Old Fort Niagara

A hundred men were posted here for one winter. Twelve were alive when the relief force arrived.

Fort Niagara stands on the eastern bank of the Niagara River where it meets Lake Ontario, and whoever held it controlled the passage between the river and the easternmost Great Lake. That is why it has been fought over for three centuries.

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, put up the first fortified structure here in 1678 and called it Fort Conti. In 1687 the Governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, replaced it with a new fort named after himself and posted a hundred-man garrison under Captain Pierre de Troyes, Chevalier de Troyes. The winter weather and disease were severe, and by the time relief came back from Montreal all but twelve were dead. In September 1688 the government decided to abandon the post and pulled the stockade down.

The British took the fort in 1759, during the French and Indian War. The United States was ostensibly ceded it after independence, but the British simply stayed, and did not leave until 1796, when the Jay Treaty reaffirmed and implemented the legal border with British Canada.

The US Army deactivated it in 1963, though the Coast Guard still has a presence on the site. The town of Youngstown, New York, grew up nearby.

It is now run by a non-profit as a state park, museum and re-enactment ground, and the way it presents itself is unusually clear about the method: preservation, authentic presentation and engaging programmes, with musket demonstrations and centuries-old buildings you walk through rather than look at. It is also a venue for events tied to the region's history.

The phrase they use is experience history where it happened, and given how much of it happened right here, that is not marketing so much as description.