E15 Fort Plain

Before it was a canal town, Fort Plain was a fort — and one that women once helped save. On August 2, 1780, Joseph Brant led some 500 Loyalists and allied warriors against the Mohawk Valley settlements here, burning dozens of houses and barns; as the story is told, with the garrison away, women inside the stockade donned men’s hats and shouldered poles above the walls, and the raiders, judging the fort strongly manned, drew off. Forty-odd years later the Erie Canal turned this defensive outpost into a busy shipping point for the surrounding farms. Lock E15, an 8-foot lift at mile 64, is a Barge Canal river lock paired with the westernmost of the Mohawk’s movable bridge dams — the modern waterway resting quietly beside ground the Revolution fought hard to hold.