Old Ticonderoga

Old Ticonderoga is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s historical sketches, drawing on the long history of Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York and the various military and political events that the strategically important location had been the site of across the eighteenth century. The fort had been the focus of significant military action during the French and Indian War in the 1750s and 1760s and during the American Revolutionary War in the 1770s, with both periods leaving the kind of historical residue that Hawthorne’s reflective sketches drew on.

The sketch uses the visit to the historic site as the framework for the wider reflection on what the various events that occurred there actually mean and how the historical memory of the site shapes contemporary American understanding of the colonial and revolutionary past. Hawthorne uses the genius loci, the spirit of the place, as the structural anchor for the reflective material, with the physical setting providing the immediate occasion for the wider historical and moral observations.

The sketch is more atmospheric and reflective than narratively driven, with Hawthorne’s characteristic prose style giving the essay the kind of careful weight that his shorter work often delivered. For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Old Ticonderoga shows him at his most directly engaged with the historical sites and the wider American military past. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of the historical sketch tradition, the piece is worth knowing.