8/16 Historic Fort William, Thunder Bay

Warning:  This is going to be a long post for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that this historic fort is really huge.  The second is that I spent two four-hour days there, and took a ton of photos, but really did not even hit all the buildings.  

Also important to know is that this place is not the original fort from 1816, but was constructed in about 1972 to reflect the original fort in Portage, Minnesota, just down the shore of Lake Superior from Thunder Bay.  It is supposedly a faithful reproduction, but I could find little information online about the original fort.  The one piece of interesting information I did find was that this fort was much larger than most fur-trading forts because it was a central point where Native Americans and fur traders met to sell and trade their furs with the North West Company.  Many of the large buildings stored trade goods and furs, plus it had a large military contingent to protect its operations. 

Anyway, nearly all of the buildings are filled with period appropriate and historical furnishings, and the employees are dressed in appropriate period costumes.  They also stick to their roles as 1816 people at the fort and will not answer any questions outside of their roles!!  We will start at the entrance! 

 

You pay admission at the visitor center, but the fort entrance is a considerable walk away, though there is a shuttle for people like me who do not want to walk.  This is the actual entrance to the fort. 

 

 

I had to stop and look at these pins on the outside of the log palisade walls. 

On the inside, I noticed that the walls were strengthened by the use of half logs and wooden pins to hold them in place.  Nails were hard to get on the frontier and had to be made individually, so they carved each wooden pin individually and hammered them into place.

Next are just a few of the many buildings inside the fort walls. 

This is a flagpole with a sentry post in the background.

I could not post the insides of every building, but I thought this building showing the bales of trade goods being stored.

And this building had several hundred hanging furs.  I wonder where they got them all???

This building was better finished than most and represents the buildings that held offices, sleeping rooms, and dining facilities for the higher level fort employees. 

This was a copy of an original note sent to the headquarters regarding someone who had died of a venereal disease! 

A room in the hospital.

I wonder what tapioca was supposed to treat??

I really liked the area of buildings where craftsmen made things that were hard or impossible to obtain or replace because of the distance from England.  Most of the craft buildings were centered around this water pump in a far corner of the fort. 

The canoe shop had real craftsmen, and one craftswoman, who built one canoe per year here at Historic Fort Williams.  The process started with finding the right birchbark trees and stripping off very large panels, then drying them and fitting them on a canoe.

This was a tinsmith who made and repaired pots, dishes, cups, and other items. 

Can you guess what this is?  Note that it is pulled by horses, but has several buckets and hand pumps on each side, as well as a storage area for water. 

A storage area above one of the craft buildings.

More tomorrow about the local event put on by the local Indian tribes.