View of Fort Amsterdam from the Water 1650, by Len Tantillo
The Fort was originally made of wooden timbers.
Construction on Fort Amsterdam was begun in 1625 by Dutch West India Company surveyor and engineer Crijn Fredericksz. Despite professional advice that a masonry structure would best withstand the elements of the waterfront site on which it was built, plus the depredations of rooting hogs and pigs, the fort was constructed of timber and suffered much degradation over time. A four-sided structure with bastions at each corner to protect the sod-covered rubble-filled walls of clay and sand, it was finally torn down in 1790 following the American Revolution. During its day, it was variously the center of New Amsterdam’s trading activity, soldiers’ barracks, by 1642 the Reformed Dutch Church, the WIC Director’s house, and a storage depot for West India Company goods.
Note: The following entry was copied from a scanned image that was converted to text by a computer (OCR), so please excuse the text errors. If you would like to see the scanned document, open the following link and flip to the right page: https://archive.org/details/iconographyofma_02stok/page/n683/mode/2up