Excerpt from America, Vol. 4 of 6 Winding Hoosac and Housatonic Valleys. Nearby is Williamstown, the seat of Williams College, with four hundred students, its buildings being the chief feature of the village. President Garfield was a graduate of this College, and William Cullen Bryant for some time a student, writing much of his early poetry here. Five miles eastward is the manufacturing town of North Adams, with twenty thousand people, in the narrow valley of the Hoosac, whose current turns its mill-wheels. A short distance down the Hoosac, at a road crossing, was the site of old Fort Massachusetts, the Thermopylae of New England in the early French and Indian War, Where, in 1746, its garrison of twenty-two men held the fort two days against an attacking force of nine hundred, of whom they killed forty-seven and wounded many more, only yielding when every grain of powder was gone. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.