This title is the only book ever written about Fort Montgomery on Lake Champlain in Rouses Point, New York. Features over 160 photos, vintage and modern, almost all never before published.

The Hudson River Valley, which George Washington referred to as the "Key to the Northern Country," played a central role in the American Revolution. From 1776 to 1780, with major battles fought at Saratoga, Fort Montgomery, and Stony Point, the region was a central battleground of the Revolution. In addition, it witnessed some of the most dramatic and memorable aspects of the war, such as Benedict Arnold's failed conspiracy at West Point, the burning of New York's capital at Kingston, and the more than six-hundred-mile march of Washington and the Continental Army and Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and his French Expeditionary Corps to Yorktown, Virginia. Compiled from essays that appeared in the Hudson Valley Regional Review and the Hudson River Valley Review, published by the Hudson River Valley Institute, the book illustrates the richly textured history of this supremely important time and place.

Essex is located on the shoreline of Lake Champlain near the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. The town was important for its role in lake commerce, shipping goods down the Champlain Canal to the burgeoning markets of New York City and via the Erie Canal to Rochester, Buffalo, and points west during America's golden age of expansion. The photographic record of Essex contains the mansions of the merchants and the houses of the workers who all lived together in this prototypical American community. The town contains a remarkable collection of Greek Revival buildings from 1820 to 1860, its period of national significance, that are still intact. Today Essex exists with the majority of its historic structures standing and little fringe development, and the edges of the hamlet continue to merge seamlessly into the agricultural countryside.

Curious about constructions? Inside this book, you'll come face-to-face with 50 incredible structures, including: a fire-breathing octopus sculpture; the skateboard ramp you'd need to jump the Great Wall of China; a whole community of tree houses in Costa Rica; and a lifesize X-Wing Starfighter built of Legos. These and many more fascinating accounts of constructions both fantastically useful and gloriously unnecessary await inquisitive readers, aspiring engineers, and anyone who ever looked at a skyscraper and thought, "Yeah, but what if it had a roller coaster on top?"