SPRINGFIELD-A trio of local history experts, working with historical records, personal exploration and, eventually, with archaeology staff and students from Dartmouth College, believe that they may have solved a regional history mystery.
That mystery? The exact location of a blockhouse built in 1760 in the first few miles of New Hampshire’s historic Crown Point Road (CPR), near where it crossed the Connecticut River by ferry into Vermont.
Local historian Lonnie Lisai, of Westminster, along with fellow historians Annette Spaulding, of Rockingham, and Nicholas Levlocke, of Springfield, have pooled their research and skills over the last two years to try to pinpoint the Beaver Brook site using underwater sonar with the help of Dartmouth archaeologists.
They feel they have discovered, photographed, and investigated the remaining stone foundation of that original blockhouse that guarded the very first section of Crown Point Road.
A blockhouse is essentially a tall (2½-story) structure, up to 32 feet square, built of stone and thick timbers. It is a house that doubles as a small, enclosed fort.
Blockhouses were so sturdy and thick they were impenetrable by the typical weapons and firearms of the period. They were built with small openings in all four walls for cannon fire, and numerous slots were built into the stone and timber walls and even the upper floors to allow for musket fire in all directions against enemy attackers.
In the Colonial era, and through the Revolutionary War, dozens of these blockhouses were built along what was then the Colonial frontier — Southern Vermont and New Hampshire.
It is well known that the military road, built in 1759 and 1760 during the French and Indian War, was constructed starting at Fort Crown Point on Lake Champlain, continuing for about 77 miles across Vermont.
The road ended at the Fort at No. 4 in New Hampshire, the fort built in 1744 in the recently surveyed township referred to as “No. 4” and ultimately chartered as Charlestown, New Hampshire in 1753. A replica of the fort was built a short distance from the original in 1960 and serves as an open-air living museum today.
Starting at the end of the 1800s, interested parties, including the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Crown Point Road Association (CPRA), began placing markers that traced the original road from end to end.
In Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Springfield, Vermont, alone, 21 historic marker granite posts and bronze plaques accurately detail the road’s route. More than 80 other markers trace the road across the rest of Vermont to Lake Champlain.
The frontier blockhouse
The Fort at No. 4 in New Hampshire was the farthest northern outpost of the colonies in the 1740s. The 1891 History of Windsor County, Vermont refers to the area across the river from Charlestown — now Springfield — at that time as “a vast unguarded frontier, unsafe for occupancy.”
This isolated region survived Abenaki raids and skirmishes up into the early 1760s and the end of the war.
In April 1747, a force of just over 30 colonists successfully defended the frontier Fort at No. 4 against a major, three-day attack by a force of about 10 French soldiers and 60 Abenaki warriors. The fort would become known as Fort Stevens. in honor of Capt. Phineas Stevens, commander of the force that defended the fort.
CPRA member Lonnie Lisai, of Westminster, said that historical records place the blockhouse at the Connecticut River ferry crossing at Beaver Brook, but some historians have confused the site with another point downriver, near the present Cheshire Bridge, where a later ferry crossed from Charlestown into Springfield.
“I think it was one ‘historian’ who did no research and determined that the Wentworth ferry/CPR could not possibly be a mile up from Black River,” Lisai said in an email. “Then other historians assumed that to be a fact — and it became a fact.”
Where was the original blockhouse located?
Levlocke, Lisai, and Spaulding agreed that the evidence they’d accumulated over the past few years — from maps, old diaries, journals, and personal exploration of the area — pointed to a site upriver from the Cheshire Bridge, not downriver, and much closer to the route of the original Crown Point Road.
Complicating the search is that two major changes have reshaped the Connecticut River and the region’s landscape in the last 266 years, and the three kept those changes in mind during their research.
First, in the mid-1800s, railroads were built along the sides of the river. The railbed was built atop large earthen berms, in some cases many yards high, with engineering that dramatically altered how smaller tributaries joined the Connecticut.
This was key, because early references about the blockhouse referred to it as being built at the place where Beaver Brook entered the big river. What had been Beaver Brook was cut off from the main river by the railroad bed.
But Levlocke, in studying maps and looking at the area where they thought the brook should be, noticed a large culvert at that point which emptied into the river. He thought that might be the place to start looking for remnants of the blockhouse.
Secondly, early in the 20th century, a series of hydroelectric dams were built on the upper Connecticut River, including the Vernon Dam in 1907 and the Bellows Falls Dam from 1926 to 1928. These dams at least tripled the width of the upper Connecticut from its original bed, expanding it into the low, open terraced farmland on both sides of the river.
The local historians knew that if any remnants of the blockhouse remained, they could be far from shore, toward the middle of the river, and perhaps buried under mud and silt.
On Aug. 15, 2025, they took a boat and scuba diving equipment to the point, now well into the river, where they predicted that Beaver Brook had originally met the Connecticut to see what they could find.
Surprise find
Spaulding has more than 35 years of experience as a master diver with more than 3,400 dives around the world. She routinely makes in excess of 100 dives a year in the Connecticut River, her stated favorite place to dive, and has made numerous historic discoveries in other rivers and lakes.
The three knew that the original blockhouse had a cut-granite foundation and first floor 12 to 14 feet high. The foundation had been topped by an upper floor of heavy timbers, 9 inches to 12 inches thick. Those timbers were removed at one point and used for other constructions in the area after the threat of Abenaki and French army attacks died down and the blockhouse was no longer needed.
Spaulding began her dive at the site where their research told them Beaver Brook should be.
Despite muddy water with poor visibility, she spotted the foundation — but not way out in the riverbed as they expected.
To everyone’s surprise, she saw a “straight line of cut-granite stones underwater, not far off the present riverbank, in about 16 feet of water.”
“I was stunned when Annette found it!” Lisai wrote.
Spaulding said that what she could see of the foundation looked like “smaller cut stone that humans could handle, with drill marks.”
She took photos and measurements, and the three accurately marked the site. They were certain they had quickly found what they were looking for.
Levlocke contacted archaeologists at Dartmouth College about the find, and in July a group of three archaeologists and two technicians, under the direction of Jonathan Alperstein, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, brought sonar down to the site to look at what was buried under the silt there.
Along with Levlocke, Lisai, and Spaulding, Alperstein boated to the site and began to search the riverbed.
“The sonar found the rest of the foundation,” Spaulding said. “Buried under feet of silt. It was a square of granite with an opening, about 8 to 10 feet from shore.”
Alperstein assured them that it was “a man-made site,” Spaulding said.
Since then, he has contacted the New Hampshire state archaeologist and made a report about the find, which begins a process that could lead to designation in the National Historic Registry. He said he will continue to follow its status.
Levlocke, Lisai, and Spaulding said they plan on continuing their investigation of the area, including seeing if they can find more details on the original path of the Connecticut River, and that they will continue “working with Dartmouth College on evaluating and documenting the discovery further.”
Lisai wrote that “the Wentworth Ferry/Blockhouse will get much more attention next year” with the 250th anniversary of Gen. John Stark “crossing the River from Fort No. 4 along the way to the 1777 Battle of Bennington” with 1,500 militia soldiers.
“I will be digging for military records,” he said.
Levlocke, Lisai, and Spaulding, each repeatedly credited the other two with doing the bulk of the investigation and work.
“I personally equate our team (Lonnie, Annette, and me) to an ant colony — everyone brought something unique to solving the Blockhouse mystery,” Levlocke said. “Together as one, we made this find happen.”
Vermont’s first Interstate highway
It’s hard to overstate the impact and importance of Crown Point Road in New England’s, and especially Vermont’s, history.
But it wasn’t exactly the case that Crown Point Road was a Colonial trail carved out of a vast wilderness, as it is often referenced.
Native people had been living in this region for thousands of years, and the road followed and widened their well-established trails between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain.
In fact, as soon as Crown Point Road crossed the Connecticut River into Vermont it passed directly through the Skitchewaug section of Springfield and over a gap in Skitchewaug Mountain into the town’s historic Eureka area. This was already a well-established Native trail.
Skitchewaug was the site of a large-scale archaeological excavation in the 1980s which showed it was a major Western Abenaki village and farming region that had been in use for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived in New England.
From the south end headed north, after leaving the Fort at No. 4 and crossing into Vermont, CPR made its way north and west through Springfield, Weathersfield, Cavendish, Ludlow, and Plymouth, and on across the Green Mountains, terminating across Lake Champlain from Fort Crown Point. It would eventually also connect with Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in New York.
The historic military supply route, built on the order of Gen. Jeffery Amherst at Fort Crown Point, was built by famed colonial frontiersman Capt. John Stark, Maj. John Hawks, and Col. John Goffe. It was cleared largely by Colonial militia and ranger military units like Rogers’ Rangers, who helped, as Amherst ordered, cut the “at least 20-foot-wide” roadway.
Trees were dropped to widen the Native trail, stumps were removed, parts of the road were graded, sturdy bridges and causeways were built, and corduroy sections were laid over wetlands and swampy areas.
Every 15 miles, Amherst required log enclosures be built to hold the cattle that would be “drove through that road for the use of the troops.”
It was first used during the French and Indian War to move British and Colonial troops, cannons, supplies, and sheep and cattle between the English settlers on the New Hampshire frontier and the forts in New York.
Then, during the American Revolution 15 years later, regiments of Colonial forces used the road to reinforce and supply U.S. troops at Fort Ticonderoga in their fight against the British.
But Crown Point Road’s major impact on Vermont emerged between the wars.
With the defeat of the French by Great Britain in 1763, and Britain now in control of Canada, the threat of Native raids was nearly gone. British colonists flooded into Vermont along this main highway between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, establishing villages and towns on what had been Native lands.
The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Crown Point Road Association have worked for decades to document and mark the original road as well as its changes and additions.
Some parts are well-known hiking trails, some parts have all but disappeared, some parts are now just vague forest paths, and a few short sections of the old military highway are still in use as town roads, such as Crown Point Road in Springfield.
This News item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.