The fort was built by the British Army and Canadian militia troops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to defend the settlement and the new capital of the Upper Canada region from the threat of a military attack, principally from the newly independent United States.
Benson John Lossing, ed. Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (vol. 9) (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1912)
Courtesy the private collection of Roy Winkelman