Fort Ticonderoga
— the fort the cannons left in winter.
Not only on a wall.
“Stone bastions on a low promontory between two lakes. The star fort the French called Carillon, taken by Ethan Allen one May morning in 1775, then quietly emptied of its guns that winter by a Boston bookseller named Henry Knox. The Pell family began the restoration in 1909. The walls hold the wind off the water.
Fort Ticonderoga, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Fort Ticonderoga stands at the narrows between Lake Champlain and Lake George, on a peninsula the Iroquois called Cheonderoga, the place between two waters. French engineers under Michel Chartier de Lotbinière laid out the star fort in 1755 and called it Fort Carillon, holding the corridor between New France and the British colonies. The site sits on the New York shore, across from Vermont, roughly a hundred miles north of Albany. The fort and its grounds, run by the Fort Ticonderoga Association, have been continuously restored since 1909.
The walls are local limestone and earth, rebuilt over a century by the Pell family from the ruin Lafayette saw when he visited in 1825. Stephen H. P. Pell began excavation and reconstruction in 1908, working from the original 1755 French plans recovered from Paris archives. Cannon, much of it cast in Sweden and France, was returned to the ramparts over decades. The four bastions face four directions like a compass rose, and each takes the morning light differently. The masonry holds the colour of a cool grey winter sky, even in August.
The fort's calendar still turns on May 10, the morning in 1775 Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys climbed the south wall before dawn and took the garrison in their bedclothes. The cannon Henry Knox dragged roughly three hundred miles by ox-sled to Boston that winter became the guns on Dorchester Heights in March 1776, ending the British occupation of the city. The site opens to visitors from early May into late October, closes for the cold months, and reawakens each spring with reenactment weekends along the lake.