Much has been written on the events of the fifteen years from 1749 to 1764, a conflict that decided the ownership of most of the North American continent. Some historians have addressed the politics of this great conflict; others have focused on the daily lives of the people on the frontier and the ravages they endured in war. In Outposts of the War for Empire, Charles Stotz brings his specialized knowledge as an architect and architectural historian to tell and show what colonial forts looked like, where they stood, who built them and why, what materials were used in building them, and how they varied in design to fit different military purposes. Stotz describes twenty-two forts built by the French, the English, and the colonists in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania --from tiny outposts built by the Ohio Company at Wills Creek on the North Branch of the Potomac to the fortresses that guarded the Ohio at Pittsburgh, first the French Fort Duquesne and later the English Fort Pitt. Using mathematically accurate perspective drawings, he shows exactly how the most important of the forts were constructed and documents their twentieth-century reconstruction.
Through narrative and illustration, Charles Morse Stotz creates a unique and important perspective on the War for Empire, a world war that had profound and lasting influence on the frontier region of western Pennsylvania.
