Note 71 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

“The minute of the surrender of Fort Chartres to M. Sterling, appointed by M. de Gage, governor of New York, commander of His Britannic Majesty’s troops in North America, is preserved in the French Archives at Paris. The fort is carefully described in it as having an arched gateway fifteen feet high; a cut stone platform above the gate, and a stair of nineteen stone steps, with a stone balustrade, leading to it; its walls of stone eighteen feet in height, and its four bastions, each with forty-eight loop-holes, eight embrasures, and a sentry-box; the whole in cut stone. And within was the great storehouse, ninety feet long by thirty wide, two stories high, and gable-roofed; the guard-house, having two rooms above for the chapel and missionary quarters; the government house, eighty-four by thirty-two feet, with iron gates and a stone porch, a coach-house and pigeon-house adjoining, and a large stone well inside; the intendant’s house, of stone and iron, with a portico; the two rows of barracks, each one hundred and twenty-eight feet long; the magazine thirty-five feet wide and thirty-eight feet long, and thirteen feet high above the ground, with a door-way of cut stone, and two doors, one of wood and one of iron; the bake-house, with two ovens and a stone well in front; the prison, with four cells of cut stone, and iron doors; and one large relief gate to the north; the whole enclosing an area of more than four acres.”—Illinois in the Eighteenth Century, by Edward G. Mason, being No. 12 of the Fergus Historical Series, p. 39.