Fort Ticonderoga

Perched where Lake Champlain narrows toward Lake George, Fort Ticonderoga commanded the water highway between Canada and the Hudson Valley — making it one of the most fought-over pieces of ground in colonial North America. Built by the French, seized by the British, captured by American rebels in a dawn raid, and then lost again, its guns were hauled 300 miles to force the British out of Boston. Few fortifications changed the course of two wars so many times.

The French built Fort Carillon in 1755 during the French and Indian War to guard the strategic portage between Lake Champlain and Lake George. In 1758 it was the site of a major British defeat, but the British finally captured it in 1759, renaming it Ticonderoga, an Iroquois-derived word meaning roughly 'between two waters.'

At the outbreak of the Revolution, the fort's cannons became an irresistible prize. On May 10, 1775, Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys and Benedict Arnold surprised the small British garrison and captured the fort without a fight, in the first American offensive victory of the war. The following winter, Colonel Henry Knox led an extraordinary expedition hauling 60 tons of Ticonderoga's captured cannons roughly 300 miles through snow to Boston.

Knox's 'Noble Train of Artillery' arrived in March 1776 and forced the British to evacuate Boston. The fort itself fell back into British hands in 1777 during the Saratoga campaign, then was abandoned as the war moved south. Left to decay, it was restored beginning in 1909 by private owners and is now operated as a museum by the nonprofit Fort Ticonderoga Association, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.