Any debate over whether the SugarHouse casino site sits where an 18th century British fort once stood seems to have been laid to rest during a public lecture last week at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Nationally known historian and author Robert Selig argued that the casino site sits atop archaeological remains of a British fort, cross-referencing more than a dozen maps and written accounts of the area dating from the 1770s. Selig and other historians have long claimed that the waterfront site is the exact location of Redoubt No. 1—the first and largest of ten forts built by the British during the Revolutionary War to control supply lines in and out of Philadelphia.
In 1777, these forts formed a northerly chain of defense connecting the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Redoubt No. 1 sat where The King's Highway (now Frankford Avenue) crossed Cohocksink Creek, which is now Canal Street, and emptied into the Delaware River near Brown Street.
The Creek was capped and buried in the mid-19th century and is now an underground storm sewer. But in 1777 it was a dense marsh, and the bridge running across was strategically important, as was the fort itself; during the British occupation of Philadelphia, Redoubt No. 1 was the only way in or out of the city, Selig said.
According to the historical society’s collection of maps, as well as an oral history compiled in the decades after the war from eyewitnesses, the fort included a barracks, cannon platforms, a moat on three sides that flooded with the tide, and palisades as well as sharpened tree trunks around its walls that extended into the tidal plain.
Confusion over the location of the fort is due in part to an inaccurate 18th century map of the area, drawn 3,000 miles away in London, which has been widely reproduced over the last 200 years, Selig said. But the maps presented at Wednesday’s lecture predate the erroneous map and place the fort directly on the SugarHouse site. During his presentation, Selig presented maps drawn by British officer and engineer John Montresor, and also John André, who was hanged as a spy in 1780, both of which show the true location of the fort.
The most important of the Redoubt maps, also presented Wednesday, is one drawn in 1777 during the British occupation, by Lewis Nicola, an officer in the Continental Army. Also of importance is a map by a man known simply as Fleury, who was a spy for George Washington. The historical society displayed original copies of some of these maps at the lecture, all of which place Redoubt No. 1 in the same location on the waterfront.
Philadelphia historian and preservationist Torben Jenk, who helped research and organize Wednesday’s lecture, has been working tirelessly to draw attention to the location of the fort for months in hopes that SugarHouse officials will agree to a thorough archaeological dig before construction begins. Jenk says he has been sending SugarHouse reports of his findings, including copies of the maps that show the location of the fort, but has received no response.
SugarHouse officials have said that even if there had been a fort on the site, any remaining archaeological evidence of it would have been destroyed by subsequent industrial use, especially the demolition of the Jack Frost Sugar refinery, built there in the late 19th century and destroyed in 1997.
But Selig said Wednesday that the refinery was destroyed by way of implosion, so that the structure would have fallen on and pushed down whatever artifacts had been under the refinery, helping to preserve them.
