Introduction

Approaching Crown Point, from the lake or the shore, reveals a scenic visa which has captured the attention of  American and Canadian visitors alike for centuries. The imposing form of His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point and the carefully preserved ruins of Fort St. Frederic whisper towards the history of struggle and violence which unlay the bucolic landscape of Lake Champlain. Nestled between New York’s Adirondack Mountains and Vermont’s Green Mountains, extending north from Lake George to beyond the Québécois border, Lake Champlain once served as the “Great Warpath” between the French stronghold of Montreal and the Anglo-Dutch metropolis at Albany. The peninsula of Crown Point, the likely spot of Samuel de Champlain’s fabled battle against the Mohawk, long-held significance in the relations between the regions’ European and Amerindian actors.

Beginning in 1734, the French authorities began constructing Fort St. Frederic to better control the narrow passage between northern Lake Champlain and what they called “Wood Creek” further south. This commanding structure cuts a unique profile among forts of the era, consisting of an exterior star-like fort in the trace italien style surrounding a four-story main keep. Positioned poorly on the landscape and with largely contradictory constituent parts, few forts better express the complexities of the circumstances surrounding their erection and the inherently multifaceted nature of early modern military structures. Occupied until 1759, during the French and Indian War, Fort St. Frederic functioned as a economic hub, staging area for small raids to full-scale campaigns, and a potent visual metaphor for French control over the valley.

The French occupation of American territory holds a unique position within the popular Anglo-American conceptualization of the nation’s history. Their liminality between the coterie of European settler-colonists and indigenized antagonists remains apparent on historic markers across the landscape to this day; mysterious French settlements and alleged treasures buried in hasty retreat dot the popular histories of small towns across that ancient border. Unfortunately, this notoriety drew the expected looters, antiquarians, and “pot-hunters” to the ruins of Fort St. Frederic and its environs since the mid-19th century. While Anne Weatherbee conducted the first major amateur digs at the site in 1908 (Hill 1913), the largest single disturbance of the fort undoubtably remains R.W. Robbins and C.J. Kravic’s 1968 mechanized excavation.

  Neither professionally trained in archaeology, their work at Crown Point far exceeded even then-contemporary standards and produced little of the scientific documentation which defines the practice of professional archaeology today. Despite these challenges, which much of this work looks to overcome, their actions did ensure that important artifacts from one of the largest French settlements in America were collected and curated rather than simply lost beneath ongoing infrastructure projects.

Research Questions

This dissertation examines the limitations and affordances of frontier economics for the mid-18th century fort-community surrounding Fort St. Frédéric at Crown Point, New York. This analysis focuses on re-examining and re-contextualizing artifacts from the extant collection resultant from the aforementioned R.W. Robbins and C.J. Kravic excavations within the Ft. St. Frédéric citadel, the citadel moat, the entrance moat, and around the curtain walls. Examination begins with the reconstruction of archaeological contexts, from the non-standardized field records taken by the original excavators and stratigraphic information gleaned by later excavations. Analysis of the form, style, and composition of the collected artifacts will further understanding and interpretation of the role Fort St. Frédéric’s community served within broader economies. Leveraging world-systems and entanglement theories offers interpretation of how capitalism influenced the lives of those in its “cracks,” i.e. semi-peripheral spaces (Pezzarossi 2019). Geospatial data allow for the emplacement of this French fort-community in three-dimensional space/place, aiding humanistic interpretations of relationships between site locations.

The affordances of frontier life at Fort St. Frédéric differed from the those experienced by rural Frenchmen in their European hinterlands. The inherent military duties of the fort and its monopoly on productive technologies, such as the grain ground at its windmill, potentially inflicted more state control over the local economy. Conversely, the frontier also offered greater affordances, including agropastoral land-grants and opportunities for trade with Amerindians. The socioeconomic function of the fort itself remains in question. Traditional Anglophone interpretations of the fort-complex at Crown Point stress its nature as military provocation; a clear violation of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, designed to tighten the French noose around the Hudson Valley. Scholarship in the 20th century, drawing from a Turnerian understanding of the frontier’s importance and Parkman’s assertion that the New France precipitated revolution within the metropole, stressed the virtue of Fort St. Frédéric in securing the fertile shores of Lake Champlain for French settler-colonialism. More recent critical examinations of the mid-18th century fur-trade’s nuances instead posit that Fort St. Frédéric’s primary economic focus was maintaining New France’s trading monopoly by preventing traders from traveling south to Albany, who’s merchants often offered more competitive prices compared to Montreal.

Examination of artifacts recovered from the moats and citadel of Fort St. Frédéric provide a unique opportunity to examine the economic circumstance of the garrison at-large, as moats often served as de facto community dumpsites. Despite the lack of conventional stratigraphic or horizontal unit controls, the destruction of Fort St. Frédéric during the French withdrawal created a layer of large rubble which Robbins noted in his level-records. Supplemental excavations, undertaken during the Summer of 2024, undertaken within the unsifted backdirt attempted to better understand sampling biases of the 1968 project.

• Question 1) To what degree was the fort garrison and immediate community at Fort St. Frédéric integrated into the broader French North Atlantic economy? The typical pattern for French assemblages, particularly ceramics, along the North American frontier demonstrates a considerable degree of non-French ceramics due to the higher production of English wares and the generally higher quality of Dutch wares. If the collection associated with the French context at Fort St. Frédéric holds a higher degree of French-made wares, then this indicates a greater degree of socio-economic control attempted at the heart of French power in the valley. Documentary records indicate proscriptions on unauthorized individual trade with Amerindians and advocation of modern agricultural techniques among the settler-colonist population. Presence/Absence analysis of individually diagnostic artifacts, such as trade arrowheads or sickle-blades, could aid interpretations on the efficacy of the commandants’ dictates.

• Question 2) To what degree can meaning conclusions be reconstructed from the records and methods of the Robbins excavation? Despite the lack of professional standardization during the 1968 work, analysis of the artifacts and digital reconstruction of the excavations can indicate what geospatial controls can be implemented post facto. Supplemental excavations also indicate sampling biases practiced by Robbins’s teams, as they selected artifacts piecemeal rather than via screening. This data influences the surety with which broader analytical claims can be made from these collections as well as guide future research and mitigation work at CPSHS.