1909 Champlain Tercentenary
Report of the NY Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commission
to the Legislature of the State of New York, Sept. 19, 1911

OLD CROWN POINT: A History of Crown Point

On a continent discovered only about four centuries ago, we meet on a spot known in history for three centuries of that time. When Champlain touched these shores it was still the period of exploration. No permanent encroachment on the dominion of the savage north of the James had been made until his arrival. Daring navigators had for a century skirted the coasts here and there, but the continent was in practically undisturbed possession of the Indian.

Henry Hudson had not yet cruised up the river that bears his name, and the landing of the Pilgrims was still over a decade away. When, therefore, Champlain paddled up this lake on those quiet July nights, three hundred years ago, the white man for the first time caught the vision of this most beautiful valley.

When we pause to contemplate what has transpired on this continent in the intervening years, what has been crowded into even the last half of that period, what has been accomplished upon it for science and art, and the political, economic and moral progress of mankind, we can hardly think of America as the domain of savages only three centuries ago, and may well deem its discovery to have been the great force that awoke human genius and energy to the multiplied activities that have brought about our modern progress.

But it is only of the historic place where we so auspiciously meet that I am to speak. It is fitting that the ceremonies of this week should be inaugurated here on old Crown Point. Other places along the lake present special claims to historic interest and distinction. Isle La Motte will be associated with the first actual occupancy of its shores; Cumberland Head with brave Macdonough and his memorable naval victory in the War of 1812; Plattsburgh with the accompanying defeat of the British land forces; Valcour with the intrepid Arnold and the first naval engagement of the Revolution; Fort Ticonderoga with Abercromby’s disastrous assault, the death of Lord Howe, and later with the heroic Allen and his dramatic demand for its surrender.

But Crown Point may justly lay claim to direct association with the discoverer of the lake himself and with an event that lies back of all these. Before the foundations of Amherst’s fort, here before us in majestic ruin; were laid; before Fort St. Frédéric reared its stern walls on yonder bluff; before the military vanguard of civilization had encamped upon these shores, over a century before the white man constructed his pioneer hut on its banks, there took place here, probably within half a mile from where we are assembled, an event that has been well described as one of the cardinal facts of American history. It was Champlain’s battle with the Iroquois.

In the light of subsequent events no fact in the local history of this region stands out in bolder relief. And yet the site of that battle is the subject of unsettled controversy. Born as I was on the opposite shore at Chimney Point, and there reared with the traditions and history of this lake for my nursery tales, I cannot forbear saying that this occasion ought not to pass without reasserting Crown Point’s claim to this historic distinction and harking back to the only authentic source of information upon the subject.

In giving events as they occurred while on his voyage, Champlain in his narrative tells of reaching a certain part of the lake from which he beheld mountains to the east and south, the former unquestionably the Green mountains, and the latter some spur of the Adirondacks, running toward the lake. This was at least two or three days before he reached the place of battle, and from where he could see no hills to the south except those on Lake Champlain. He proceeds to state what his Indian companions told him of the latter mountains, of the lake beyond them, and of the necessity of passing a rapid to reach it, evidently referring to Lake George and the falls in its outlet.

At this point of the narrative, following the word “rapid” is injected the dubious and ambiguous phrase “which I afterwards saw.” It is principally from connecting this phrase with the statement that Champlain pursued the Iroquois into the forest after the battle that some writers, deeming it conclusive that he saw the rapid or falls on this voyage, have located the site near Ticonderoga.

But the phrase is too indefinite and uncertain in both its meaning and the time to which it refers, and its connection with the circumstance of the pursuit too doubtful to support the inference that the battle afterward described in his narrative took place at or near Fort Ticonderoga

He began his return a few hours later on the same day, stopping for the Indians to feast, dance and gather up the spoils of battle. In the pursuit he killed several Indians with his arquebuse. But handicapped with his armor and heavy weapon and the necessity of stopping to reload it, the pursuit of the fleet-footed Indian with such havoc could not have been far from the point of retreat. Manifestly, it was not far from the shore — certainly not so far as the Ticonderoga Falls. Under the circumstances we would hardly expect him to go so far into the home land of the wily enemy as to incur the risk of being cut off with his meager force from his canoes and only means of safety.

In describing the place of meeting the Iroquois in their canoes, he refers to it as “the end of a cape that projects into the lake on the west side.” There are only two points of land on the “west side “ — Crown Point and Willsborough Point, that answer such a description, or that we might reasonably expect, on a shore of many jutting points, would be designated as a cape by this careful geographer of the king, evidently mindful of the latter’s injunction to bring back a truthful report. It is conceded that Willsborough Point is an impossible location. The latitude given by Champlain is not exact —“ 43 degrees and some minutes.” But as due allowance must be made for his uncertain instrument of calculation as shown by his computations at various other points on his voyages — its markings so far varying from the true standard as not to designate accurately any place within so short a distance as separates Ticonderoga and Crown Point, the latitude given is inconclusive of the question.

But Champlain has left one striking piece of evidence on the subject — the now familiar picture of the battle, which represents him on a shore at the left of the Iroquois. As stated by others, it is incredible that he would place himself to the south of the enemy and thus between them and their own country. If he landed to the north of the enemy whence he came, as he naturally would have done to prevent being cut off in case of retreat, then to have water west of him, as indicated in the drawing, he must necessarily have been on the western shore of the so-called cape.

Crown Point and Willsborough Point are the only points on the western shore of the lake which admit of such a position. If the position was taken on a north shore then he was east of the enemy, and again Crown Point is the only cape or point which presents a shore for such a situation. We have the strongest historic evidence, therefore, that we stand on the same soil upon which Champlain himself set foot three hundred years ago; and we may safely say that yonder near the northwest corner of this cape “that projects into the lake on the west side” is where the Algonquins met the Iroquois; that near there they floated in their canoes awaiting the dawn for the battle; that either on the west or the north side of this cape it was fought; that there those plumed chiefs fell before the white man’s weapon, and there the report of gunpowder was first heard by the Iroquois and woke their undying hatred for the French nation.

When we consider that the Iroquois carried their implacable hatred for a century and a half and became powerful allies of the English in the war that stripped France of her American possessions, and that largely through their hostility then provoked this land passed under the dominion of the new Saxon instead of the new Gaul, we are forced to realize that we stand near the spot of an event which exerted a conspicuous influence in shaping the destiny of a new world.

Little could Champlain have foreseen that his participation in that apparently insignificant battle would perpetuate a hatred against his nation that a century and a half later would operate to drive it from American soil. Little did he know that on the very spot where his clumsy arquebuse wrought that fatal victory would be the border line of contest for the mastery of the continent. Little could he have divined that here in quick succession of events his nation would stand against her inveterate foe only to retreat and surrender at last her continental possessions, and that the victor in turn would be compelled to relinquish its grasp to the sons of liberty and the makers of a new nation.

But if he could not look forward to us, we, who have become the beneficiaries of his discovery and intervening events, may fittingly look back to him and them. Here then, of all places on this lake, where he gave it his illustrious name, should be erected a monument to the memory of this great explorer, who more than any other of his time was actuated by a worthy zeal for state and religion.

Another century had passed before Crown Point again loomed up in history. The French were extending their outposts southward and the English were advancing theirs northward. The “door of the country,” as the Indian called the lake, was again opened by the French; and it is here again the Frenchman made his landing and in the erection of Fort St. Frédéric in 1731 established his seat of power on the lake. Yonder are its ruins, a heap of stone and earth, made more complete with the ravages of time, but left as such by the French when deserted for a last stand on the heights of Quebec.

The lines of its ramparts are still discernible. On that little bluff where its walls rose straight from the shore we may take our stand and in retrospect contemplate in its erection the assertion of French sovereignty and the challenge of English pretension. There we may readily call the names of the illustrious dead connected with its history; of Beauharnois, who selected this strategic position and named it after the French secretary of state; of Dieskau, who later strengthened its fortifications and moved his forces on to the bloody encounters with Williams and Lyman between Fort Edward and Lake George; of Montcalm, who occupied it with the soldiery of France and moved on to old Carillon; of Abercromby, who made a fatal attempt to reach it; of Sir William Johnson, who made his fruitless expedition against it; of Bourlamaque, who on his flight to the north stopped to sigh over its departing glory and left it in flames and ruins; of Rogers, who approached with his rangers to grasp the prize and found it a devastation; and of Amherst, who later followed on to erect a new fort and from it moved on to the walls of Montreal and victory.

The high tower stored with cannon, the little church where assembled for mass the soldiers and the inhabitants of the little settlements about a half mile to the southwest and across the lake on Chimney Point; the thick walls of limestone quarried back from the shore, all have crumbled into dust or disappeared beneath the sod. Time has closed the covered way to the lake, open even in my father’s boyhood, and removed all signs of the mighty trench that encircled it. No trace is left of the old windmill constructed to serve as a redoubt on a point to the east. A few flagstones till recently showed where the villagers trod, and all that remains of the chimneys that long marked the vanished settlement on the opposite point, is the name they gave it.

As we draw the picture of the past on this lonely spot where now graze the flocks of the peaceable farmer, while we feel a touch of sympathy for the nation that seemingly earned dominion by methods and with motives that entitled her claims to fairest consideration, we cannot but rejoice that the grandeur and the cruelty of military conquest have given way to the peaceful scene of the twentieth century. While the tide of warfare had surged up and down the lake with many predatory and sanguinary excursions directed against both French and English frontiers and many movements of armies up and down this shore, and while this, the most strategic location south of Quebec, became the seat of French power on the lake and the objective point of English campaigns, yet the battles of that period were fought elsewhere, and just a century and a half ago the French left it in ruins and forever.

Then began the third stage of Crown Point’s history — possession by the English and the erection of Amherst’s fort at the enormous cost of two million pounds sterling. It rises before us in splendid ruins, a forceful reminder not only of English conquest but of English defeat. Here we may contemplate other scenes. England has strengthened her frontier. The French have ceded their possessions in America. The shot has been fired that was “heard round the world.” England is in a fight to maintain her colonial possessions. The seeds of English institutions have taken root in America. Independence has been given a motive and soon will be a fact.

We may now stand on the ramparts of old Amherst and call another roll. Let us hope that the spirits of the mighty heroes who once stood within those walls, muster before us as we call their names in the order in which history assigns them to its moving events. Seth Warner, who with a band of Green Mountain boys made its first and bloodless capture; Remember Baker, who with another band quickly joined the forces here; Ethan Allen, who fresh from the laurels of Ticonderoga started from here on that rash expedition against Montreal and into British chains; Richard Montgomery, who embarked from here for victory at St. Johns and Montreal and heroic death at Quebec; Benedict Arnold, who set out from here with his improvised fleets and returned here from those famous naval engagements; John Trumbull, who looked with pity on the sick and emaciated troops brought back here by Arnold from that disastrous Canadian campaign to suffering and forgotten graves; Carleton, who sweeping after Arnold held it for a short time only to retreat again; Gates, to whom its command was assigned with Ticonderoga before Burgoyne came up the lake scattering terror along its shores; and Burgoyne, last to make military use of it, when his reduced army returned from Saratoga and defeat.

What names, many of these, with which to conjure the spirit of freedom. They cannot answer. But I think I catch a response to some of those names in the hearts of their grateful countrymen. The story of many of their exploits were first told within those walls, and today they give back the story. They tell of soldier and savage, of the bitter contest between two civilizations for control of a continent, and of the struggle for the independence whose one hundred and thirty-third anniversary we celebrate today beneath them.

It is fitting that this old fort should then have passed out of history, and this occasion ought not to go by without the suggestion that a grateful people should protect from further ruin this best preserved relic of the “times that stirred men’s souls.” True, it witnessed no battle, but more than once in the great struggle invading forces compelled its exchange of sovereignty. It is a perishable heritage of an age gone by, but the principles it was employed to establish will endure forever. It sheltered many a hero of that last great struggle of which it remains an inspiring monument; and we who enjoy the fruits of their valorous deeds should see to it that it shall continue to carry on their lessons to future generations.

The tomahawk has been buried, the old musket stored as a relic, and the sword beaten into the ploughshare. The forest has been supplanted by the farm and the only fleets on the quiet waters of the lake are those of commerce and pleasure. The warrior has gone and peace and freedom have come, but not without tremendous struggles the history of which cannot well be written and leave out Crown Point.

As we take a parting glance at these ruins, consecrated to the memories we here invoke, as the panorama of events that have passed in front of this spot for three centuries slip back into history, we cannot but be grateful that the “door of the country’s has seemingly forever closed to warfare; that the savage visits us in the garb of civilization, that Gaul and Saxon are in amity and peace, and out of all that was fierce and barbarous, grand and pathetic, has risen a nation that offers a home to the descendants of all who then met in conflict with the assurance of the fullest liberty and opportunity enjoyed by man anywhere on the face of earth.