In 1759, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Pownall established Fort Pownall at Penobscot River after earlier urging that a fort at this site, then called Aquahassidek, would secure a fine country, drive inland the remaining Noridgwoak and Penobscot Indians, and strengthen Britain's frontier near the Bay of Fundy. Pownall led four hundred men who built the fort and named it for him, and although it never fired a shot in anger, its presence encouraged Anglo-American settlement in the Penobscot region. In 1775, British forces seized its cannons and powder, and later a Continental regiment burned the blockhouse and filled much of the ditch system to prevent British occupation. Knowledge of the fort's appearance survives chiefly through a detailed plan by an unknown artist and through an 1828 account recorded by Revolutionary War veteran Joseph P. Martin from someone apparently familiar with it, describing a regular fortification with four square flankers, a central blockhouse, a surrounding ditch, cannon, and officers' houses between the fort and the riverbank. Brigadier General Samuel Waldo, an early settler, wealthy Maine land proprietor, British army officer, and proprietor of the Waldo Patent, joined Pownall's 1759 expedition but died suddenly of an apoplexy near the falls at age sixty-three; he was buried at the fort site with full military honors and a religious service before his remains were later moved to King's Chapel in Boston.