The area on the Hudson River now known as Fort Edward once lay between the British colonies to the south and the colonies of New France to the north. In the mid-eighteenth century, as tensions between the British and French escalated, the British began constructing Fort Edward and Fort William Henry soon after the battle of Lake George in 1755. Fort Edward, named for Edward Augustus, Duke of York and Albany and brother to King George III, and Fort William Henry, along with smaller nearby fortifications, protected the portage routes to Lake George and Lake Champlain and the settlements farther south on the river. Fort Edward became Britain’s largest military encampment in the colonies and America’s third largest city at the time, and it served as base quarters for British troops sent to fight at Fort Carillon, now Fort Ticonderoga. Rogers Island on the Hudson River at Fort Edward was home to Rogers’ Rangers from 1757 to 1759, and in total fifteen thousand to sixteen thousand British and Provincial soldiers were stationed at Fort Edward in the 1750s. After the war ended in 1763, the British moved their troops to Crown Point and Fort Edward was left largely abandoned. A few years later, during the American Revolution, the Fort Edward region returned to prominence when General John Burgoyne brought a British army south from Canada in the summer of 1777 and occupied the area north of Fort Edward. That July, Jane McCrea, a young woman colonist, was killed and scalped at Fort Edward by Native Americans accompanying Burgoyne’s army. Soon afterward, American Patriots, angered by the McCrea tragedy, defeated Burgoyne and his troops at the Battle of Saratoga.