Crown Point contains the sites of two major eighteenth-century fortifications, France's Fort St. Frédéric and Great Britain's fort at Crown Point, whose ruins have survived substantially unchanged since the late eighteenth century and have been separately designated National Historic Landmarks by the U.S. Department of the Interior. On this peninsula, French, British, and Native American people all left their mark along a colonial North American water route formed by the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River from Montréal to New York City. Between 1734 and 1738, the French built Fort St. Frédéric, an awe-inspiring stone fortress planned by Chaussegros de Léry, and a thriving French community grew around it, supported in part by a windmill that ground wheat into flour, until the settlers abandoned the area in 1759 as a large British army approached and the French destroyed the fort rather than let it fall into British hands. After occupying Crown Point in 1759, the British began building one of the largest forts they would construct in North America, a massive pentagonal fortification with walls over 20 feet high, designed to hold up to 4,000 men and withstand enemy artillery, but in 1773 an accidental chimney fire burned out of control and reduced it to ruins. In its ruined but unaltered state, the Crown Point fort has been regarded as probably the finest existing architectural and archeological type specimen in the United States of a superior example of eighteenth-century military engineering, and its Georgian style barracks are preserved as authentic ruins.
