Fort Ticonderoga

Fort Ticonderoga is a large eighteenth-century fort built at a narrows near the south end of Lake Champlain in upstate New York. The Fort Ticonderoga site controls a river portage alongside the mouth of the rapids-infested La Chute River in the 3.5 miles (6 kilometers) between Lake Champlain and Lake George that was strategically important during the 18th-century colonial conflicts between Great Britain and France, and again to a lesser extent during the American Revolutionary War.

At stake were commonly-used trade routes between the English-controlled Hudson River Valley and the French-controlled Saint Lawrence River Valley. The importance of the Fort Ticonderoga site was further amplified by terrain, both lakes were long and narrow oriented north-south, as were many the many ridge lines of the Appalachians with the orientation as far south as Georgia creating the near-impassable mountainous terrains to the east and west of the Great Appalachian Valley which the site commanded. The name "Ticonderoga" comes from an Iroquois word tekontaró:ken, meaning "it is at the junction of two waterways".

The French, who called it Fort Carillon, constructed the fort between 1755 and 1758, during the French and Indian War. The fort attained a reputation of impregnability during the 1758 Battle of Carillon when an attack by 16,000 British troops near the fort was repelled by 4,000 French defenders. In 1759, the British returned, and drove a token French garrison from the fort merely by occupying high ground that threatened the fort. During the American Revolutionary War the fort again saw action in May 1775 when it was captured in a surprise attack by the Green Mountain Boys and other state militia commanded by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold. Americans held it until June 1777, when British forces under General John Burgoyne again occupied high ground above the fort and threatened the Continental Army, leading it to withdraw from the fort and its surrounding defenses. The only direct attack on the fort took place during the British occupation of the fort in September 1777, when John Brown led 500 Americans in an attempt to capture the fort from about 100 British defenders.

The fort was abandoned by the British following the failure of the Fort Ticonderoga campaign, and ceased to be of any notable military value after 1781. It fell into ruins, was stripped of some of its usable stone, metal and woodwork, and became a stop on tourist routes of the area in the 19th century. The Fort Ticonderoga was restored by its private owners early in the 20th century, and is now operated by a foundation as a tourist attraction, museum, and research center.