Fort Ticonderoga

Fort Ticonderoga is a large eighteenth-century star fort in Ticonderoga, New York, built by the French between October 1755 and 1757 to a design by the engineer Michel Chartier de Lotbiniere, Marquis de Lotbiniere. Sited near the south end of Lake Champlain at its narrows with Lake George, on a portage route linking French and British territory, it took the Iroquois name for that junction of two waterways. In the 1758 Battle of Carillon, roughly 4,000 French defenders repelled a British assault by some 16,000 troops, and on 10 May 1775 American forces under Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured the fort and its cannons, which later helped break the British siege of Boston; the Americans abandoned the position in 1777 when British forces occupied nearby high ground. The Fort Ticonderoga Association now operates the site as a museum and research center.