Archaeological and Geophysical Investigations of Cook’s Fort (1774-1783), Monroe County, West Virginia

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper reports on recent archaeological and geophysical investigations at Cook’s Fort, Monroe County, WV, constructed by local militia in 1774 during Dunmore’s War and garrisoned by militia and used as a place of refuge by settlers throughout the Revolutionary War. During these wars this location was on the Virginia Frontier and was very much an area of contested ownership and warfare between the Virginia settlers and Ohio Valley Native Americans, particularly the Shawnee and Mingo.

Gradiometer survey delineated an 82 ft. square stockade with two opposite corner stockade bastions, and a V-shaped “redan-like” anomaly southeast of the fort. Numerous eighteenth century artifacts were recovered. The discovery of this fort’s location and design adds to our growing inventory of excavated fort sites in the Greenbrier Valley of West Virginia and broadens our understanding of both the range of frontier fort design/construction and settlement patterns in this region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology