INVESTIGATING FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR FORTS

he war was going badly. Enemy insurgents allied with foreign fighters were sowing terror, killing civilians, and driving families from their homes in brutal, unpredictable attacks. Anxious, the generals changed tactics. Thousands of fresh troops surged into the war zone, with orders to build small forward-operating bases, launch aggressive patrols, and restore security.

The surge in Iraq, circa 2007? No, the French and Indian War in Virginia, 1755. Colonial governments, alarmed by escalating attacks on frontier settlers by Native American insurgents allied with the French, rushed to build a string of forts. Now, archaeologists are gaining deeper insights into this Colonial-era military surge by excavating some of those forts, including two that were built under the supervision of a young officer from Virginia named George Washington.

“This is a bit of history we are still learning about,” said W. Stephen McBride, who owns the archaeological firm McBride Preservation Services in Lexington, Kentucky. Over the last seven years, McBride and his wife Kim, an archaeologist with the Kentuky Archaeological Survey, have excavated eight Colonial-era forts. Three—Forts Ashby, Edwards, and Vause—are associated with the French and Indian War, which lasted from 1754 to 1763.

“We’ve kind of become the fort people,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of records that tell us how these fortifications were designed, built, or used. So digs can reveal some pretty interesting information.” The researchers are seeing telling differences, for instance, between forts that were built by the military and those built by settlers to defend their homes.

Last fall, the McBrides’ work took them to Fort Ashby, a

Tsmall town in the hills of northern West Virginia named after its historic fortification. The McBrides had already conducted a major dig at Fort Ashby in 2007 funded by a West Virginia Humanities Council grant, and they had returned to try to answer some puzzling questions raised by the earlier excavation. “We’re hoping to get a better look at some features that could tell us more about the construction sequence—what came first, what came later—and how the fort evolved,” Stephen explained as a backhoe clawed away fill from the previous dig. The one-acre site sits along Patterson Creek on the edge of town, just behind a two-story, 18th-century log building that may have once been part of the fort. The building houses a museum owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The site, which is mostly lawn and meadow, stretches into the backyards of several adjoining homeowners. It was one of those neighbors, Elliot “Butch” Ridenour, who prompted archaeologist Bill Gardner of Catholic University in Washington D.C. to excavate Fort Ashby in the late 1990s. An avid gardener, Ridenour dug an unusually deep backyard trench one spring. Greg Adamson, a geologist and amateur archaeologist who lives in Dayton, Virginia, noticed the trench and soon learned that “Butch had harvested musket balls, uniform buttons, coins, and a whole bunch of other artifacts that appeared to pertain to the 18th-century fortification.” Adamson’s discovery ultimately led to intermittent digs from 1998 to 2002 that uncovered postmolds left by one of the fort’s wooden walls. “We also found some artifacts, like ceramic pipe stems, gunflints, and such. But we couldn’t really see the whole picture, just a piece of it,” said Adamson.

The 18th-Century Surge That glimpse helped rekindle interest in Fort Ashby’s story. It began in the 1730s, when European settlers began working their way up the nearby Potomac River Valley. By 1750, some 5,000 people lived in the region. Initially, their relations with neighboring Native American groups—including the Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and Mingo—were good. Those relations began to sour, however, as the settlers pushed west to the Ohio River Valley, which the French claimed.

In early 1754, the conflict flared when Virginia’s governor sent a small force led by a 21-year-old officer named George Washington to occupy a contested chunk of land at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers (now the site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Washington’s troops ambushed a French scouting party, killing an officer. The French retaliated, overwhelming and capturing Washington’s men. The future first president was allowed to slink home, tail between his legs. It was just one of a string of French victories that marked the early years of the war. “The situation got pretty bad for the settlers along the Potomac and Patterson Creek,” said Stephen. “Indian groups were launching these hit-and-run raids all over the place. Some were led by French officers. They wanted to force the settlers out. A lot of people were getting killed.” Some settlers responded by building their own forts. Many fled east. “It was a big mess,” he said.

Washington, now in command of Virginia’s military forces, struggled to calm the chaos. He boosted the size of Virginia’s provincial army, made up of citizen soldiers, and unleashed his own surge, flooding the western frontier with fresh troops. In October 1755, he ordered the construction of two forts along Patterson Creek. They were part of a much larger plan to build a wall of numerous forts, stretching south at 15- or 20-mile intervals. “The troops were supposed to patrol between the forts and keep an eye out for raiding parties,” Stephen said.

Fort Ashby was finished in just a month or two, records suggest. It was named after its commander, Captain John Ashby of the Virginia 2nd Company of Rangers, which boasted 32 fighters. Ashby’s Rangers were soon engaged in occasional skirmishes, and it’s said that Ashby himself barely escaped death after encountering the enemy while collecting firewood.

Strategically, however, Fort Ashby was failing. Almost no settlers remained in the valley for it to protect, and Ashby’s Rangers had gained a reputation for laziness, drunkenness, and desertion. In a letter, Washington blamed some of the problems on the influence of Ashby’s spirited wife. Financial hardship and political ideology, however, may have also played a role in the low morale. “The war wasn’t popular with many of the soldiers,” said Stephen. “They weren’t paid very well, service took them away from their farms, and they complained that they were fighting for a bunch of rich speculators worried about losing their land. So they sometimes just stayed in the forts.”

By the autumn of 1757—just two years after groundbreaking—it appears Fort Ashby was largely abandoned, serving as a little more than a supply stop. Settlers wouldn’t return to the valley in large numbers until the war ended in 1763, with the British victorious. Fort Ashby mostly moldered during the following decades, with the site used for everything from a trading post to a school. In 1927, the DAR paid $200 for the fort’s last building; it was restored and opened to the public in the 1930s.

The McBrides are now trying to understand how Fort Ashby was used, and how its architecture evolved. “From his letters,” Stephen said, “it appears Washington had a pretty clear vision of what he wanted the fort to look like.” In one, for instance, Washington instructed a junior officer to “make choice of the most convenient Ground… in building a Quadrangular Fort of Ninety feet, with Bastions.” (The bastions protruded from the fort’s corners, allowing soldiers to better defend the walls). Other documents suggest Washington envisioned four stockade walls built with vertical timbers, and four diamond-shaped bastions made of squared-off logs stacked horizontally.

Evidence uncovered during the digs at Fort Ashby suggest it largely matched Washington’s vision, except it was smaller than he wished. Postmolds in trenches, for instance, provided clear evidence of three of the four stockade walls. There were also signs of two of the corner bastions, including discolored earth where the horizontal logs may have been banked with dirt. And the archaeologists have found artifacts that reflect Fort Ashby’s military origins, including uniform buttons, gunflints, and lead musket balls.

But there were postholes from a pair of stockades that didn’t fit Washington’s plan, and it wasn’t clear if those walls

George Washington, shown standing in this illustration, ordered the construction of Fort Ashby.

Colonial armies and settlers built dozens of forts over a large section of the Eastern United States. This map shows some of them.

were built before or after the 1755 fort. Similarly, it was hard to determine the relative age of the big log building, which according to local lore was a barracks for the original fort.

To sort out the sequence, the McBrides carefully removed backfill and peered intently at key features, stooping now and then to get a better view of faint soil discolorations. Stephen even crawled under the log barracks to study several features. “It was really tight under there, I kept scraping my shoulder blades,” he said.

After much contemplation, the researchers reached a consensus: The irregular stockades were built after the original 1755 construction. “But we don’t know how long after,” said Stephen. They “could have come two hours later, or two years later.” And the log barracks probably was built even later, or was moved to its present location after Fort Ashby was well established. “There do seem to be very separate periods of construction,” said Stephen. Settler and Military Forts These details are helping scholars develop a much more nuanced picture of military life on the Colonial frontier. The McBrides’ work at several other fortifications that date to the French and Indian War suggests there were significant differences between forts built and used by professional soldiers and those mostly constructed and used by civilians.

This musket sideplate was found in a bastion at Fort Ashby. The sideplate was part of a heavy-caliber military musket. The archaeologists also found large gunflints from other heavy-caliber arms.

For instance, “the civilian forts appear to have much more irregular designs,” Stephen said.

Some of those differences are on display at Fort Edwards, which sits near Capon Bridge, West Virginia, just 30 miles southeast of Fort Ashby. Unlike Ashby, Edwards started as a private fort built on land owned by an affluent settler, Joseph Edwards. As the war intensified, Washington incorporated it into his Virginia defenses and sent troops to defend it. In April 1756, nearly 20 of those soldiers were ambushed and killed after they left the fort to pursue Indian raiders.

Like Ashby, Fort Edwards was ultimately abandoned and largely forgotten. That changed in the 1990s, when a developer proposed building townhomes on the site. A preliminary archaeological survey turned up 18th-century artifacts and postmolds, and local preservationists soon purchased the site. In 2001 and 2004, Stephen led digs that uncovered more than 50 features associated with the fort, including several stockade walls, a bastion, and what appears to be the foundation of Joseph Edwards’ home. Just outside the fort’s walls, the researchers discovered two small features that appeared to be huts or tent sites. “Each one had room for just a couple of soldiers,” he said. “Maybe it was too crowded inside the fort, with the house and everything, so they camped outside. We haven’t seen anything like that at Fort Ashby.”

The design of Fort Edwards is also unlike anything seen at the forts designed by military professionals, Stephen said. The walls have unusual nooks and crannies, for instance, perhaps to accommodate buildings that existed before Edwards built the fort. And all the walls appear to have been vertical stockades, with no use of horizontal logs.

Another difference is that Edwards and other settler forts appear to hold more domestic artifacts, such as glazed pottery and glassware, than the military forts. In part, that may be because some military forts had relatively brief periods of heavy occupation and, said Stephen, “not much of a residential component.” But it also may reflect the fact that soldiers had to keep the fort clean and “probably didn’t cart around a lot of heavy ceramics and glass; they traveled pretty light.”

That artifact pattern is also reflected at Fort Vause, a third French and Indian War fort that the McBrides studied. Located near Shawsville, Virginia, Fort Vause was also originally built by a settler, Ephraim Vause. In 1756, however, it was attacked and burned by French and Indian raiders. Washington moved quickly to rebuild the outpost, but labor problems delayed the reconstruction. “The troops wanted to be paid the same as carpenters,” said Stephen, who has participated in two brief excavations of the site.

The digs have confirmed that the rebuilt Fort Vause followed a formal military design. “We found evidence of several of the walls and you can still see three of the bastions,” he said. But Vause differs from some other French and Indian War forts in one important respect: The bastions were made of piled-up dirt instead of stacked logs. It’s not clear why the design shifted, but Stephen said “it suggests that, over time, the fort builders were adapting and improvising.”

The McBrides and other scholars are still analyzing the growing body of archaeological information from French and Indian War forts. For instance, both Forts Ashby and Edwards produced lots of bones from wild and domestic animals that were likely consumed. Those bones are being identified by specialists, as are some pollen grains and chunks of wood found at Fort Ashby. Preliminary results “strongly indicate the stockade (at Ashby) was built out of white oak almost exclusively,” said Stephen. This suggests that they wanted certain

A large key recovered from Fort Ashby. The key was found in a postmold, which leads the McBrides to surmise that it was discarded after the fort was torn down.

Preserving vestiges of the ConfliCt

This plaque commemorates Fort Littleton, one of the Conservancy’s French and Indian War preserves.

Fort Edwards, West Virginia is one of several French and Indian War sites The Archaeological Conservancy has played a role in preserving. The Conservancy purchased the site in 1995 to protect it from a planned townhouse development. Residents of nearby Capon Bridge subsequently formed their own nonprofit organization, and by 1999 they had raised the money to buy the site. In 2001 they opened the Fort Edwards visitor center (see www.fortedwards.org).

In 1997, the Conservancy obtained a conservation easement for Dunbar’s Camp in southwest Pennsylvania. This is where British forces abandoned their supply train and made a hasty retreat following Gen. Braddock’s

qualities in the wood. He is also musing over a possible pattern in the distribution of pottery made from red clay—a common material at the time for inexpensive housewares. This pottery is common at settler forts like Edwards, but nearly absent from Fort Ashby. One theory, he said, is that the settler forts were used by members of relatively informal county militias, “who had to bring their own dishes and housewares with them.” In contrast, the soldiers stationed at Ashby were probably supplied with metal dishes.

Stephen and another archaeologist, James Fenton, have also been in Canada, poring over records that might tell them more about the war from the French perspective. “We’ve found reports from officers that talk about which Indian tribes were involved in raids, how many settlers they captured, killed, or forced out. But they don’t name any of the forts involved, so it takes a bit of work to see if you can disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela on July 19, 1755.

The Feingold site, north of Albany in upstate New York, was once part of a large British military complex that included Fort Edward. Rogers Island, and the Royal Blockhouse. The Conservancy obtained the Feingold site in 2001.

Fort Littleton, in south-central Pennsylvania, was one of four forts that formed a line of defense against French and Indian forces in what was then the colony’s western frontier. Fort Littleton consisted of two or three houses surrounded by a stockade featuring four bastions. The Conservancy acquired the site in 2005.

figure out which ones they are talking about,” said Stephen. They were surprised to discover that some of the Native Americans involved came from tribes that lived near the Great Lakes, far from the war zone. “It just reminds you how far-ranging this conflict was,” he said.

Ironically, he noted, the British victory ultimately helped sow the seeds of the American Revolution. The cost of the war forced the Crown to raise taxes on its American colonists, helping foment the anger that eventually erupted into the fight for independence. That history has made Forts Ashby, Edwards, and Vause important to today’s historic preservationists and intriguing to archaeologists interested in following the footprints left by some of America’s earliest soldiers.