The Fort
How the fort was put together: a five-cornered post with blockhouses at the corners, a log wall, quarters inside, and a trading house at its heart.
Explore the plan
Select a part of the fort to see where it sat in the whole. Full descriptions follow in the cards below.
The fort was laid out with five corners, roughly 120 by 160 feet. The shape is the source of the star mark used across this site. Five points let defenders cover the walls between the corners, though no plan could fully fix the trouble of the fort's low ground.
The fort was a five-cornered post, roughly 120 by 160 feet, built to hold a garrison of about 60 soldiers and to anchor American trade and authority on the Upper Mississippi. It was a frontier fort, not a grand fortress, and every part of it had a job: keep the men housed and supplied, let them defend the walls, and carry on the trade that was part of the post's reason for being.
The hardest fact about the structures was the ground they sat on. A fort is built to command the land around it, but this one was overlooked by a bluff and a ravine. The blockhouses and the palisade had to do their work from a low spot that gave attackers cover and a line of fire down into the post. The builders made a sound enough fort. They could not move the bluff.
The fort was laid out with five corners, roughly 120 by 160 feet. The shape is the source of the star mark used across this site. Five points let defenders cover the walls between the corners, though no plan could fully fix the trouble of the fort's low ground.
Heavy timber blockhouses stood at the corners. They rose above the walls so defenders could fire along the palisade and out at attackers. The central blockhouse was the structure later found in the 1965 dig.
A wall of upright logs enclosed the post and tied the corners together. It kept the fort's interior shielded from view and from direct fire, at least from the level ground, and formed the line the September 1812 attackers nearly carried.
Inside the walls were the soldiers' barracks and the officers' quarters that housed the garrison of about 60 men. The stone foundations of the officers' quarters survived underground and were uncovered in the 1965 excavation.
The fort included a factory, the government trading house where goods were exchanged with Native nations. Trade was part of the fort's purpose, not a sideline, and the trading house tied the post to the wider business of the frontier.
The fort that stands on the riverfront now is a reconstruction, built near the original site in the mid-1980s, much of it by volunteers, including inmates from the Iowa State Penitentiary. It follows the plan that the 1965 excavation helped confirm, so a visitor can walk inside a five-cornered post, look up at the blockhouses, and stand where the barracks and trading house once were.
As a living-history site, the reconstruction is meant to be experienced rather than viewed from behind a rope. Tours, reenactments, and education programs put people inside the walls and the daily routine of the early 1800s.
The $3.5 millioncapital campaign now carries that preservation further. The whole site is raised about four feet to stand well above the flood plain, the existing buildings are repaired and re-chinked on new, higher foundations, the structures that had been rolled off site are reset, and the blockhouse and enlisted men's barracks that had been torn down are rebuilt, alongside a new Welcome Center/Living History Center.
Plan a visit to walk the reconstructed fort, or read how the original was found.