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| Fort Henry Towers |
The Place and a History Lesson
Kingston, Ontario is a lovely city founded in 1673 by the
French as a center for fur trading and as a military stronghold. It has beautiful older buildings and homes
and the very lovely Queens University.
It also has 2 interesting features related to the War of 1812 – Fort
Henry and the Rideau Canal.
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| Fort Henry Towers |
As far as I can understand, the War of 1812 started when the
US tried to oust Great Britain out of North America. Great Britain was busy fighting Napoleon in
Europe, so the US figured this was a good time to push them out. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. Great Britain stayed and British North
America eventually became Canada.
Kingston is very close to the US at the entrance to the St.
Lawrence River and guards the access to this vital waterway. So, the British built the enormous Fort Henry
on a bluff overlooking the lake and river, with fortifications along the
shoreline and even on an island.
Additionally, the British recognized that this section of the St. Lawrence
would always be vulnerable should they go to war with the US again, and built a
202 km canal called the Rideau Canal to transport supplies to
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| Thatsa Windy Lake! |
the inland city
of Ottawa.
The Adventure
Fort Henry is only open at night during the month of October
for the Fort Fright tour and show. So,
instead we walked around the outside of the fort and looked at the views. When we started out a weak sun was shining
and it looked like the foul weather had finally passed. As we got to the farthest point away from the
parking lot the skies opened and we were drenched in icy, cold rain before we
made it back to safety. The weather did
not diminish how impressive the location is for this fort.
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| Rideau Canal Locks |
After a lovely drive through Kingston, we headed off to find
the Rideau Canal. The first of the 47
sets of locks are in Kingston Mill just north of the city. The Rideau Canal is still in use today and is
the oldest continuously used canal of this sort. In areas where it was too difficult to break
through all this rock (remember we are talking 1820s) they built dams and
flooded the land. So when you look at a
map of the Rideau, you see wide areas of lakes along the route. In fact, we are camping in a campground
called Rideau Acres on the banks of one of these almost 200 year old man-made
lakes!
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| Rideau Canal |
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| Rideau Canal |
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| Canal/Lake Above Locks on Rideau Canal |
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| Canal/Lake View from Our Campsite |
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| Canal/Lake View from Our Campsite |
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