Fort Halifax

Fort Halifax is a former British colonial outpost on the banks of the Sebasticook River, just above its mouth at the Kennebec River, in Winslow, Maine. Originally built as a wooden palisaded fort in 1754, during the French and Indian War, only a single blockhouse survives. The oldest blockhouse in the United States, it is preserved as Fort Halifax State Historic Site, and is open to the public in the warmer months. It was the first of three significant forts which the British built on the major rivers in the Northeast to cut off the native water ways to the ocean ). The blockhouse was declared a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1968.
Fort Halifax was a fort on the north bank of the Sebasticook River. Its blockhouse, which survives, is the oldest blockhouse in the United States. . It was part of a garrison built by the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1754-1756 at the outset of the French and Indian War. On July 25, 1754, Major General John Winslow arrived with a force of 600 soldiers to establish the fort at the confluence of the Kennebec River with the Sebasticook River. The palisaded defense was intended to prevent Canadiens and their Native American allies from using the Kennebec River valley as a route to attack English settlements. Further, Massachusetts was extending its border into the former region of Acadia and threatening the capital of Canada, Quebec.

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