Ticonderoga, whose name comes from an Iroquoian word meaning “place between two waters,” has long stood at a strategic crossroads in the Lake Champlain Valley. In 1609, a battle on the shore of Lake Champlain brought Mohawks and Algonquian-speaking warriors from Canada into conflict with three Frenchmen including Samuel de Champlain, marking the first combat between Europeans and Native Americans in the Champlain Valley. Through the late 17th and early 18th centuries, its position placed it repeatedly in the path of Native and European warfare. In 1755, after a French defeat at the Battle of Lake George, Michael Chartier de Lotbiniere began planning a fortification on the peninsula to secure the water route to Canada, and it was named Fort Carillon. In 1757, nearly 2,000 Native warriors gathered there before the successful attack on Fort William Henry, though confusion and misunderstandings soon shattered the French-Native partnership. In 1758, General James Abercrombie led the largest military force yet assembled in North America against Fort Carillon, but the French under the Marquis de Montcalm, outnumbered and with few Native allies, inflicted a devastating defeat from hastily built defenses, producing nearly 2,000 British and American casualties. In 1759, as General Jeffery Amherst advanced and Quebec was threatened, the French withdrew after blowing up the fort’s powder magazine, and the British renamed it Fort Ticonderoga. After Canada surrendered in 1760, British troops held the fort continuously with small detachments until the opening of the American Revolution. On May 10, 1775, colonial forces under Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold surprised and captured the small British garrison, gaining an important material victory. Later that year Henry Knox arrived on George Washington’s orders, selected 59 pieces of artillery weighing nearly 60 tons, and had them hauled nearly 300 miles to help force the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776. Ticonderoga then served as a base for the American invasion of Canada and, after that campaign collapsed, as a place to regroup and prepare defenses that turned back a British test in October 1776. In 1777, General John Burgoyne’s advance forced the outnumbered Americans under General Arthur St. Clair to evacuate, and the site remained in British and German hands until it was abandoned after news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. After a brief final military reoccupation in 1781, the site passed to New York State and later to Columbia and Union Colleges. In 1820, William Ferris Pell bought the garrison grounds and fenced in the ruins, beginning the first preservation of an historic battlefield in American history. Restoration began in 1908, and the Fort Ticonderoga Museum opened to the public on July 6, 1909, as an early effort to restore the fort and establish a premier military museum in America.
