Nicolls' Outpost

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Nicolls' Outpost was the smaller and more northern of two forts built by British Lt. Col. Edward Nicolls during the War of 1812. (The Americans referred to it as Fort Apalachicola. Built at the end of 1814, together with the larger "British post" or storage depot down the Apalachicola,^[1]: 47 it was "the northernmost post built by the British during their Gulf Coast Campaign". It was just below the Spanish Florida–Georgia border, where the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers meet to form the Apalachicola, in River Landing Park in modern Chattahoochee, Florida. Even though what was built was smaller than the much larger British post down the Apalachicola, it was intended to be the base, presumably enlarged, for an English invasion of the United States, and British post was to have been its supply depot. The 1815 end of the War of 1812 aborted this project.

It was built atop the largest of three surviving mounds of the prehistoric Fort Walton culture. Above the winter flood stage of the Apalachicola, it could reach both forks of the river with cannon fire. It was built in 1814 and abandoned early in 1815, at the end of the war. It was armed with a 5+1⁄2-inch howitzer. It also had a coehorn, a mortar that could fire 24-pound shells. According to a report of U.S. Colonel and Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins, there were "200 troops white and black and an assemblage of 500 [Creek] Warriors", "well supplied with cloth[e]s and munitions of War". The intention was to mount an expedition "up the river" (the Flint), bringing the cannon along.^[2]: 76 Georgia militia, other U.S. forces, and the faction of the Creek allied with the U.S. (the Lower Creeks) were preparing upriver (in Georgia) for a battle. News of the treaty ending the war (Treaty of Ghent), which reached both sides in February 1815, prevented the battle from taking place. The British abandoned both of its forts on the Apalachicola, leaving them in the hands of the black Corps of Colonial Marines that Nicolls had trained, and of Red Stick Creek Neamathla and his warriors.