Between 1719 and 1720, the old trading post at Thomaston was remodeled into Fort St. George, a stockaded fort protected by two blockhouses. This fortification represented English colonial expansion into territory along the St. George River, which had previously been considered the boundary between New England and New France. The establishment of this English fort provoked strong resistance from Abenaki Indian tribes who viewed the construction as an encroachment on their ancestral lands. The French, seeking to maintain their influence in the region, instigated the Abenaki tribes to take military action against the garrison.
During Dummer's War, the Abenaki and French forces attacked the garrison of Fort St. George on two separate occasions in 1722. Following these initial assaults, they returned in 1723 to launch a more sustained military campaign against the fort, laying siege to it for a period lasting 30 days. The siege represented a significant escalation in hostilities, as the attacking forces committed substantial time and resources to attempting to capture or destroy the English fortification.
The article does not provide details about the immediate outcome of the 1723 siege or its specific consequences. However, it indicates that the attacks on Fort St. George and other similar provocations prompted an English response, suggesting that the conflicts contributed to broader patterns of colonial-indigenous warfare during this period. The siege occurred during Dummer's War, a significant conflict in early 18th-century New England colonial history.
European colonization of North America accelerated after 1600, with England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands establishing competing settlements along the Atlantic coast, the St. Lawrence River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley. The first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (1607) struggled with starvation and conflict; the Plymouth colony (1620) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630) followed. By the mid-1700s, thirteen English colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard, governed through a mix of royal charters, proprietary grants, and elected assemblies. The colonial economy depended on tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, rice and indigo in the Carolinas, and maritime trade in New England — all increasingly reliant on enslaved African labor after 1619. Conflict with Indigenous peoples over land was continuous, punctuated by major wars including King Philip's War (1675–1676) in New England and the Yamasee War (1715–1717) in the South. The French and Indian War (1754–1763), part of the global Seven Years' War, ended French power in North America and left Britain deeply in debt — triggering the taxation disputes that would lead to revolution.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.