2001-09-02 - 11:49 p.m.

Sight Seeing with Harry

Last night I got a phone call from my brother Harry, mentioning that he was coming up to visit today. We made plans to spend the day visiting a couple of the local historical sites. Both of us are avid history fans, but in recent years Harry's knowledge has far outstripped my own.

The first place we decided to see was the fort at Crown Point, or rather the ruins of the fort at Crown Point. Oh, and when I say it was nearby I mean it was less than two hours away by car.

Of vital strategic interest in the 1700s was the waterway from New York to Montreal, which consisted of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. Crown Point was a key strategic point on the southern part of Lake Champlain because the lake was so narrow. Standing on the New York side I probably could have thrown a rock to the Vermont side. Well, maybe not, but Harry probably could. I don't have that great a throwing arm.

The treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, drew the boundary between the Freench and English holdings in the New World. That boundary was the modern border between Canada and the U.S.A., but the French built a fort on Crown Point in 1734 over 100 miles south of the agreed-upon border.

Naughty, naughty French people!

The French used Fort St. Frederic (as they called it) to harass and annoy the English for nearly 25 years. The English made a couple half-hearted attempts to take the fort, but they were repulsed. Then, in 1759, the British under a General Amherst sent an army of over 12,000 to take the fort once and for all. The couple hundred French soldiers at the citadel knew that the jig was up, so they set fire to the fort and fled before the English got there.

At the little museum at the site Harry and I saw a model of the French fort, which flew the French Colonial flag of the time. This flag had a curious design: a white cross on a white background. Harry made the comment that it saved the French the bother of long, drawn-out negotiations: they were already surrendering!

After the British chased the French away, they built their own fort on Crown Point, right next to the old French Citadel. This fort was huge - it was the biggest British fort in the New World at the time: it enclosed about six acres and held around 3,000 men.

In the winter of 1773 the fort had a little mishap. A spark from a chimney ignited the roof of one of the barracks, and the fire spread out of control. When it reached the powder magazine - BOOM! It blew a big hole in the wall. Since things were pretty peaceful and the fort was nearly empty, they didn't bother to fix it. Therefore in 1776 the Americans strolled right in and captured the fort, which they held until the end of the war.

Benedict Arnold used the fort at Crown Point as the launching place for his disastrous campaign against Canada. When his exhausted, defeated soldiers returned they brought back a plague of smallpox with them.

Since the walls were primarily made of logs, all that is left of them is high earthworks. The burned out-shells of the barracks are still there, and there are remnants of the well, and the bakery and other parts of daily life.

It's odd that this fort is in ruins, when it clearly has more historical significance than Fort Ticonderoga or Fort William Henry, which are both fully rebuilt and maintained as tourist attractions. Maybe Crown Point was too big to rebuild.

After we took the walking tour of Crown Point we headed back along the route we came, stooping for a light lunch at a local General Store. After lunch, we decided to go follow the signs for something called the "Penfield Museum." It was a twisting, turning route, following the brown tourist signs, but eventually we pulled up in front what must have been quite a prosperous-looking house 120 years ago.

What it was, in fact, was a memento of a bustling small town that was now dead. It was mainly a collection of all the old stuff that people in the area had found.

In the middle of the 1800s the area was quite a center for iron mining, in fact the first electromagnet on the North American continent was invented there.

But like all the small manufacturing towns in our part of the world, it eventually went bust. "Bad business decisions" were blamed for the disaster, but the plain fact was that people in other places could do the manufacturing better and cheaper and could get the product to the customers easier. Manufacturing has been almost totally cleaned out of upstate New York. EVERYBODY couldn't have suddenly become business dunces.

Ah, the heartbreak of commerce!

Something that both Harry and I noticed was that people in this part of the world seemed to have absolutely no imagination. Nearly everything was given the most obvious name possible. For instance, the town where the iron factory was built was called "Factoryville." "Lake Road" was the name of the road that ran by the lake, in fact ANY road by ANY lake was called that. The name of the street that ran through the middle of Penfield was called "Town Road." I'm not kidding!

And the name of the road that ran through the town park... Park Avenue!

I could go on, but you get the idea.

And thus do two silly guys amuse themselves while driving through the countryside.

On the way back from Penfield, we decided to stop at the house of General Phillip Schuyler, the general who won the battle of Saratoga for the Americans. This was like the fifth or sixth time we'd visited the house, but it always seemed to be closed. This time it was actually open, and I nearly fainted from surprise. However, looking at the sign in front of the house I saw it was due to close for the season tomorrow. Hah! I finally beat you, you bastards!

The house itself was a really nice example of the architecture of the period. The windows in the place were huge, so the house was filled with light and seemed very cheery.

However, the best part of the tour was the guide. She was a very, very thin girl, dressed in a period costume, who looked like she was about 16. She seemed so nervous and awkward that she could hardly talk. A couple of times she started to tell us about various things in the house, and just got lost in a thicket of syntax until she ground to a halt.

Everyone in our tour group was very understanding, especially after we found out that our guide was only twelve. Damn, she was as tall as me! She actually did okay for a seventh grader.

I was glad that we finally got a chance to see the house after so many unsuccessful tries. The sun was getting near the horizon when Harry finally dropped me off at home, and went off to a party at the house of a friend of his.

Little did I know that the REAL party was going to be happening at my house in the wee hours of the morning, but that story properly belongs to tomorrow...

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