Fort Laurens

Among all the defensive works raised in Ohio during the Revolutionary War, Fort Laurens stands alone as the sole such structure erected within the state's present-day borders. Builders raised it in the fall of 1778 along the Tuscarawas River, near the site of modern Bolivar, Ohio. Winter of 1779 brought weeks of siege against the fort, carried out by a combination of Indigenous warriors and British troops. By August of that year, orders came down to abandon the outpost entirely. Today the Ohio History Connection holds ownership of the property, though nothing of the original structure survives above the earth's surface.

Construction

Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh set out from Pittsburgh in October 1778 at the head of 1,200 regulars and militia, aiming to strike Wyandot settlements along the Sandusky River before pushing on to seize Fort Detroit. His column reached the Tuscarawas River, which feeds into the Muskingam, by November, and there he gave the order to raise a fort on the western bank. What went up was a standard four-sided stockade, complete with a square blockhouse positioned near the gate facing land. In honor of Henry Laurens, then president of the Second Continental Congress, the outpost took the name Fort Laurens. Inside its walls, workers added a storehouse along with barracks. When supplies grew scarce, McIntosh made the call in December to march back to Pittsburg, but not before assigning Colonel John Gibson to hold the position, along with 19 officers and 152 men drawn from the 13th Virginia Regiment.

Siege

Word of the fort's construction reached the British garrison at Detroit through their native allies. Simon Girty, an interpreter with the British Indian Department, was dispatched in January to survey the site, traveling with a party of Mingo warriors. He reached Fort Laurens on January 21, arriving just as Captain John Clark of the 8th Pennsylvania brought a modest resupply column into the fort. Though he missed his chance to seize the supplies themselves, Girty struck at the escort during its return march toward Pittsburg. The ambush left two Americans dead and four wounded, while a fifth man was captured. Girty carried this prisoner back to Detroit, where he pressed for British regulars to join in an assault on the fort. Captain Henry Bird of the 8th Regiment answered the call, volunteering along with a handful of soldiers to accompany Girty to Upper Sandusky, a Wyandot settlement. There the group swelled with the addition of about 180 Mingo and Wyandot fighters.

The blockade of Fort Laurens opened on February 22, 1779, when a party of workers outside the fort's walls was caught off guard. Seventeen men died and were scalped on the spot, and two more were seized as captives.

Throughout the encirclement, those defending the fort endured shortages of provisions and cold-weather gear. Captain Benjamin Biggs of the 13th Virginia later described the ordeal: the blockade stretched across four weeks, and once food ran out, the men subsisted on half a biscuit daily for three or four days before resorting, in the final two days, to boiling and eating their own moccasins along with strips of old, dried hide.

Brutal winter weather ultimately forced Bird to withdraw his forces after four weeks, just before reinforcements from the American side arrived. Colonel Daniel Brodhead, who had taken over from McIntosh as head of the Western Department of the Continental Army, later concluded that the fort's position could not be defended, and he gave orders in August for it to be abandoned.

Fort Laurens Museum & Park

The property belongs to the Ohio History Connection, though a small museum on the grounds is run by the Zoar Community Association. Through artifacts pulled from digs conducted in the 1970s, along with various exhibits and dioramas, the museum walks visitors through the history of the fort and the men who served there. Surrounding the museum is a spacious park where military reenactments take place. No structure of the fort survives above the surface, but the outline has been carved into the grass and packed with wood chips so that guests can trace its shape and size.

Whatever survived of the eastern wall was wiped out in 1832 when the Ohio and Erie Canal was being built. The site earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Digs carried out in 1972 and 1973 uncovered the fort's layout and pinpointed where its cemetery had been. Then, in 1986 and 1987, the bodies of soldiers who died on February 22, 1779, were pulled from a mass grave. Full military honors accompanied the burial of one soldier at the site's Tomb of the Unknown Patriot of the American Revolution. Following study of the bones, the remaining soldiers were interred within a crypt built into a wall of the museum.

The Ohio History Connection revealed in 2024 that it had secured the money needed to reconstruct part of the fort.