Archaeological Survey of the Old Federal Road in Alabama

and were not accessible for revisit at the time of our survey.All of the Peirce sites are located on privately owned landFigure 4-17. Detail from Melish map of Alabama Territory, 1818, showing Fort Mims and FortMontgomery in Baldwin County (courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History).Fort Montgomery. Dt. Holmes also recalled for Albert Pickett, in the 1840s, how FortMontgomery was built. From August through October 1814 Colonel Thomas Hart Benton and most of the39th U.S. Infantry Regiment constructed “the strongest kind of a timber fort built in the shape of a star,the Pickets 14 feet high.... It had a ditch on the outside the block House was very strong ... 3 stories highcovered with large hard timber & cement with tar & Timber[.] on top of this were placed 4 pieces[,] 6pounders[,] so as to rake the whole country.” 12 Major Howell Tatum noted in his journal entry for August20, 1814, the regiment had occupied “Holms’s Hill about 2 miles from Fort Mimms” (Figure 4-17),which was deemed a more healthy situation than Fort Stoddert, which would soon be abandoned. Hedescribed the new post, Fort Montgomery, as “a Stockade Fort” intended “to secure his men from thedanger of any attempt of Francis or McQueen to annoy them, and also as a mean of giving greatersecurity to the settlers on the East side of the Mobile & alabama rivers.” 13 In late October and early87