I stopped at Crown Point on my way home this week, crossing over to New York from Vermont on the bridge seen above, next to the scant remains of the French Fort St. Frederic. Cannon could guard Lake Champlain at this narrow point, on the frontier between two colonial empires in the French and Indian War.
Lieutenant Noah Grant went off to what turned out to be a relatively small-scale yet brutal war from Connecticut, a married American fighting -- like George Washington -- with the British. He was part of an expedition that failed to capture Fort St. Frederic in 1755. The next year he was promoted to captain, and killed at the age of 38 in a skirmish by one account not far from the lake -- by another it was farther south, near Fort Edward. His younger brother Lt. Solomon Grant also was killed that year, in Massachusetts.
Ulysses Grant referred briefly to these events in his Personal Memoirs:
"In the fifth descending generation my great grandfather, Noah Grant, and his younger brother, Solomon, held commissions in the English army, in 1756, in the war against the French and Indians. Both were killed that year."
There is more left of Fort Crown Point which the British built after the French abandoned and destroyed Fort St. Frederic in 1759.
