Fort Gaspareaux, French colonial fort in Baie Verte, Canada.
Fort Gaspareaux is a National Historic Site at the head of Baie Verte, just southeast of Port Elgin, New Brunswick, on the Isthmus of Chignecto. What remains today is a ditched enclosure; inside the ditch, palisaded grounds once surrounded the site. A small cemetery with illegible headstones and a stone cairn from the 1930s stand on the grounds.
French forces built this fort in 1751 as a strategic outpost positioned between two other major military bases in the region. British forces captured it in 1755 during the conflicts that determined European control over North America.
The site's name comes from the Gaspareaux River; the British renamed it Fort Monckton after Robert Monckton. A pyramidal stone cairn erected by the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board in the 1930s bears an inscription recalling the 1755 capitulation and the burning of the fort in September 1756. A small cemetery with illegible headstones holds soldiers killed in a 1756 Mi'kmaw ambush.
The site lies on Old Fort Street in Port Elgin, just off the Northumberland Strait. Visitors walk a ditched enclosure; the small cemetery's headstones are now illegible, and a stone cairn erected in the 1930s marks the spot. An unmanned light structure was added in 1972.
The remains reveal a squared earthwork with blockhouse positions at each corner, defended by a surrounding ditch and wooden palisade system. This design was typical of French military architecture of that era and differed significantly from later British fortification styles.
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