How Haitian ordnance wound up in the Adirondack Mountains

Fort Ticonderoga sits atop a hill in New York’s Adirondack Park. The limestone structure was built by the French, and then captured by the British, followed by the Americans.

It’s especially dramatic in winter, with an American flag flying high in strong winds over an icy Lake Champlain below, and the fort walls bristling with snow-covered cannons.

Crowds brave the cold to commemorate the 1775 so-called “Noble Train.” That’s when Colonel Henry Knox and his men hauled 59 cannons hundreds of miles from the fort to Boston to help drive out the British. 

Visitors can watchinterpreters clean and test the weapons before loading them onto oxcarts. 

They come for the story of the weapons that went to Boston, but they usually don’t know about the 156 cannons, mortars and howitzers that rim the fort today, comprising the largest private collection of 18th century artillery in the Hemisphere.

“In reconstructing the fortifications, you have these empty embrasures — the holes in the walls where the cannon would have originally pointed through,” said Matthew Keagle, Fort Ticonderoga’s curator. “There were no cannons here.”

Some of the original artillery was moved, like the 60 tons that went to Boston in the Noble Train. The rest was largely salvaged for scrap iron.

To explain the collection today, a map titled, “Where did our cannon come from?” was placed on the wall of an exhibit room in the fort.

There are some location pins on the US, France and England, and then a circle of arrows around the Caribbean Sea.

That’s the route of a 1930 expedition by H. Jermain Slocum, who was hired by the man who owned the site to amass cannons for the restored fort.

“[He] is a peculiar, almost kind of Indiana Jones-type adventurer, from that era,” Keagle explained.

When Keagle came to the fort 11 years ago, he began researching its artillery — and, inevitably, H. Jermain Slocum. He found that the man’s mission was clear enough to earn him nicknames like, “gun man” and “Señor Guns.”

“He finds a pilot in Miami … to fly him around,” Keagle said, “and then takes a tramp steamer along the north coast of South America and through the Antilles, stopping at all these different places.”

In his so-called cannon-hunting expeditions, Slocum procured scores of weapons from Panama, Nicaragua, Curaçao, St. Kitts, St. Eustatius, the Dominican Republic and, more than anywhere else, Haiti. These small countries were popular targets for cannon hunting because they were full of cannons left by European colonists.

In Nicaragua, Slocum’s crew hauled several tons of cannons by hand through forests, by ship across Lake Managua and then by train to the coast. It was a trip just as challenging as the Noble Train — in this case, not to fight oppression, but to restore a historical site.

In Haiti, Slocum flew low over the massive fortress La Citadelle, before returning on foot to see what he could haul out. He wound up with weapons from all over the country.

And he worked to convince leaders across the region to hand over their weapons. (Almost all of them were donated.)

“Of course, you’re in a time period where you’re still in a kind of colonial phase of American expansion in the Caribbean,” Keagle said, “and so, it’s at a time when there are US army officers, not only in Panama, thinking and working on a canal project there, but also in Nicaragua and elsewhere, including Haiti.”

What’s more, Slocum was a former military officer from a prominent military family, so he was able to get American officers to connect him to various heads of state. Then he turned on the charm.

“[He] tried to flatter his way around the area to get what he could,” Keagle said.

Slocum told leaders that Fort Ticonderoga was to be a museum of liberty, celebrating independence struggles of peoples across Latin America. And he said there would be a plaque next to every cannon, explaining its historical significance.

Today, Fort Ticonderoga has close to 60 cannons and other weapons from Haiti alone — mostly Slocum’s acquisitions, but also purchases made years before and after.

Historian Marlene Daut had read about Slocum’s adventures in Haiti, including the resistance his team faced.

“Haitian people did witness this and were kind of like, ‘What are you doing? You can’t take these things.’ And they were sort of like, ‘Yes, we have permission from the government,’ which is an iffy thing because it’s during the US occupation, and all of these heads of state are being installed by the US.”

Nevertheless, at first, at least some of Slocum’s promises about the cannons were kept.

“Going back to the 1930s and ‘40s, there were signs up,” Keagle said. “We have them in photographs at the museum.”

The wooden plaques stated which nation had donated each cannon. But they’re now gone, having decayed and never been replaced. What’s more, information about the cannons disappeared along with them, since most of the weapons weren’t even catalogued at the museum until the late 1990s. They were, after all, mere set dressing, as Keagle said, not museum pieces with their own value.

Keagle added that for years he’s been trying to make good on Slocum’s promise — however disingenuous — by figuring out and sharing the history behind each cannon.

Today, he offers special tours and talks about the cannons. But the average visitor still doesn’t learn about them.

He said the semi-quincentennial on July 4, 2026, might provide an opportunity to present the American Revolution in a more global way, “so that Fort Ticonderoga is not just this iconic historic site for Americans and American history, but also represents something much bigger.”

Back at the Noble Train reenactment, once the carts had been loaded with cannons (these ones were reproductions), Henry Knox and his men started the journey to Boston, passing through downtown Ticonderoga, where a crowd had gathered. 

Among the history buffs following along were two siblings from an hour and a half south of the fort. 

“We’ve been big Noble artillery Train fans for a long time,” explained Clinton Greene, a 25-year city worker.

Both were surprised to find out the cannons at the fort are largely from Latin America.

“I love learning that something has more history than it was initially famous for,” was Clinton’s reaction.

His sister, Sharon, a 28-year-old theater maker, also wanted to learn more. 

“It’s absolutely important to talk about where an artifact is coming from, and especially when you’re going to talk about a cannon coming from somewhere like Haiti,” she said. “They have a huge colonial history, and they had their own independence movement, and all of the history of the Caribbean and the New World and the Atlantic are all tied together.”

Haiti historian Marlene Daut said she sees an opportunity to talk about a shift in the Americas from international cooperation in struggles for independence to the US pilfering from and occupying its neighbors in the 1900s.

“Telling the story in a way that is true to all of that, I think it should be, and I hope it will be, possible,” she said. “It seems like Fort Ticonderoga would be a perfect site to do that.”

It’s a site that couldn’t feel farther from Haiti, Nicaragua or Panama. But for the history fans who visit, there will be something new to learn about cannons and the very international stories they have to tell.