mountain Boys up the east side of Lake Champlain toward Crown Point. There they crossed the lake and continued to the British garrison, seizing the ruined fort and capturing its skeleton force of nine soldiers — along with ten women and children — without resistance. Critically, Warner's men salvaged the cannons that had been buried when the fort's walls collapsed in the 1773 fire; in all, over 111 cannons and a wealth of heavy ordnance fell into American hands. Crown Point and Ticonderoga together became the focus of the first American offensive of the war, and the artillery seized at both posts would prove essential to the patriot cause. Of the fifty-nine cannons that Colonel Henry Knox transported to Boston in his legendary "Noble Train of Artillery" during the winter of 1775–76 — an epic 300-mile journey by boat, horse, and ox-drawn sledge through the frozen Berkshires — twenty-nine originated at Crown Point. Those guns, emplaced on Dorchester Heights in March 1776, forced the British evacuation of Boston and gave the Revolution one of its earliest strategic triumphs.

Barely a month after Warner's capture of the fort, Crown Point became the site of a remarkable and largely forgotten act of political defiance. On June 15, 1775, not far from the historic site, thirty-one men from the Northeast signed a "Declaration of Principles," vowing they would "never become slaves," calling for a union of the states, and pledging their allegiance to the newly formed Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Among the most prominent signers was William Gilliland, an Irish immigrant and New York City merchant who controlled about 50,000 acres between Crown Point and Plattsburgh. Benedict Arnold, then commanding at Ticonderoga, issued the written principles from Crown Point to rally support for the patriot cause. The signers did so at great personal risk, as the document marked them as potential traitors to the British Crown at a time when the punishment for treason was death.

Through the summer and fall of 1775, Crown Point served as Benedict Arnold's base of operations for his small American naval force on Lake Champlain. On May 23, 1775, the fort was the meeting place for Allen, the Green Mountain Boys, and Arnold. Arnold ordered repairs to the barracks and used Crown Point as a staging ground for American control of the lake. But command disputes between Arnold and Allen, and later with Connecticut militia sent to hold the forts, plagued the American presence. By midsummer, Arnold had relinquished control to General Philip Schuyler's Northern Department of the Continental Army. Crown Point then became the launching pad for patriot attacks directed at British-controlled Montreal and Quebec on the St. Lawrence River. In the fall of 1775, Schuyler's army embarked from Crown Point with 1,700 troops for the invasion of Canada — a campaign that would meet initial success at Montreal under General Richard Montgomery before ending in catastrophe at Quebec in December 1775.

The spring and summer of 1776 brought one of