the fort and the retreat of the combined British forces towards Burlington. The occupying Americans immediately strengthened the fort’s southern flank by constructing a new major bastion of earthworks and palisades. They eventually threw up extensive earthworks extending from the northwest bastion as far as St. Mark’s cemetery (where remnants can still be traced today) and then eastward towards the river’s edge.[12] No new buildings were erected by the Americans inside the fort during their occupation. The Americans established several small outlying posts, or “piquets,” within a mile or two of the fort. Similar British piquets lay beyond. There were multiple skirmishes across this no man’s land throughout the summer and early fall. Taking part in these skirmishes on the side of the Americans were two new groups of combatants.
Bird’s-eye view of Fort George, 1812 from the east, artist Tiffany Merritt, graphite on paper, 2011. By the fall of 1812 or early the following spring, the Royal Engineers were directed to truncate the fort, abandoning the two southern bastions and stone powder magazine with wooden palisades across the southern exposure. The soldiers’ barracks were also to be reduced in height. It is not clear how much of this work was actually accomplished.
Drawing based on conjectural drawings in an unpublished report. Gouhar Shemdin, David Bouse, “A Report on Fort George” (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1975). With permission of Parks Canada.
Bird’s-eye view of Fort George, 1814 from the east, artist Tiffany Merritt, graphite on paper, 2011. During their occupation the Americans greatly fortified Fort George with stronger earthen bastions, including earthworks extending across the southern half of the truncated fort as well as earthworks extending from the northwest bastion towards St. Mark’s burying ground. They apparently did not erect any significant buildings within. Upon recapture by the British in late 1813, new log barracks and possibly a brick/stone inner powder magazine were erected.
Drawing based on conjectural drawings in an unpublished report. Gouhar Shemdin, David Bouse, “A Report on Fort George” (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1975). With permission of Parks Canada.
For the first time in the war “volunteer”[13] Native Americans were fighting on the Canadian side of the river, often in direct confrontation with their cousins, the Grand River Six Nations, a pivotal event in Iroquoian history.
Also fighting with the Americans were the “Canadian Volunteers.” One-time member of the House of Assembly, newspaper publisher and citizen of Niagara Joseph Willcocks[14] convinced American General Dearborn at Fort George in July 1813 to allow him to establish a corps of disaffected Canadian volunteers to fight alongside the American army in Upper Canada. As such, the Canadian Volunteers are the only military corps to be actually raised at Fort George.
Six thousand American soldiers, their Native allies, and the Canadian Volunteers were encamped in tents on the plains outside the fort behind the new trenches. They were much decimated by disease,[15] desertion, and eventual redeployment elsewhere. One disgusted American General reported:
We have an army at Fort George which for two months past has lain panic-struck, shut up and whipped in by a few hundred miserable savages leaving the whole of the frontier, except the mile in extent which they occupy, exposed to the inroads and depredations of the enemy.[16]
By December there were only sixty remaining occupying troops that happily returned to American soil, but not before they torched the town of Niagara. Surprisingly, the fortifications and the Americans’ pitched tents were left intact although, according to one observer, no barracks were left standing.[17] When the British reoccupied the fort the rebuilding process began once again: two log barracks for three hundred men, a small frame quarters for officers, and possibly a new stone/brick powder magazine[18] within the fortifications.
During the summer of 1814, after the American success at the Battle of Chippawa, the American army laid siege to Fort George and dug trenches on the Commons. Years later, a young U.S. drummer recalled an incident on the Commons during this abbreviated siege. Their commander, Colonel Winfield Scott,[19] was sitting on his horse a few yards in front of the American line, when suddenly a whistling sound was heard coming from the fort’s artillery (probably a howitzer). Scott calmly held up his sword to sight the incoming shell, concluded that he was vulnerable, and immediately wheeled his charger to the side just before the shell landed on the very site he had been occupying seconds before.[20] Despite this one inspiring moment, the Americans, having waited in vain for promised naval support, withdrew after only a few days.
After the war, realizing the shortcomings of the Fort George site, all efforts were directed to building Fort Mississauga (see chapter 23) at the entrance to the Niagara River and the new Butler’s Barracks (see chapter 11) at the westerly end of the Military Reserve, out of clear range of American artillery. Initially, some troops were still quartered in the old log barracks within the fort. Both surviving powder magazines served as supply depots for the Royal Artillery stationed at Fort Mississauga.
In 1817, while on a good-will tour, the President of the United States, James Monroe was entertained with great civility by British officers somewhere in the historic Fort.[21]
By 1825, however, Fort George was reported to be “in ruins.”[22] The bodies of Brock and Macdonell, buried in 1812 with great ceremony in the Northeast Bastion (now known as the Brock bastion), were disinterred and reburied in the base of the first Brock’s Monument at Queenston Heights. British military headquarters were moved to York, much to the annoyance of the locals. By 1839, the remaining soldiers were using the rebuilt Navy Hall complex as their barracks while the old barracks within the fort were downgraded to stables. Some of the adjacent Military Reserve was granted to merchant James Crooks in exchange for his strategic lands at Mississauga Point (see chapter 12).
In November 1844, Lieutenant Colonel R.H. Bonnycastle of the Royal Engineers received an unusual request from Mr. Edward Campbell of Niagara to purchase a ten-foot square of land on the southwest bastion of Fort George. Campbell claimed that he was the eldest son of Donald Campbell who had served honorably as Fort Major of Fort George until his untimely death in December 1812. Apparently he had been buried near the southwest bastion and his son wanted to erect a memorial on the site. Although the Board of Ordnance approved the request it is not known whether the son ever erected a cairn.[23] He may have changed his mind, as a large memorial plaque for the Fort Major is situated inside St. Mark’s Church “Erected By His Eldest Son 1848.”
Bird’s-eye view of Fort George, 1880s, artist Tiffany Merritt, drawing, graphite on paper, 2011. By the 1880s the bastions were deteriorating as well as both powder magazines. The 1816 officers’ barracks was occupied by a custodian and some of the land both inside the fort and on the outer earthworks was being cultivated.
Drawing based on conjectural drawings in an unpublished report. Gouhar Shemdin, David Bouse, “A Report on Fort George” (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1975). With permission of Parks Canada.
With the Fort no longer a military installation, the eight-acre parcel of land was leased intermittently to private citizens, including John Meneilly in the 1840s and ’50s and later the Wright family from 1882 until the eve of the Great War. Rent was sixteen dollars per annum. The small officers’ quarters (circa 1814) was incorporated into a larger farmhouse, while the esplanade was cultivated as a garden and used for grazing animals. The original stone powder magazine was intermittently occupied by squatters or used for the storing of hay. The townsfolk’s livestock grazed on the grassy bastions and youngsters played “fort” or dug for artifacts on the slowly eroding earthworks.
