Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/181

This page has been validated.
THE VIRGINIA REGIMENT
177

acre? It could not contain half that amount.

The present writer went to Fort Necessity armed with this two-page map of Fort Necessity in the Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania which he trusted as authoritative. The present owner of the land, Mr. Lewis Fazenbaker, objected to the map, and it was only in trying to prove its correctness that its inconsistencies were discovered.

The mounds now standing on the ground are drawn on the appended chart Diagrams of Fort Necessity as lines C A B E. By a careful survey of them by Mr. Robert McCracken C.E., sides C A and A B are found to be the identical mounds surveyed by Mr. Lewis, the variation in direction being exceedingly slight and easily accounted for by erosion. The direction of Mr. Lewis's sides were N. 25 W. and S. 80 W.: their direction by Mr. McCracken's survey are N. 22 W. and S. 80.30 W. This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the embankments surveyed in 1816 and 1901 are identical.

But the third mound B E runs utterly at variance with Mr. Lewis's figure. By him its direction was S. 59¼ E.; its present