For the outside, white pine logs were scored down, and then hewn to six inches thick and fourteen inches high; and the scores worked 48 days on these, receiving L14, 8s. for their work, and the hewers 24 days, receiving L10, 16s.  The walls of the fort were twelve feet high, thus requiring nine courses of these timbers laid edgewise one above another, each being doweled to the one below by red oak dowel-pins, two of which were pulled out of their quiet resting places of 141 years’ duration, in a good state of preservation, by Mr. Maxwell and the writer, Sept. 5, 1885.  Those ends of these timbers that came to the four corners of the fort were dove-tailed into each other in the well known manner, so that there were straight lines and strong locking at the corners; and it so happens, that three of the six timbers preserved are corner timbers, and show at one end the exact mode of locking.

There were two mounts on two corners of the fort 12 feet square and 7 feet high; and the houses and barracks within the fort were 11 feet wide with shingled roofs; and the mount-timber, the insides of the houses, and the floors, were all hewn, presumably of the same width and thickness as the wall-timbers.  Undoubtedly the whole parade in the middle of the fort was also floored in the same way, as the site of the fort was and is low and wet.

The fort was built in this manner during the months of August, September, and October, 1744; and on the 30th of the last mentioned month, Capt.  Williams commenced to billet himself and the soldiers under his command at the fort.  He remained there all the winter and spring; about the 1st of March he enlisted 14 of his men for the Louisburg Expedition, at Col.  Stoddard’s request, whom he took to Boston; but was not himself allowed to embark, and returned to his fort; while later in the season, under a strong call for reinforcements for Louisburg by Gov.  Shirley, Williams took 74 able bodied men to Boston, recruited by himself in less than six days mostly in the Connecticut valley, and was given a Lieutenant colonel’s commission in the regiment destined for Louisburg commanded by Col.  John Choate.  They sailed in June, 1745, but the fortress had been taken before they arrived, and the regiment with Williams as acting Colonel was detained there to do garrison duty.

Fort Pelham in Rowe was built by Williams before he left for Louisburg, that is, in the spring of 1745; and in the autumn of that year we find Capt.  Ephraim Williams, a kinsman of the other, afterwards founder of Williams College, in command of Fort Shirley and of the line of forts.  It is fair to presume that he was appointed to the command on the withdrawal of the other in June; but which of the two built Fort Massachusetts along the same line, or whether either of them, can not now be stated with absolute certainty.  It is probable that Ephraim Williams saw to its construction under the Committee of the General Court, of which