Friary at the Shirley-Eustis House, 25 March

On Sunday, 25 March, at 2:00 P.M., Donald Friary will speak at the Shirley-Eustis House on “Louisbourg: Defense for New France, Offense to New England.” Friary is President of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and Director Emeritus of Historic Deerfield.

The event announcement says:

The great French fortress at Louisbourg had its beginnings only at the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, when France’s oldest North American settlement, Acadia, and its capital at Port Royal, had fallen to the British, along with the fishing settlements on the French shore of Newfoundland. The royal government at Paris knew that entrance to the St. Lawrence must be guarded, and built Louisbourg as a symbol not only to protect its interests, but to frighten English settlers all along the North Atlantic seaboard.

Gov. William Shirley launched a successful Massachusetts campaign against the fortress at Louisbourg in 1745. At the end of that war (called King George’s War in North America but the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe and later, since there were so many King Georges with so many wars), the British government returned the territory to France.

Less than a decade later those same two empires went to war again, and the men of Massachusetts got to say, “I told you so.” This time the attack on Louisburg was under the direction of the regular British army. In the Revolutionary period New Englanders looked back to the 1745 campaign, the high point of Massachusetts’s military history thirty years before, as evidence that they could match military professionals in the field.

This event is sponsored by the Shirley-Eustis House Association. Admission is $5 for members, $10 for the public, and there will be refreshments.

TOMORROW: How Gov. Shirley celebrated his victory.