8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



was erected which was the style of fortification until 1747 but by 

 1750 a stone and earthwork fort mounting 20 cannon had been 

 established and named Fort St Frederick. It was visited in the 

 summer of 1749 by Peter Kalm, the famous Swedish traveler and 

 naturalist, who has left for us in his quaint and fascinating book 

 of Travels in North America some interesting notes on the local 

 geology. Kalm walked about the ledges and shores both of the 

 mainland and of the point. He noticed the same garnet sand on 

 the beaches which we see today, and was much impressed by the 

 specimens of C o r n u s a m m o n i s or ammonites which he saw 

 in the limestones, mistaking thus the Macl u rites magnus of 

 the Ordovicic for the index fossils of the Jurassic and Cretaceous.^ 



The French were not unmindful of the strategic importance of 

 the headland where now old Fort Ticonderoga is being rebuilt from 

 its ruins, and in 1755 established at this point their Fort Carillon 

 which commanded the portage from Lake Champlain to Lake .St 

 Sacrament. Both Fort Carillon and Fort St Frederick were 

 sources of much irritation to the colonists on the south, and finally 

 in 1759 were captured by the British and Colonial forces under 

 Gen. Jeffrey Amherst afterward made baron in 1776. The British 

 then erected on Crown Point the very important fortification which 

 still remains in a fairly good state of preservation with the excep- 

 tion of the old stone barracks within the earthwork. These latter 

 are mostly in ruins. A plan of them is here given based upon a 

 survey kindly made at the writer's request in 1908 by Mr Samuel 

 Shapira of Witherbee, Sherman & Co., and by permission of the 

 of^cers of the company. The photographs of the earthworks and 

 barracks given on plates 2 to 5 were taken in 1897. The old for 

 remains as a most interesting exhibition of early work of this 

 kind. Its pentagonal outline with the salients and embrasures can 

 be easily followed. It was obviously an undertaking of no small 

 magnitude for its time, and is said tO' have cost 2,000,000 pounds. 

 Its remains should be carefully guarded and preserved as a State 

 or National reservation. 



The old French fort, St Frederick, is much less easy to trace. 

 The lines of its earthworks are, however, not yet fully effaced, and 

 the reproduced photograph on plate i will give some idea of 

 their distinctness. The French fort stood at the water's edge, and 

 extended back in a salient quadrangle some 200 feet so that the 



1 Kalm, Peter. Travels in America. English translation in volume 13, 

 page 374 of Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels. Fort St Frederick is described 

 on p. 604-15. 



