Blockhouse

This sturdy granite blockhouse is the oldest surviving structure at Fort Trumbull State Park and the only building still standing from the 1794 federal fortification program that constructed defenses from Georgia to Maine. After President George Washington urged Congress to fund the fortification of American seaports in 1794, French engineer Stephen Rochefontaine directed the effort in New England and built this blockhouse, sometimes called a citadel, as the first Fort Trumbull was repaired and reconfigured on and around a site first fortified almost twenty years earlier. Its thick stone walls taper upward and have few openings, and Rochefontaine designed it to be bomb proof so exploding shells could not penetrate the walls. He placed a magazine for storing ammunition in the cellar. The building was planned to house twenty-two soldiers in peacetime and fifty men in war, and to serve as a final defensive stronghold if the fort came under attack and all else failed.

New London, Connecticut · United States