Early in 1799, a joint U.S.-Spanish survey commission determined the international boundary to be a few miles south of this spot at 31° N Longitude, prompting Spanish colonial administrators to withdraw their garrison from Fuerte San Esteban, which became St. Stephens. To assert American claims in the region, Congress created the Mississippi Territory and ordered the U.S. Army to establish posts along the new boundary to protect settlers and collect customs duties from commercial traffic on rivers flowing to Mobile in Spanish West Florida. In July 1799, two companies of the 2nd Regiment U.S. Infantry under Captain Bartholomew Schaumburgh marched from Natchez and established Fort Stoddert, named for first Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert, at Ward's Bluff on the Mobile River. The stockade fort had blockhouses in two of its four bastions with ordnance, while soldiers' barracks and officers' quarters formed the curtain walls. Though no battles were fought there, the post figured in notable events: Ephraim Kirby served briefly as federal judge in 1804; after Kirby's death, Judge Harry Toulmin succeeded him and became first postmaster in January 1805; in February 1807, Captain Edmund P. Gaines and mounted riflemen arrested former Vice President Aaron Burr on the road north of the fort and escorted him to Washing, DC, for trial on treason charges. Early in 1811, John Hood and Samuel Miller brought a printing press overland from Chattanooga to the Alabama River and then downstream to the fort intending to publish a newspaper in Mobile, but because the city remained under Spanish rule they instead printed The Mobile Centinel there from May 23, 1811 to June 6, 1812, the first newspaper published in what would become Alabama. On November 30, 1811, Captain Matthew Arbuckle of the 3rd Regiment U.S. Infantry led a road construction party from the fort that met a party working from the east to open the Federal Road to Georgia. During the War of 1812, an expedition launched from the fort seized Mobile from Spain on April 13, 1813. In early September, Fort Stoddert and Mount Vernon Cantonment sheltered thousands of refugees displaced from the Tombigbee and Tensaw settlements by the destruction of Fort Mims at the beginning of the Creek War. During the war, the fort served as military headquarters for General Ferdinand Claiborne's Mississippi Territorial Volunteers and for regular U.S. Army troops operating on the Gulf coast, and by the end of 1814 it no longer functioned as a military post, though its name continued to be used for the civilian community that grew up around it.