Crown Point State Historic Site is the site of a former military stronghold at the south end of the wider part of Lake Champlain. The location is in Essex County, New York, United States. The site is on a peninsula in the town of Crown Point, New York.
Crown Point is the location of the 1734–1759 French-built Fort St. Frédéric limestone fortress and an even more ambitious British fort constructed during the French and Indian War, starting in 1759, Fort Crown Point. During the American Revolutionary War, the fort was captured by Seth Warner and his Green Mountain Boys militia on May 12, 1775, but was re-taken by the British invasion under General John Burgoyne early in the summer of 1777.
Once at the front line of the New World clash between two colonizing European nations, the two forts' ruins remain and are operated as a historic attraction by the State of New York.
Construction started in 1734. When complete, Fort Saint-Frédéric walls were twelve feet thick and four stories high, with cannons on each level. It was manned by hundreds of officers and troops, principally from Les Compagnies Franches de la Marine.
The fort gave the French control of the frontier between New France and the British colonies to the south. As the only permanent stronghold in the area until the building of Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga starting in 1755, many French raids originated there and it was a target of British operations in the French and Indian War. Constructed on the tip of a strategic peninsula at a narrows in the lake, the cannons of Fort Saint-Frédéric and the later British Fort Crown Point were capable of halting all north-south travel on the lake.