The outflow of Lake George (Andiatarocte) tumbles into Lake Champlain (Pitawbagok), down an escalade of cataracts aptly named the La Chute River. The trail that followed its stream was a key portage (carrying-place), between the Saint Lawrence watershed and the Hudson Valley. The land north of the narrow waterway functioned as a no-man’s-land between Mohawk (Kanien’kehá-ka) and Abenaki (Wôbanakiak) territories. To the west, the iron hills of the western Adirondacks. The eastern boundary of this contested ground is the river-like stretch of upper Lake Champlain. The northernmost extremity of this demilitarized zone is a thumb-shaped peninsula, bordered on the west by swampy wetlands and Bulwagga Bay. This finger of land is known today as Crown Point—not be confused with the village on Putnam Creek five miles to the south. The origin of its name is a matter of conjecture. The French dubbed it Pointe á la Chevelure, because its shape resembled a trophy scalp. During peacetime in precolonial times, this headland served as a meeting-place and trading hub. During periods of hostility, it became a bloody battleground. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain organized an expedition of Wyandot, Algonquin and Montagnais warriors to seize control of the strategic La Chute portage. Haudenosaunee warriors hastened from the Mohawk Valley, to meet the invaders somewhere between Crown Point and Ticonderoga. As both sides traded boasts and insults, the French explorer stepped forward with sang-froid, lowered his arquebus, and blasted a load of buck and ball into the Iroquois formation. When the smoke cleared, three chiefs lay dead on the field. The rest dispersed in terror, unaware that what awaited them in the centuries to follow would prove to be far worse.
Having allied themselves with traditional indigenous enemies, the colonial powers of France and Britain found themselves at odds on the same embattled ground. Crown Point served a military function again, during the American War of independence when it changed hands several times. Since 1910 the site has been maintained as a park by the State of New York, with picnic areas, a small museum and hiking trails. Built in 1909 to celebrate the explorer’s arrival to the region, Champlain Memorial Lighthouse stands on the easternmost tip of the peninsula. On its northeastern face is a bronze bas-relief by Auguste Rodin; only public commission by the famed sculptor in the United States.
Crown Point acquired its present name in 1759, when it was seized by British arms. Its western shore tapers like a stray lock of hair as it juts into Bulwagga Bay, while the blunt northeastern corner of the headland stands across the water from Chimney Point, in Vermont. A vehicular bridge that first spanned the narrows in 1929 was replaced in 2011.
The Champlain Valley is undergirded with a band of Ordovician limestone that stretches from Tennessee to Newfoundland. Formed half a billion years ago, the most recognizable characteristic of the Chazy Fossil Reef is a layer-cake of thick, fractured strata, which I have seen along the banks of the Cumberland River, and portions of Civil War-era Fort Negley in downtown Nashville. The brittle dark grey rock shatters easily under a hammer-stroke, to reveal one of the most diverse arrays of microbial fossils found on Earth. This stone was quarried by the French to construct Fort St-Frederique in 1734. When the post was abandoned twenty-five years later, its former defenders packed the building with gunpowder and blew it sky-high. Unfazed by the pyrotechnics, the arriving British picked up the pieces and built a massive star-fort next to the ruins. Much of the labor for this construction project was provided by colonial militiamen under the direction of Israel Putnam; an ensign in Roger’s Rangers who later would serve as a major-general in the Continental Army. Parts of the new fort were hewn from living rock, clad with masonry salvaged from the French fortress, and augmented with freshly quarried stones. Heaps of spoil from rocky outcrops; dressed to serve as the scarp, lay scattered in the surrounding ditch. Unfinished blocks still rest near borrow-pits along the shoreline. During the nineteenth century, masonry from both historic forts was cannibalized to feed new construction in nearby towns and dwellings. Shallow excavations south of the fort fed limekilns that burned the stone for mortar. Flat uplifts of grey limestone break through the turf of the broad parade-ground. Similar slabs outside of the fort angle down to the water; layered like Phyllo. One supposes that once upon a time these had been covered over by soil, but time and the elements have now laid them bare. Carved into the weathered rock face are the names of past visitors; many dating back to the nineteenth century. How red-coated formations drilled in close order on such broken ground simply boggles the mind.
Noted author James Howard Kunstler and I had often painted together, in all kinds of weather. While visiting his lakeside camp in the summer of 1992, we embarked on a painting expedition to Crown Point, decades before the plein-air craze swept the nation. I was living in Virginia at the time, making paintings of Civil War battlefields threatened by neglect, commerce, and real estate development. Crown Point’s martial significance predated The Late Unpleasantness by more than a century. It may have fallen beyond the scope of my narrative timewise, but I found the site compelling.
Since shifting my base from Manhattan to the Champlain Valley in 2020, I have made many visits to the site. After completing a visit to Fort Saint-Frederic one day, and a stroll around the battlements of His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point; my focus shifted from military architecture to the natural setting. A tiny green frog leaped across my path, as I descended a grassy track to a wooded finger of riprap pointing northward into the lake. The path melted away on a rocky shelf that bore a macadam-like residue. To my left at the bottom of this incline was a large pit gouged out of the rocky bank. Quarried stones tumbled off to the right. Smaller stones the size of brickbats lay scattered about in heaps. Too small for masonry, these would have been tossed into one of the nearby lime-kilns, of which only one remains.
A cluster of large umbrageous trees at the landward end of the jetty reminded me of a Barbizon painting of Fontainebleau Forest. Beyond this grove was a wide rocky beach; its broad crescent swept westward. Crisscrossed with fractures, long uptilted rafts of limestone rose up from the shoreline. Upon one of these was heaped a gathering of small cairns that were quite different from those I had seen a month prior. Beachcombers set them up. Someone, or something knocks them down. They are reassembled, and then toppled again, like the cycles of nature. Dashed against one of these limestone slabs, a large stone shattered. Instead of coherent fossils within the brittle chunk I found a dense, sparkling charcoal-grey mass variegated with organic patterns of slightly lighter material.
Resting on one of these broad rocky shelves was the spine and pelvis of a medium-sized mammal—perhaps a fox or coyote. A tangle of ribs and rotting lake-grass lay beside it. The absence of blood and the presence of vegetal material led me to wonder if the animal had not drowned, and then washed ashore. The rotting carcass might have been dragged up onto the rocks by ravenous scavengers, leaving scraps from their feast for the gulls and raccoons. The sun-bleached shells of freshwater clams and oysters nestled among small rocks. I pass the sun-bleached skull and bones of a large bass. A middle-aged couple casts me sheepish looks, as they emerge from the woods at the head of the jetty. The woman wiggles her fingers in a halfhearted greeting. Her companion nods. Their body-language suggests a tryst.
My feet search for purchase in the slippery grass on the steep embankment, atop which a gravel road trails into the woods. A blonde woman in a black bikini walks briskly toward the beach. A Chesapeake Bay retriever prances at her heels, keen on something she holds. With a sudden turn and a sweep of her arm, a Frisbee glides over the waves. The dog splashes into the water, collects the downed disc, then hurries back to the woman. The game begins anew.
At the end of the road I espy a private residence, then backtrack to a cluster of utility sheds overlooking the verdant mass of His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point, the esplanade, visitor center and parking-lot, Fort Saint Frederic, and the soaring arch of Champlain Bridge. In June of 1775 one of my ancestors had been here; a thirty-eight-year-old first lieutenant in Shubael Griswold’s Fifth company of Benjamin Hinman’s Fourth Connecticut Regiment. He had also been at Crown Point sixteen years earlier, as a 22-year-old private soldier in David Wooster’s provincial regiment. In civilian life, Benjamin Mills was a Connecticut farmer. As a colonial militiaman, he would not have escaped fatigue duty on one of the crews that built the great fort.
Captain Thomas Davies of the Royal Artillery was detailed to less physical work. He produced an intricate watercolor of the disposition of Amherst’s camp, as seen from three hundred yards to the south. What I could reckon from Davies’s watercolor was that today’s parking-area had been covered by workshops, warehouses, and other dependencies serving the fort. An improvised village stood just beyond its western wall. General Amherst and his staff pitched their tens beside the little cove, beyond the foot of today’s bridge. A picnic area, events-pavilion and rest-rooms now stand on the former site of a French redoubt. Rangers and indigenous levies were quartered in huts and wigwams near the present-day site of the park-ranger station. Embellished with picturesque touches, Davies’s finished watercolor is far from realistic, but nonetheless accurate. Twenty-first-century viewers conditioned by photography, cinema, and video, might confuse a lack of optical verisimilitude with inaccuracy. Davies was keenly aware that whatever artistic aims his painting might achieve, his assignment was to create a chorographic vista one could read like a map.
A hallmark of topographical sketching is the intentional distortion of scale—artistic license in the service of military intelligence. render more legible specific features of terrain. In looking at terrain with the naked eye, I find historic renderings that privilege data over verisimilitude come closer to the experience than images captured via photography. Richard Hovenden Kern’s 1849 view from Fort Marcy comes to mind. Looking south from Martyr’s Hill above Santa Fe, one might focus the eye first on the Ortiz mountains, or the Sandias, or La Tetilla hill; but taken together in a single glance, each monumental formation becomes nothing more than a speck on the horizon. By compressing the foreground and enlarging distant features, Kern’s drawing provided travelers with recognizable landmarks. The artist’s aim was to represent their relationship to one another across great distances, within the confines of a book-plate. It comes closer to my memory of that view than do any of my photographs.
Believing optical veracity to be the gold standard of factual fidelity, many might dismiss Kern’s drawing as naïve; despite the fact that single exposure with the finest camera would be utterly useless, in conveying the same degree of topographical data from the same point of view. Produced more than a century prior to the advent of Landsat imaging, Kern’s drawing is not a clumsy snapshot, but a lesson in geography. His more fashionable contemporaries would have grasped this instantly. For them, painting could never rely on mere imitation to attain the lofty precincts of fine art. Oscar Wilde wrote that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” As paving-stones on the path to poetic meaning, facts are honored by mimicry at the journey’s expense. One can pause to smell the flowers, without counting all their petals.
Like the layer-cake limestone that undergirds its blanket of soil, Crown Point is a palimpsest of narratives—a territorial boundary and maritime wayside; an overnight roost for migratory birds, and daytime rendezvous for afternoon delights. The yield of its quarries became fortifications, resounding with warlike clamor. Reduced by the elements, these proud structures today wear the mark of antiquity, like iron-age ring-forts on Hibernian hilltops. Eastern White pine trees pierce the sky, as they did in Amherst’s time. The breasts and bellies of kindly camp followers may have been on Davies’s mind, when he sketched the iron hills of the far western shore. The wharves are gone, but a crumpled blanket of cyanobacteria laps at the shore of the shingle beach at the foot of the grassy bluff. Laughing children run along the ramparts. A family unpacks a picnic, in the shade of a large Salix diaphnoides, or European Violet-Willow; an invasive species. Screaming jet-skis cut large crescents in offshore waters, trailing their cockscombs. I open my sketchbook and begin to draw.
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