Historic Shrines of America / Being the Story of One Hundred and Twenty Historic Buildings and the Pioneers Who Made Them Notable

by John T. Faris

After the construction of the barques had been begun, the consent of the five Iroquois nations was secured. Longueuil promised them that it would be to them "a House of Peace" down to the third generation and farther. To Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry, engineer, was committed the building of the structure. He determined to make it fireproof. "Instead of wooden partitions I have built heavy walls, and paved all the floors with flat stone," he wrote in a report sent to France. The loft was paved with flat stones "on a floor full of good oak joists, upon which cannon may be placed above the structure."

The trade with the Indians at the completed stone house on the Niagara increased. So did the activities of the English. Governor Burnet of New York craftily persuaded the Onondaga Indians that their interests had been endangered by the building of the French fort, since it penned them up from their chief hunting-place, and was therefore contrary to the Treaty of Utrecht; they agreed with him that the Iroquois had no right to the territory, which was really the property of the Senecas, and they asked the Governor to appeal to King George to protect them in their right.

Therefore the suggestion was made that they "submit and give up all their hunting country to the King," and sign a deed for it. Accordingly Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga sachems deeded to the English a sixty-mile strip along the south shore of Lake Ontario, which included the Niagara frontier, the Niagara River being the western boundary.

"From this time on the 'stone house' was on British soil; but it was yet to take the new owner a generation to dispossess the obnoxious tenant," Frank H. Severance writes in "An Old Frontier of France."

The story of the next thirty years is a story of plots and counter-plots, of expeditions threatened and actual, of disappointing campaigns, of imprisonment and cruelty and death. More than once Indians promised the English that the house at Niagara should be razed. Spies reported that the defences at the castle were in bad shape; "'tis certain that, should the English once attack it, 'tis theirs," one report ran. "I am informed that the fort is so dilapidated that 'tis impossible to put a pin in it without causing it to crumble; stanchions have been obliged to be set up against it to support it." Another report disclosed that if the cannon were fired the walls would crumble.

But the French were not ready to give up. They felt that Fort Niagara was the key to the Ohio Valley, which they wished to control. They strengthened the defences of the fort. The defeat of Braddock at Fort Du Quesne and the strange decision of General Shirley to stop at Oswego instead of continuing with his force to Niagara, gave the French a new lease of life.

In 1759 came the end of French rule. General Prideaux's expedition from New York began the siege of the fort early in July, and after several weeks it capitulated. Until 1796 the English flag floated above the "castle." The commander of this post, like the commanders of six other forts, refused on various pretexts to surrender to America, in spite of the terms of the treaty of 1783. Attempts were made to secure possession, but none of them were successful, and it was not until 1794 that Great Britain agreed to evacuate Niagara and the other forts still held, "on or before the 1st of June, 1796."

Seventeen years later, in 1813, the British flag again replaced the Stars and Stripes over the historic building, but the fort was restored to the United States in 1815. Since that time it has been a part of the army post that has been more important because of its history than for any other reason.

The Daughters of the War of 1812 have placed a suitable tablet on the Old Castle, and are interested in the proposition that has been made to turn the venerable edifice into an international museum, which shall commemorate the one hundred years of peace between Great Britain and America.

In 1917 the eyes of the nation were once more turned on the fort by Lake Ontario, for it was made a training ground for officers who were to be sent to the battle front in France and Belgium. The castle, nearly two hundred years old, and strong as ever, again witnessed the gathering of patriots, and the spot that had echoed to the tread of French who had yielded to the English, of English who had driven out the French, and of Americans who had driven out the English, became the parade ground of Americans who were making ready to stand side by side with French and English for the freedom of the world.