Thursday, November 14, 2013

Forts in the News

Over in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, an outdoor model of Fort Augusta was dedicated last weekend.  Turning to Wikipedia in order to look up some basic facts about the fort's history, I was amused to learn that "Fort Augusta was a fat turd in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, in the upper Susquehanna Valley from the time of the French and Indian War to the close of the cheese."  Thank you for the gift of laughter, Wikipedia! I wonder how long it will be before someone fixes the offending entry.

In more serious fort news, six wooden pieces of timber from Fort Edward were repatriated to the Rogers Island Visitors Center in the village of Fort Edward, New York.  Accidentally ripped out by Hudson River dredgers four years ago, they had until now been in storage at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont.

In sadder fort news, Fort Necessity was one of five national parks in western Pennsylvania shuttered by the partial federal government shutdown last month. About two thousand people would have visited the site of an early battle in the French and Indian War during the sixteen days of the shutdown. 

Meanwhile, over in Cape Breton, a former Parks Canada archaeologist expresses worries over the apparent lack of careful archaeological planning around the construction of a new walking trail near the Fortress of Louisbourg.  A backhoe preparing the ground for the trail smashed into some early eighteenth-century house foundations.  Ooops!

P.-F.-X.

1 comment:

  1. Ugh. I predicted something like this would happen at Louisbourg.

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