Before Burgoyne: French & Indian War Sites in the Saratoga Area – May 17, 2019

Friday, May 17, 2019 (8:00am-5:00pm)

Led by: Dr. David Preston

Tour Leaves from Fort Ticonderoga

Tour Registration: $125.00 – SOLD OUT!

America’s History LLC is proud to continue its partnership with Fort Ticonderoga by again offering a special one-day tour. For the first time, a tour will be offered prior to the Fort’s War College of the Seven Years’ War. Our tour leader, Dr. David Preston, is also the keynote speaker at this year’s War College.

Dr. Preston recently completed a report, based on new archival research, entitled “Colonial Saratoga: War and Peace on the Borderlands of Early America” commissioned by the Saratoga National Historical Park. The NPS Historic Resource Study explores Saratoga’s colonial background and its development as a logistical hub for British operations from 1755 to 1760. Fort Hardy and other British posts in the Hudson-Lake George corridor crucially anchored road networks, bateaux routes, warehouses, and barracks, all of which enabled British armies to project their power deep into the continent’s interior in unprecedented ways.

Along the way, we will see Lake Champlain’s South Bay where Baron Dieskau landed in 1755 to attack Maj. Gen. William Johnson’s provincial army at Lake George and the site of Fort Anne, a stockade built during Queen Anne’s War.

Once we arrive in the Saratoga area, we will visit the site where French Lt. Paul Marin de La Malgue, along with his Indian allies, attacked and destroyed “Saraghtoga” in November 1745. We also will visit the site of Fort Clinton (private property) constructed in 1746 for defensive and logistical purposes during King George’s War—a post that the French and Indians attacked a number of times in 1746 and 1747 . We will visit the General Philip Schuyler summer home property which was prosperously developed by the Schuyler family starting in the 1730s. We’ll also see Saratoga Falls where French and Indian raiders crossed the Hudson River in 1745. Another site will be Schaghticoke, an Indian community of the early 1700s. Fort Hardy, famously known as the place where Burgoyne’s army laid down their muskets in 1777, was a prominent location during the French and Indian War. David Preston’s research has uncovered never before published information and drawings of Fort Hardy which you’ll want to hear about in detail.

As time permits, we’ll see the sites of Fort Miller, Fort Edward and Johnson’s military road on our return northward.  We will return to Fort Ticonderoga by 5 p.m. to allow you to participate in the Friday evening program.

What’s included: Motor coach transportation, lunch, snack and beverage breaks, all admissions and gratuities, a map and materials package and the services of a historian selected for his knowledge and expertise as a tour leader.

Our Tour Leader and Historian: Dr. David Preston is the Westvaco Professor of National Security Studies at The Citadel. He is the author of the award-winning book, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution which won the prestigious Gilder-Lehrman Prize for Military History along with four other book prizes. His first book, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783 (2009), was hailed as an innovative study of how French, British, and Indian communities co-existed near the Iroquois Confederacy. The Texture of Contact received the 2010 Albert B. Corey Prize, for best book on American-Canadian relations.

Other important information: The bus will leave the Fort Ticonderoga parking lot at 8 a.m. You must register for the War College of the Seven Years War directly with Fort Ticonderoga.


THIS TOUR IS SOLD OUT! Contact Bruce Venter to get on the waiting list:

  • Phone: 1-703-785-4373
  • Email us at: info@AmericasHistoryLLC.com
  • Postal mail: America’s History LLC, P. O. Box 1076, Goochland, VA 23063

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