I have always had an amateur interest in Colonial American history and the period of the American Revolutionary War. In school, one of my social studies curriculum fair projects was a map of key battles that my dad helped me rig up so you could press a button and a Christmas light would show where a battle had occurred while you could read a brief description on the side.
When we started planning our Northeast states road trip (which I'm now abbreviating as NERT - NorthEast Road Trip - my sons tell me that's a ridiculous acronym), we kept adding sites to visit that were significant during the American Revolution. One of these is Fort Ticonderoga in New York. In fact, we were going to just pass through on the way to Vermont, but once I started looking at what all there was to see there, we adjusted the itinerary to allow us much of the day to explore. (On our Middle States trip, we had a few late additions to our itinerary that I wish we'd had more time for, so I'm thinking about that now.)
Anyway, DH brought a book home from the library the other day: The Fate of the Day - from Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston - which is 2nd of a trilogy, beginning in 1777. I'm not so much for reading about history - I'd much rather watch a documentary or visit a museum - but I started flipping through the book and reading the descriptions of landscape, terrain, logistics, etc., of how troops moved in, through, and about the parts of New York, Vermont, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania we'll be visiting. I'd already been studying the Google maps and AAA maps to become familiar with the area, so it was pretty cool to look at the old maps from the late 1700s and think about how what we'll see next year would have looked like 250 years ago.
The stories the land could tell....
~ Cindy D.
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