Michel Eustace Gaspard, Marquis de Lotbinière
Michel Eustace Gaspard, Marquis de Lotbinière (1723 – 1799) was born in Canada and studied military engineering in France. In 1755, Lotbinière was ordered to construct a fort at Ticonderoga to secure France’s claim to the Champlain Valley and to control the strategically important portage between Lakes George and Champlain. Lotbinière had no experience in fort construction but he got the Ticonderoga assignment through his political connections.
Construction of Fort Carillon began in September 1755 and was still on–going when the Fort was blown up and abandoned by the French in late July 1759. In 1757, for his service to New France at Carillon, Lotbinière was given the seigneuries of Alain and Hocquart, two large tracts of land located north of Ticonderoga on the east and west shores of Lake Champlain. After the American Revolution, Lotbinière came to the city of New York, then the capital of the United States, to press his claim for the return of the lands given to him by France in the Champlain Valley.
He died there from yellow fever in 1790 and was buried the city’s Potter’s Field, the land that comprises today’s Washington Square Park. In 1825, many of the remains buried in that cemetery were exhumed and eventually reburied in the city’s new Potter’s Field on Hart Island. This island was part of the land John Pell, the first Lord of the Manor of Pelham, purchased from Native Americans in 1654. It would be one of the great ironies of history if Lotbinière’s final resting place was on land that once belonged to the Pell family. For, in 1909, Stephen Hyatt Pelham Pell, a direct descendent of John Pell, and his wife, Sarah Gibbs Thompson Pell, began the restoration of Lotbinière’s Fort at Ticonderoga.
