![Page from a historical handwritten letter in brown ink on aged parchment, with cursive script across the lines making up the text.”] ,](https://fortticonderoga.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/08-04-1776-MS1973-234x300.jpg "08-04-1776 MS1973 - Fort Ticonderoga")
For soldiers stationed at Fort Ticonderoga, news was often hard to come by. Ticonderoga was a fairly isolated military post, and while most soldiers stayed in touch with family and friends via letters, those letters were often infrequent or lost in transit. Even when letters did arrive, or when the garrison obtained new military intelligence, soldiers faced the challenge of sorting facts from rumors or outright falsehoods.
On August 4, 1776—250 years ago today—Colonel Arthur St. Clair wrote a letter to Dr. Jonathan Potts. Potts, director of the military hospital at Fort George, and St. Clair, a Pennsylvania officer stationed at Ticonderoga, likely knew each other before the war and had friends in common. St. Clair begins the letter with pleasantries, thanking Potts for the gift of some lamb, before getting down to business: “I am obliged to send you a number of more Sick Men. I believe you have enough of them already… but my Surgeon is prisoner… and the Mate is dying.”
“To make amend for the last paragraph,” St. Clair shares some better news. According to the testimony of a group of French Canadians at Ticonderoga, “a French Fleet is actually in the River St. Lawrence, and…the English Troops have marched back for Quebec with as much Haste nearly, as we made in leaving it”. This news of French aid and a British retreat was heartening, but wrong. Whether the Canadians were incorrect or lying, St. Clair had been misled. Potts hopefully knew to take this and other news with a grain of salt. This was far from the first piece of false information the army had obtained from informants, and it would not be the last.
St. Clair ends his letter with a plea for Potts to “For Gods Sake send us some News no matter where it is, or if you have an old Letter that you have no farther occasion for, There are four or five of your Friends here that would be very glad of it.” For an isolated garrison with spotty postal service in a rapidly moving world, any news, even unreliable news, was good news.
Learn about this letter (object ID MS.1973) on the Ticonderoga Online Collections database: https://fortticonderoga.catalogaccess.com/archives/29817