The Fort at the Railyard

This building is called The Fort, and the name does not say which one. The ground at the mouth of the Fox River has held more than one. First a French post. Then the same post under a British name, Fort Edward Augustus, garrisoned in October 1761 and abandoned in June 1763. It lasted about twenty months. Then more than fifty years with no fort at all. Then Fort Howard, built by the U.S. Army in August 1816 on the west bank, where this building stands.

The fort on this wall is none of them in particular and all of them at once. Its bastions and pointed palisade belong to the older French posts of the upper Great Lakes. It sits low on a thin strip of ground at the waterline, the way a daguerreotype from Fort Howard’s last years shows it.

Fort Howard closed in 1852. Its buildings were sold, moved, or torn down, and the Chicago & North Western Railway laid its depot and freight yard across the old fort grounds. The railroad took the fort’s ground, and the fort’s name kept going. The west side was the City of Fort Howard until it joined Green Bay in 1895. In 1919 a paper company founded on this side of the river took the name too.

My father worked at the Fort Howard mill. For decades the company put a fort on its boxes, trucks, and letterhead: a long low wall with a sawtooth top and a single blockhouse, in flat black and white. That small drawing is how a generation of Green Bay pictured the fort, the people in my house included. Almost no one has seen the photograph. Everyone saw the box. When I drew this fort I was drawing toward what the place remembers, not what the camera recorded.

The heron is the largest thing on the wall. It stood in this marsh before the French post, before the flags changed, before the railroad, the mill, and the building you are looking at. The cattails at its feet grew here too. The fort is small, and far off.

Don Krumpos and Erin LaBonte, Yonder. Painting with David Carpenter. Commissioned by TWG Development for The Fort at the Railyard, 2026.