09/20/2026
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Sharing this amazing image from LIDAR America of Fort Wooster Park. For those of you who don't watch "The Curse of Oak Island" and therefore do not have an honorary degree in how LIDAR works, it sends rapid pulses of laser light toward a target and measures how long the light takes to bounce back. That data is used to calculate distances and "paint a picture" of an area. Cool stuff!!😀
📌 Fort Wooster — New Haven, Connecticut
📍 41°16′55.71″N 72°53′32.98″W
Before this hilltop was an American fort, it was a Quinnipiac village. Before that fort was even built, it had already been a battlefield once.
Today, dense woods cover much of Fort Wooster Park, making its surviving earthworks hard to understand from the ground. LiDAR changes that dramatically. The elevated position of Beacon Hill, the enclosed fortification, and its relationship to the surrounding terrain all become clearly visible beneath the tree canopy.
Long before Europeans settled New Haven, this hill was associated with the Quinnipiac people. Historical and archaeological research identifies Beacon Hill as the site of a palisaded Quinnipiac village and burial ground. In November 1638, Quinnipiac leaders and New Haven colonists entered an agreement setting aside about 1,200 acres on the eastern side of New Haven Harbor for the Quinnipiac, an area that included what is now Fort Wooster Park.
The hill's commanding view of the harbor later gave it a very different purpose. In 1775, Americans set up a signal beacon here to warn New Haven of approaching British ships, and when a British expedition appeared off the harbor on July 4, 1779, Beacon Hill was one of the points used to raise the alarm. The next day, July 5, British troops landed on the eastern side of New Haven Harbor, and American defenders fought them on and around Beacon Hill before being overwhelmed. The British occupied the position during their invasion of New Haven, and contemporary and later accounts describe Patriot earthworks on the hill during that fighting.
But the fort whose remains survive today belongs mainly to the site's next war. With conflict against Britain underway again, Beacon Hill was fortified once more during the War of 1812. The earthwork included a powder magazine and worked alongside Fort Hale closer to the harbor, and in August 1814, the position was officially named Fort Wooster, honoring Connecticut Maj. Gen. David Wooster, who died from wounds received fighting the British at Ridgefield in 1777.
An 1820 description gives an unusually detailed picture of the fort. It was an oval earthen redoubt on ground about 168 feet above sea level, its interior crest measuring roughly 122 yards around with axes of about 44 and 22 yards. The breastworks ran approximately 15 feet thick, the entrance was protected by a redan, and a bombproof-covered powder magazine stood inside.
More than two centuries later, portions of those earthworks remain, and that's exactly what makes the LiDAR here so interesting. What looks in ordinary aerial imagery like little more than a heavily wooded neighborhood park resolves into the modified summit of Beacon Hill, a place generations of people used for very different purposes across very different eras: a Quinnipiac landscape, a Revolutionary War battlefield and signal station, and a War of 1812 fortification, three layers of history occupying the same New Haven hilltop.
Fort Wooster Park is also a protected Connecticut archaeological site, so the surviving earthworks and archaeological resources should be observed without disturbing the ground.
