Fort Edgecomb occupies just over three acres at the entrance to Wiscasset harbor and was built in 1808 as part of a United States effort to strengthen coastal defenses amid rising tensions with England. During England's conflicts with France, restrictions on shipping and repeated searches of American vessels caused hardships for American merchants, and in 1807 an English ship attacked the American frigate Chesapeake off Virginia while pursuing deserters. President Thomas Jefferson and Congress responded not with war but by authorizing more than one million dollars for new and improved coastal fortifications, including nine in the District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts. After trees were cleared from the site, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn arrived in August 1808 to help Major Moses Porter lay out the fort. The first major work was the waterside battery, built to protect the fort's cannons, with a massive wall, curved earthworks, a powder magazine, wooden cannon platforms, hot shot furnaces, and a palisade. Porter hired local residents to haul stone, water, lime, bricks, and sod, and by late February 1809 the battery was ready for six cannons. He also directed construction of the blockhouse and a building identified on a drawing as quarters that was actually a brick kitchen, while troops later built a storehouse in 1811 and at least one barracks building in 1812. Between 20 and 35 Federal troops were stationed there until 1816, and after they left, local volunteers briefly armed the fort during the Civil War because of threats along the Maine coast from a Confederate raider. Archaeology later uncovered portions of the fort's buildings, showing the quarters or brick kitchen had a substantial dressed granite foundation while the later barracks were poorly built with cobblestone foundations and sills on grade, and excavations also yielded many artifacts, especially buttons from military uniforms, including examples issued in 1798, 1808 to 1815, 1811, and 1812, some associated with the 4th Regiment of Infantry.