Why build Fort Allen?

After the British Royal Navy bombarded and burned Portland on October 18, 1775, in a nine-hour attack led by Captain Henry Mowat, memory of the town’s devastation endured and fear of another assault remained strong. In 1814, after the British captured several coastal Maine cities and new threats loomed, five thousand militiamen strengthened local defenses by building a lower waterfront battery and then, in just twenty days, erecting Fort Allen on high ground. This earthworks battery was designed to hold eight guns, and with six forts defending Portland Harbor, the British never assaulted. The fort was named on October 27, 1814, by local militia in honor of William Henry Allen, the twenty-seven-year-old commander of the U.S. brig Argus, who in 1813, while disguised in British colors, destroyed eighteen vessels off the coast of England in one month before being mortally wounded in his final battle and buried by the British with full military honors. Fort Allen was a simple earthen gun battery, later altered when a gap was cut through it in the 1890 to create a path, and though erosion reduced its size, it is the only one of Maine’s state earthwork harbor forts from the War of 1812 that still remains.

Portland, Maine · United States