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Old Fort House Museum

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FORT EDWARD — Many upstate New York villages and towns like to boast of a long and illustrious history, but in Fort Edward words such as freedom and liberty seem to ring a little bit louder.

At the Old Fort House Museum on Broadway in the village, all of Fort Edward’s rich past is on display, and what quickly becomes evident is that freedom and liberty can mean slightly different things to different people. To the townsfolk of Fort Edward during the American Revolution, the words meant overthrowing the yoke of British tyranny, and to Patrick Smyth, who built the house in 1772, they meant skedaddling to Canada to find a new home. To Solomon Northup, a black man, they meant even more.

“We are a history-rich community, and we have this wonderful landmark house that survived the American Revolution and is still with us,” said Paul McCarty, executive director of the Fort Edward Historical Association, which owns the Old Fort House Museum. “We have the story of an otherwise decent and fairly well-liked man who was the agent of the British crown, and we have the story of a free black man who was kidnapped back into slavery. We have quite a bit here for people to see.”

Lunch date

The yellow, three-story Dutch Colonial home twice hosted George Washington for lunch during the American Revolution. And less than 40 years later, not too long after slavery had been outlawed in New York, it was home to Northup, a free black man, and his wife. The Washington and Northup connections are just two of the many interesting historical tidbits related to the house, which survived a fire during World War II and was saved from demolition in 1953 by a handful of concerned citizens and the Fort Edward Historical Association.

“It’s very unique that we have a house like this, because a lot of homes like it in this part of the country were put to the torch by the British during the Revolution,” said McCarty. “The British evidently thought it was well-armed; so they stayed away.”

Fort was family name

They were right. While the British were setting much of Washington County ablaze in 1780, a stockade had been built around Smyth’s house and it was referred to as Fort Stark, as it was Gen. John Stark of New Hampshire and his troops who spent the most time there during the war. The “fort” however in the building’s name has no connection to a military fort. Rather, it is the name of the family that inhabited the house from around 1830 until Mrs. Fort sold the place in 1867.

Visitors to the house these days enter through the back door, and are taken on a guided tour that includes four rooms on the ground floor, a large center hallway and four more rooms on the second floor, including a large meeting room. The house is filled with artifacts from throughout the house’s long history, and only on the ground floor’s main room, where once was a tavern, is the house set up to look like it might in Colonial days.

“We’ve never had a complete collection so that we could put the entire house in one particular period,” said McCarty. “But it is a Dutch Colonial built much like Cherry Hill in Albany. It has the huge center hallway, which was typical of Dutch homes back then. And while it’s on a smaller scale than Cherry Hill, it’s set up exactly the same way, and they were built within a year or two of each other.”

Much of the house was built from beams taken from the site of Fort Edward, built in 1755 by the British to fend off French invasion from the north. Smyth had been a prominent member of the small Fort Edward community up until the outbreak of the Revolution, when his close ties to the British put him on the outs with his neighbors. He was initially put under house arrest by Benedict Arnold before making his way to Canada.

Connected to the crown

“The house Smyth built was a very large one for its day,” said McCarty, “and we think it was the first timber-framed house built in Fort Edward as a home. He had a number of different titles with the crown, and at one time was a friend of Philip Schuyler’s family. Generals from both sides used the house during the war. At the beginning of the war, they were still saying, ‘hail to the king,’ in the house, but very quickly it became something more like the pledge of alliance.”

It was Smyth who was put in charge of demolishing Fort Edward by the British around 1770. The fort was a place of huge significance during both the French and Indian War and American Revolution, mostly because of its geographical location, but the structure never came under attack. It was, however, at one time home to more than 13,000 British and Colonial troops during the French war.

“We refer to it as the third largest city in America in 1759 because of all the troops that were stationed there,” said David Starbuck, an archaeology professor at Plymouth State University and the author of five books on Colonial New York history. “It was an enormous log fort with these big embankments and earthworks, and if the French had ever attacked it they would have had to gone through this incredible maze just to reach the fort. The area that is now the modern village grew up right over the fort.”

Kidnapped, freed again

Along with the history of America’s two major Colonial wars, the Old Fort House Museum also tells the story of Northup, a free black man who by most accounts had a fine life in Fort Edward.

“He was what we call a canal rafter and had a pretty lucrative business hauling logs down the Hudson River to Troy,” McCarty said of Northup, who lived in the house. “We don’t know exactly what room he stayed in while he and his wife were here, but we assumed it was a boarding house at the time and they were probably renting one of the rooms.”

One of the upstairs rooms is dedicated to Northup, whose story takes a negative turn after moving to Saratoga Springs.

“He accompanied a couple of gentlemen to New York, and once he got there they convinced him to go onto Washington, D.C.,” said Eileen Hannay, the manager of the nearby Rogers Rangers Visitor Center and a former education director at the Old Fort House. “He was then drugged and sold into slavery for 12 years. His autobiography, ‘Twelve Years a Slave,’ came out in 1853 and was very popular. In the book, he describes the Old Fort House very well. He calls it the old yellow house.”

The ‘old yellow house’ will host a celebration commemorating Northup’s 200th birthday on Aug. 16. Cliff Mealy, a re-enactor who played Northup in the Saratoga Springs’ celebration earlier this month, will also be part of the festivities. Fortunately, Northup’s story ended on a happy note when Henry B. Northup, a white man whose father had owned Solomon’s father as a slave, found him in the South and brought him back to upstate New York, once again a free man.

“He actually went down South looking for Solomon and found him,” said McCarty. “It’s a great story.”

Along with the house itself, a visit to the Old Fort House Museum includes walking through a couple of other historical buildings, among them a lawyer’s office from the 1850s and a schoolhouse from the early 20th century.

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