New Battle over Fort Ethan Allen

The men who built and manned Fort Ethan Allen for four years in the Civil War might enjoy the notion that a 150 years later a bunch of civilians are fighting over what to do with their lonely and sometimes scary gun emplacement.

Fort Ethan Allen was built in 1861 and became one of the 68 forts and batteries that surrounded Washington after Union troops were defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run, which resulted in what Arlington Historic Preservation Coordinator Michael Leventhal calls the "great skedaddle. The 32-mile foot race" back to Washington.

President Lincoln ordered the military to immediately build a series of forts to surround the nation’s capital and defend it against being overrun by Southern Forces. In the end, Washington became the most fortified city in the United States.

Many of these forts never had to fire in anger any of the 1,120 guns distributed around the city, but for the Virginia perimeter forts there were other hazards. The pickets and rifle pits manned to screen the guns were raided by rebel guerilla bands and of course, there was disease, one of greatest killers in the Civil War and certainly so at Fort Ethan Allen, where in one summer alone Ohio units had 200 men disabled by disease and 50 died....