Two Hundred and Fifty Plus, 3

Back to the theme of buildings that are both very old and not old, we’re proud to have been working at Fort Ticonderoga. In order to understand why three different countries wanted this fort you need to think about geography and eighteenth-century technology. There were few roads in the North American colonies once you got away from the east coast, and the relatively small Appalachian Mountains were a serious obstacle to anyone traveling inland. There was (and still is) a relatively easy route from New York to Montreal: the line of the Hudson River, Lake George, and Lake Champlain. If you used small boats that could be carried across some quite short pieces of land, you had a mostly sea-level water route for that 300-mile trek. Good news for trade, bad news if you were worried about the possibility of the neighboring group of colonists invading. In 1755, in the middle of the French and Indian War[1] the French army constructed Fort Carillon at the southern end of Lake Champlain,…