careful historian and author of the standard work on Washington, visited Fort Necessity. According to him its remains occupied "an irregular square, the dimensions of which were about one hundred feet on each side."[1] Mr. Sparks drew a map of the embankments which is incorporated in his Writings of Washington (see plate on page 175). This drawing has not been reproduced in any later work, the authors of both History of Cumberland and Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania preferring to reproduce Mr. Lewis's inconsistent survey and speculation rather than Mr. Sparks's more accurate drawing.
It is plain that Mr. Sparks found the embankment B E running in the direction it does today and not at all in the direction of the line B C, as Mr. Lewis drew it. By giving the approximate length of the sides as one hundred feet, Mr. Sparks gives about the exact length of the line B E in whatever direction it is extended to the brook. The fact that such an exact scholar as Mr. Sparks does not mention a sign or tradition of an embankment at B C, only fourteen years after Mr. Lewis "surveyed"
- ↑ Writings of Washington (1837), vol. i., p. 54.
