Old Fort House Museum

Old Fort House is built from the fort it replaced. Patrick Smyth salvaged the timbers of the French and Indian War's Fort Edward in 1772 and framed his house from the ruins — the walls literally made of the old fortification. The Revolution caught him inside it: Smyth was a Loyalist, Benedict Arnold arrested him in 1777, and the house served both armies in turn — Burgoyne's British and Stark's Americans, who called it Fort Stark, using the same rooms.

The guest book is the file's spine — Washington and Monroe ate at the tavern the house became; Baroness von Riedesel, the general's wife who followed the army into captivity, stayed within its walls. It worked as boarding house and home through the nineteenth century, one of the oldest frame structures in northern New York, until the Historical Association made it a museum in 1953.

The house keeps the archaeology of its making — the fort's timbers in the frame, the Loyalist builder arrested by the future traitor, the tavern where the future presidents ate, the rooms where both sides of the Revolution headquartered in the same house. The museum complex around it holds the rest of Fort Edward's salvage: the law office, the schoolhouse, the barn.

Old Fort House Museum is the archive's salvaged file — the 1772 house built from the French and Indian War fort's timbers, headquarters to both armies in the Revolution, the tavern where Washington and Monroe ate.