A Visit to Fort Stanwix

A combination of travel, illness, and lack of connectivity kept me from posting on my usual daily schedule this weekend, so I’m catching up with some of the places I passed through in central New York.

First up is Fort Stanwix in the city of Rome. I visited this site once before, in the 1990s. It’s impressive to see an eighteenth-century wooden fortification, built to high standards of authenticity, in the middle of a modern city.

Of course, location was the point of Fort Stanwix—it commanded an important portage point in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars. It provided a base for protecting the nascent U.S. of A.’s furthest northwest settlements. The city of Rome grew up around it.

And location was also the point of the reconstruction—it was an urban-renewal project. The land was designated as a National Monument back in 1935, when it was still covered with apartment buildings and shops. In the 1960s, Rome city leaders decided a recreated fort would be better for tourism, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy threw his weight behind the project.

The somewhat dragooned National Park Service offered a master plan in 1967. From 1970 to 1973 it oversaw archeological work, and from 1974 to 1978 the fort went up. Though there’s a reinforced concrete structure, most of what we see is earth and wood.

Fort Stanwix was besieged by Crown forces starting on 3 Aug 1777. To commemorate that period, the park flies a flag based on period sources—thirteen red, white, and blue stripes with no canton or stars.

I was there on a summer Monday. The visitor center was closed. Only one interpretive ranger was on site at a time. A thin but steady stream of visitors suggests that the park could attract more people on summer Mondays with more programming, but of course that costs money.

Some parts of the fort were recently rebuilt, I learned, but the contractor who’d won the bid to haul away the old lumber went out of business during the pandemic. Now there are big piles of logs on the grounds waiting to be removed. That heavy hauling job has to go through the federal hiring process again, following rules designed to protect our public interest but also subject to slowness.

The present park site is thus a memorial to both the wars of the eighteenth century and the expansive, can-do attitude of the Kennedy decade.