The fight for independence is unfolding in real time at Fort Ticonderoga, and on September 19 and 20 visitors can take part in it. During the REAL TIME REVOLUTION® Signature Event, “Lodging as the Nature of the Campaign will Admit,” guests of all ages will pick up a mallet or a saw and work beside soldiers of the Northern Continental Army to raise the wooden huts that sheltered an army atop Liberty Hill 250 years ago.
Two hundred fifty years ago this month, the Northern Continental Army held this ground with winter closing in and a British fleet somewhere to the north. Soldiers had to build shelter from what the landscape gave them, and finish before the weather or the enemy arrived. No one knew how the story would end.
This event falls during one of the strongest seasons in Fort Ticonderoga’s 117-year history, on the heels of its recent recognition as a “Best Living History” site for the nation’s 250th birthday by USA Today. Fort Ticonderoga was also featured prominently in Fodor’s, Travel + Leisure, and Smithsonian Magazine among other publications.
“The story of 1776 was not shaped by declarations and battles alone. It was shaped by the daily work required to keep an army together and ready to fight,” said Beth L. Hill, Fort Ticonderoga President and CEO. “Visitors will not simply watch that work in September. They will take up a tool and do it, on the same ground and in the same season it happened. Building shelter may look like a simple act, but it was part of the preparation, ingenuity and determination that allowed the Northern Continental Army to hold its position and keep the Revolution alive.”
The weekend also opens up the historical detective work behind the recreation. Fort Ticonderoga’s historians drew on surviving evidence to piece together the design, materials and purpose of this distinctive 1776 military housing, and visitors will see how boards, posts and beams came together into shelter that carried an army from summer into fall.
By September 1776, the Northern Continental Army was fortifying Ticonderoga and the strategic high ground surrounding it while British forces prepared to advance south from Canada. Soldiers had already endured a difficult retreat, disease and severe shortages. As colder weather approached, dependable shelter became essential to protecting the army’s health, discipline and ability to defend the Lake Champlain corridor.
The huts on Liberty Hill demonstrate the practical problem-solving at the heart of the 1776 campaign. Their construction was one part of a much larger effort that included building miles of earthworks, mounting more than 100 cannon, outfitting a fleet on Lake Champlain and mobilizing nearly 13,000 troops at Ticonderoga.
Event Highlights
“Lodging as the Nature of the Campaign will Admit,” September 19 and 20, 2026:
Ongoing, 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. — Hut Building (Liberty Hill Encampment). Help make history. Grab a mallet or a saw and try your hand at timber framing, working alongside Continental Army soldiers to build the simple wooden huts that housed them as they held the line for liberty in 1776.
12:30 p.m. — Author Presentation, Steven Elliott (Mars Education Center Great Room). Steven Elliott of Rutgers University discusses his book Surviving the Winters: Housing Washington’s Army during the American Revolution and the crucial role camp construction and administration played in Patriot strategy.
1:45 p.m. — Fife and Drum Parade to Liberty Hill Encampment (begins at the American Flag). March to the sound of fifes and drums out to the Liberty Hill Encampment, west of the fortress.
2 p.m. — Cannon Demonstration (Liberty Hill Encampment). Examine how the Continental Army mounted old French and British guns within a host of new American fortifications, and see the workings, power and sound of these heavy cannon.