Places: Fort Prince Goerge, South Carolina

Forts and fortified blockhouses served an important dual purpose on the frontier.  They were supposed to provide protection for local inhabitants during conflict with the Natives.  And they were also meant to impress the local Natives into not attacking in the first place.  Sometimes, the forts failed on both counts.  Such was the case of Fort Prince George.

As we've seen with Fort Loudoun, built across from the key Cherokee town of Tellico, the British often chose sites for their forts both along Native trails and often adjacent to important Native towns.  Such was the same for Fort Prince George, built on the Cherokee Trail across the river from the important Lower Cherokee town of Keeowee in 1753.  The Fort was named for then-Prince of Wales, later George III.  It and the town site of Keeowee are submerged by Lake Keeowee in Pickens County, not far from the college town of Clemson.  The fort was a wooden stockade that took only two months to build, complete with bastions for cannons trained on the Cherokee town. 

The site is most important for an incident that occurred in 1759, during the Anglo-Cherokee War.  A Cherokee delegation arrived in Charleston for peace talks with the royal governor, and was promptly taken hostage.  They were escorted to Fort Prince George for safekeeping.  A few months later, in 1760, while Attakullakulla worked with the British to secure their release, a war party lead by Oconostata killed a British officer outside the walls of Fort Prince George.  All the Native hostages inside were killed in retaliation, which set off attacks on Fort Prince George, Fort Loudoun, Fort Dobbs and the town of Ninety-Six.  Although the town and most of the forts held out, Oconostata took Fort Loudoun by siege, not an easy thing to do and almost unheard of for a Native commander.  Hostilities between the Cherokee and British ended by 1761 and the Fort was abandoned by 1768.  It was not used by either side during the Revolution and moldered into ruin.  Archaeologists excavated it prior to it being submerged under the lake, finding Native skeletons, cannon and musket balls, rum bottles, cooking utensils and glass fragments, among other things.  The local museum houses a replica model of the fort, shown below.