Fort Ticonderoga- Saturday, October 10, 2026

     Today is the start of October Craziness.  It is the first of four weekends in a row that Scott is going off on adventures.  Two of the weekends are for Revolutionary War 250th anniversary events, and two are for music.  Scott says he's really not crazy.  Julie believes he most certainly is, but apparently loves him very much and is letting him go on his foolish quests.

     Usually in this blog, the pronoun "we" means Scott and Julie, but Julie is staying home, being Grandma to Wyatt this weekend.  This weekend, "we" means Scott and Emma, since she accepted Dad's invitation to tag along.  That meant that Scott had to wait for her to get home from her overnight shift, at 6:40 or so this morning.  She said she'd pack when she got home from work.  When Dad joking expressed concern, she said, "No, you of all people don't get to say that," and reminded him that he is usually the last-minute packer.  She took some satisfaction when she returned home from work and found that Dad was indeed still packing and still had to take a shower.

     We left home at a little after 7:00.  Emma made a nest for herself way in the back and slept nearly the whole way.  That left Scott able to listen to his music for the ride.  The fall colors may be a little past peak, but there were lots of pretty yellows and reds still on the trees and there was lots of them to look at, especially after the GPS took us off the Thruway and into the woods of the southern Adirondacks.  The sun was shining brightly, and we passed through some cute little mountain towns like Prospect and Lake Pleasant.  Scott stopped at the public library in Lake Pleasant to use the bathroom, and remarked to them that it was such a pretty little place.  We arrived at Fort Ticonderoga at about 1:30, with lots of time left in the afternoon to do things there.

     The fighting at Fort Ticonderoga was biggest during the French and Indian War, but there were several times when action took place here during the Revolution.  In May of 1775, just shortly after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold, and about 80 Green Mountain Boys made a surprise attack on this fort and captured it for the Patriots.  It was the first offensive victory for the Americans and put this important fort and its valuable cannons in Patriot hands.  (Scott wasn't planning for this event last spring because he had just come back from Lexington and Concord.  Because he wasn't paying attention, he was taken by surprise when he saw on Facebook that Fort Ticonderoga was "now" controlled by the Americans.  He was almost as shocked as the British were.)  Henry Knox famously brought many of the cannon from here overland in his "Noble Train of Artillery" to aid in the siege of Boston.  (We got to see part of that commemoration last December.)  The American control of the fort ended when it was taken by the British in 1777 as part of General Burgoyne's campaign that would lead to his defeat and surrender at Saratoga that fall.  (Perhaps Scott will make it back here over the 4th of July weekend next year?) That September of 1777, there was a huge cannonade between Germans in Fort Ticonderoga using captured American guns and Americans on Mount Defiance using captured British guns.   American forces would attack the fort again at that time, though they weren't able to capture it. 

    What brought us here this weekend, though, was the actions of October 1776.  The British and Patriot navies fought in Valcour Bay near Plattsburgh, where we are going tomorrow.   The British were under the command of General Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec.  The British goal was to send a force up Lake Champlain from Quebec to capture Fort Ticonderoga.  This fort had been the jumping off point that the Patriots used to try to invade Canada.  If it were in British hands again, it could also be an effective position for the British to move through New York State.   At the Battle of Valcour Bay, Arnold managed to slow the British navy down, but could not stop them.  (More on that tomorrow.)  Carleton brought his forces into this vicinity on October 28, 1776.  He was expecting to face the shattered army that he had chased out of Quebec, but was surprised to find a strong force of 13,000 Continentals waiting to defend the fort.    Knowing that the fort was nearly impregnable against an assault, and that the winter would make a siege difficult at best, the British withdrew back down Lake Champlain to Quebec, and left Fort Ticonderoga for next summer's work.

      When we entered Fort Ticonderoga's grounds, a staff member in a toll booth asked Scott if the admission would be for one adult.  Scott said, "No, two adults."  As we drove to the parking lot, we laughed about how he must have thought Scott was paying for an imaginary friend, since Emma was still laying down, hidden in the back.   The fort was quite busy, perhaps because it was an important anniversary weekend.  There were many people who were there for a three day conference-- "Arnold's Defeat or Ultimate Victory? Perspectives on the 1776 Campaign."  (It's probably good that Scott didn't know about this conference before.)   We used the bathrooms, browsed quickly around the gift shop, and then headed into the fort.  We admired the view of the lake below and entered the main gates.  A plaque read, "Through this entrance to the Place D'Armes of the fort have passed..." and then it had a list of 19 famous people, starting with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.  "You tread in their footsteps."

     Scott has only been to Fort Ticonderoga once before, back in 2004.  Anna was not yet 4 years old and Emma was still in China.  (That was before we started this blog too.)  Julie, Scott and Anna had left on the last day of the school year, anxious to go somewhere, anywhere, and we set up a tent at Lake George.  We didn't know that it was French & Indian War weekend at Fort Ticonderoga until we arrived and saw the crowds.  Scott and Julie remembered liking the fort then, but a lot has changed in the 22 years since.  For one thing, as Scott remembers it, the interior of most of the buildings were "primitive" looking, in an attempt to resemble what the fort was like for the soldiers.  Today, the buildings inside the fort have mostly been turned into museum exhibits.  The artifacts fill cases in brightly lit spaces.  The overall presentation is very nice, though, and we enjoyed exploring there.

     The first building that we entered had a video playing on a continuous loop.  It was titled, "Ticonderoga- A Place Between Two Waters" (It is available to be viewed on YouTube here.)  We watched most of the video.  When Scott turned around at the end, he was excited to see that the back of the room had relics from the schooner Royal Savage.  This ship was part of the American force at the Battle of Valcour Bay, where we are going tomorrow.   The ship had been run aground after being heavily damaged in the fight, and eventually exploded.  Archaeologists were able to uncover the gun carriage on display here and several cannonballs.  We exited the theater room and passed a shiny life-sized statue of Ethan Allen, and Scott had to explain to Emma why he made a joke about a furniture store.

     Elsewhere in that same building was an exhibit called, "A Revolutionary Anthology." This exhibit is scheduled to be here until 2028, and apparently this is part 3 of the exhibition, "Revolutionary Possibilities."    Among the many interesting artifacts was a lock of Benedict Arnold's hair!   Nearby, Emma liked seeing the seal of Angelica Schuyler, whom she knows as a character from the musical Hamilton.  Many of the artifacts were being discussed in videos playing there, which are also available online.  Upstairs, we saw a smaller exhibit called, "The Archaeology of Independence" with many artifacts that have been excavated here.  We went outside where it was a little chillier, and Emma noted that the dragonflies on the stone walls didn't seem to like the cold.  We didn't watch the whole of the cannon demonstration, but were able to get there just as they touched the powder off.

     We explored the exhibits in the largest of the three main buildings, which included many artifacts in the fort's collections.  There were animal bones that showed what the soldiers were using for meat- beef, pork, mutton, venison, etc., but the most interesting bones might have been those of the now extinct passenger pigeon, which the soldiers probably ate by the score.  There were many guns, swords, and even carved powder horns on display, but Emma noticed a strange circle in panes of one of the windows.  A docent noticed our interest in it, and told us that it was not from a bullet.  It was, in fact, a mark put in during the manufacturing process, and wasn't really intended to be put into the windows, but the guy doing the reconstruction work thought it added character to the glass and used it anyway.  We noticed many more of the same circular indentations in other windows as we went through the rest of the fort.  

     In another room, Scott noticed a small original cannon that the fort staff used in demonstrations up until the 1990s.  Even though this cannon was original, the fort staff fired gun powder out of it and fired "cannonballs" made of plaster of Paris at an iron target!   Scott couldn't imagine doing that at Fort Niagara, even though he would have been at about the same time.  In a display called "The Diaorama-Rama" we saw a number of different interesting recreations that had been used for interpretation here at the fort in the past.  We went through a musty smelling barracks, with beds that had ticks that must have been full of straw.  Outside, in the center of the "Place D'Armes," Scott found the marker that shows the beginning of the trail that Knox used for his "Noble Train of Artillery."  He had to get his picture there since he had one from on the trail itself, and of course, another at the end of the journey on Dorchester Heights in Boston.  We were entertained in one room that had very "hands-on" exhibits.  One allowed you to shoot tiny wooden "cannonballs" at a fort, almost as if it was in a giant pinball machine.  Emma laughed as Scott's first shot went dribbling limply out of the little cannon because he hadn't pulled the plunger back far enough.  Nearby, we explored some of the rooms that the military interpreters use and they had the same rustic quality that Fort Niagara's barracks do.  The embers of the fire that they were using for cooking were still hot and the peas porridge or stew or whatever-it-was was still there.   As we left the fort, Scott managed to get a video of the musket firing demonstration, just as he was about to shoot, the same way we had for the artillery demonstration.

    We went back to the gift shop and started spending money.  Scott bought a T-shirt that says, "Hold the Line- From Valcour Island to Ticonderoga."  He is certainly going to wear it tomorrow.  He also liked a shirt about Benedict Arnold that said "Patriot" on the front and "Traitor" on the back, but they were out of his size.    He was talked into two books by the fort staff, and he also got a patch for his bulletin board at school.  He wanted a pin, but couldn't find one.  We got something for Abby and something for Julie too.

     We left the gift shop and went around to below the fort to see the two oxen.  There was merchandise in the gift shop that told us that their names were "Mick" and "Mack."   We saw a sign that promised a 1.75 mile trail around the Carillon battlefield from the French & Indian War, and we started to try to follow it.  Even though Emma had a map on her phone from the QR code on the sign, it was difficult to tell exactly where we were supposed to be.  We saw some earthworks, but we weren't seeing any signs that we were expecting on the trail.  We made our way across the fields to an area where there are reconstructed soldier huts.  These wooden buildings were empty, but interesting, and smelled of fresh cut wood.  The American soldiers who built the original camp here in 1776 were apparently shocked to find that they were digging up graves from the British who had died here in the French and Indian War, back in 1758.  That British attack cost them 2,000 casualties and several times today, we heard it called the day of the bloodiest military action in North America until the Mexican-American War in the 1840s.  We gave up on trying to follow the trail, though.

     We got back in the car and drove to Mount Defiance.  This commanding position sits over 700 feet above the fort.  Once the British accomplished the amazing and unexpected feat of getting cannon up there in 1777, the Americans had little choice but to withdraw.  Later, the Americans would capture the guns there and turn them on the German Hessians in the fort.  We didn't come up here when we visited in 2004, so Scott didn't know what to expect.  We had a token from the admission that we paid originally, and we used it to raise a gate to allow a car to drive up the narrow road to parking near the top.  It was bumpy, and a little nerve wracking when we had to make way for cars coming down.  The parking lot was small, oddly shaped, and full, and we had to wait for someone to leave before we could fit in a place.  The steepest part of the road was the last bit that we had to climb on foot.  Once we were at the top, though, the view of Fort Ticonderoga and the surrounding area was tremendous.  A young but knowledgeable military interpreter was dressed as an American soldier and was talking to a crowd about the many military actions at Ticonderoga.  Scott thought his presentation was very good, especially considering the many different events he had to cover.  We took some time after to appreciate the view from the top.  

     It was about 4:30, and we had spent about three hours exploring the various aspects of Fort Ticonderoga.  We still had an hour and a half or so to get to our hotel in Plattsburgh, so we got back in the car, carefully went down the road on Mount Defiance and followed the winding roads north.  Emma slept for most of this car ride too.   Scott was hoping to find some place to eat because neither of us had really had anything since breakfast.  It wasn't until we got to Plattsburgh that we found a McDonald's.  Scott ate inside, while Emma continued to sleep.  We then went to their hotel and checked in.    The room is kind of nice, and Scott sat down to write this blog.  He jumped up with a shout when a large bug crawled onto the top of the desk right where he was typing.  He Googled it and found it was nothing to be concerned about.  It was a "conifer seed bug," which Google said was perfectly harmless and not an indication of uncleanliness.  They usually live in trees, but as the weather gets colder, they seek the warmth that can be found indoors.  Scott felt bad that he had killed it after reading that.

 

 

Heading Home from Gettysburg- Tuesday, August 25, 2026

     We have to leave today, because the rental car is due back by 9 PM, but that still gave us a little time to explore around the town.

     We started with breakfast at the Steinwehr Diner. which now occupies the same building that the infamous "Marvelous Marv's" did.

     After breakfast we strolled around the area a bit.  We crossed by the Old Homestead and stopped at the shop of sculptor Gary Casteel.  He is responsible for several of the monuments around Gettysburg today, most notably the equestrian statue of Longstreet and the drummer boy in Unity Park.   Scott knows him best as the guy who makes the replicas of monuments of Gettysburg, and Scott owns the replicas he has made of the 154th NY monuments at both Gettysburg and Chancellorsville.  Gary seems like a very nice guy and he spoke with us for a while.  We got to see a sculpture he is currently working on- a life-sized drummer who is sleeping on his drum.  It is being made for a future national Civil War memorial. Naturally, Brian was amazed at that sculpture.

     We passed by the Jennie Wade house and stopped for a moment.  Brian had previously seen a story about a soldier who had carved his initials in the brick of this house using his bayonet while he was sheltering behind it during the battle.  He later returned to add his company and regiment.  Brian wanted to see this carving, and we stood outside the house for a while staring at the bricks to try to spot it.  Scott finally found it- the letters "AFM" for Private Adam F. Miller of Company I, 75th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.  It is on the southwest corner of the house almost behind drainpipe coming down from the eavestrough.  

     We stopped for a few minutes at Gary Casteel's drummer boy statue, and then we continued on.  We passed by the Dobbin House where they were getting ready for the re-dedication ceremony tomorrow.  A large crane had lowered a giant replica of the Liberty Bell into place among the various plaques in the new park that has been constructed there.  Naturally, Scott is disappointed that we won't be around for the ceremony tomorrow, but we had to head back home.  We only missed it by a day. 

     From here, we drove to the middle of town and briefly visited Lord Nelson's Gallery before heading north.  We listened to old episodes the Addressing  Gettysburg podcast all the way home.  We stopped at Scott's house, where we emptied the car, and Julie followed us to the airport.  We dropped the car off and took Brian home.