A Virtual Tour of Prickett's Fort (Part 2)

Warning: The following images and descriptions are of the reconstructed Memorial Fort, NOT the actual eighteenth-century fortification. The original Prickett's Fort disappeared from the written record around 1780. Unfortunately, nobody alive today knows what the historic fort looked like.

Prickett's Fort State Park is a day-use park that offers a number of amenities including picnic tables, fishing, and a boat ramp that provides access to the Monongahela River. Other recreational opportunities include birding, a "bayside" nature trail, and easy access to two rail trails: the MC Trail and the Mon River Trail, which both run adjacent to the park.

The reconstructed Memorial Fort is operated by the Pricketts Fort Memorial Foundation. Anyone wishing to tour the fort must first stop by the Visitor Center and purchase an admission ticket. The Visitor Center features a modest gift shop and an upstairs gallery where visitors can view an introductory video to the park and explore some museum displays. After watching the video and exploring the museum gallery, it is but a short walk to the Memorial Fort.

Prickett's Fort

The Memorial Fort measures about 110 feet square and features a two storey blockhouse on each of the four corners. Blockhouses not only provided defenders with an elevated "lookout" position, but they also enabled shooters to fire down along the lengths of the exterior walls. The wooden stockade, or palisade, averages about twelve feet high and features numerous "loopholes," or gun ports for firing on attackers. Some frontier forts in western Virginia, such as Arbuckle's Fort in the Greenbrier Valley, had bastions in the corners rather than blockhouses. A bastion is simply a protrusion of the stockade wall in a corner. Much like blockhouses, bastions enabled defenders to shoot at attackers that have gotten up against the exterior wall.

Blockhouse and Main Gate to the Fort

The side gate is open!

A Virtual Tour of Prickett's Fort (Part 1)

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Pricketts Fort Memorial Foundation set out to build a facsimile of what they believed the original Prickett's Fort looked like. Unfortunately, part way through the project, it became apparent that they had based their "reconstruction" plan on a fraudulent document (the so-called Stephen Morgan account). At that point, rather than abandon the project or change the design, they decided to proceed as originally planned. When it was completed, the Foundation officially designated the structure the "Memorial Fort" because it was meant to stand as a memorial to those settlers who had lived, fought, loved, and in many cases died on the western Virginia frontier. Whether or not the present structure looks anything like the original Prickett's Fort is impossible to say with any degree of certainty. Regardless, the important point is that the fort not only serves as a memorial, but it also functions as a valuable educational tool. By visiting the "reconstructed" fort located near Fairmont, West Virginia, modern Americans can glimpse what it may have been like to live on the colonial Virginia frontier during the 1770s.

Over the next several days, I will take you on a virtual tour of the Memorial Fort.