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Updated: June 17, 2025
SKENESBOROUGH, now Whitehall, named for Philip Skene, a retired British officer, who settled on lands granted him after the French War. He had about fifty tenants, and a few negro slaves. THE CAPTURED ARTILLERY was taken to Cambridge on sleds in midwinter, by Colonel Knox. It enabled Washington to bring the siege of Boston to a favorable conclusion.
But while Burgoyne was getting his scattered forces again in hand, and was bringing everything up the lake to Skenesborough, the garrison of Fort Edward had been spreading themselves out over the road he meant to take, and were putting every obstacle in his way that ingenuity could devise or experience suggest. Hundreds of trees were felled across the road.
That night he sent away his stores and baggage in more than two hundred bateaux, under convoy of five armed gallies, to Skenesborough, a town about eight miles distant, at the head of a small inlet, South Bay, which branches off from the Lake at Ticonderoga. The troops marched to the same place, leaving more than a hundred guns behind. Daylight showed the flight of the enemy.
After burning the enemy's boats on the lake, Brown returned to Skenesborough. General Lincoln was about to march from Skenesborough to Fort Edward, with seven hundred men, when he received a pressing request from Gates, dated on the morning of the battle, to join him at once.
FORT ANNE, one of the minor posts built during the French War to protect the route from Albany to Lake Champlain. It consisted of a log blockhouse surrounded by a palisade. Boat navigation of Lake Champlain began here, fourteen miles from Skenesborough, by Wood Creek flowing into it.
He waited, therefore, a few days near Skenesborough for his tents, baggage, and provisions; employing himself, in the mean time, in clearing the navigation of Wood Creek, while his people at Ticonderoga were transporting the stores and artillery over the portages to Lake George.
Skenesborough was then set on fire, the Americans making good their retreat to Fort Anne, with the loss of all their stores. St. Clair heard of Warner's defeat and of the taking of Skenesborough almost at the same hour. His first plan had wholly miscarried.
In like manner, his two hundred and fifty Canadians and Provincials had grown to more than six hundred of the latter before he left Skenesborough. Most of these recruits came from the Vermont settlements. They were put to work clearing the roads, scouting, getting forward the supplies, collecting cattle, etc. Their knowledge of the country was greatly serviceable to Burgoyne.
It was a good plan, undertaken without Gates's knowledge or consent. On the same day that Burgoyne was crossing the Hudson, Lincoln sent five hundred men to the head of Lake George, with orders to destroy the stores there; five hundred more to attack Ticonderoga; and another five hundred to Skenesborough, to support them in case of need.
People, therefore, were filled with wonder when they heard how Ethan Allen had surprised and taken it on the 9th of May, 1775, with only a handful of men; how Seth Warner had also taken Crown Point; and how Skenesborough and Fort George, being thus cut off from Canada, had also fallen into our hands without firing a shot.
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