10/04/2026
In April of 1747, about thirty men inside a log fort in Charlestown, New Hampshire held off a force of several hundred French and Native allies for days. 🏹
The place was called the Fort at No. 4, because it was the fourth township up the Connecticut River, and it was about as far north as English settlement went. Captain Phineas Stevens commanded the garrison. The attackers tried to burn the stockade more than once, and the defenders dug, hauled water and put out the fires while shooting back through the gaps between the logs.
The attackers eventually gave up and withdrew. News of it traveled fast, because a tiny frontier post that holds against those odds is the kind of story people repeat. A British admiral named Sir Charles Knowles sent Stevens a sword for it, and the town was later renamed Charlestown in Knowles's honor.
The fort has since been rebuilt as a living history museum on the river, with the stockade, the gatehouse and the cabins laid out the way they were. Standing inside the walls, you notice how small it is. Thirty men is not many to hold a place that size against a few hundred. 🍁
Do you know the story of the nearest old fort or garrison house to where you grew up?
