Fort Cocke was a

stockade A stockade is an enclosure of palisades and tall walls, made of logs placed side by side vertically, with the tops sharpened as a defensive wall. Etymology ''Stockade'' is derived from the French word ''estocade''. The French word was derived ...

, made of wooden

palisade A palisade, sometimes called a stakewall or a paling, is typically a fence or defensive wall made from iron or wooden stakes, or tree trunks, and used as a defensive structure or enclosure. Palisades can form a stockade. Etymology ''Palisade' ...

s up stream from

Fort Ashby Fort Ashby is a historic stockade fort located in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, US. A military installation constructed during the French and Indian War, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Origin On October 26, 1755, Colone ...

. It was a square ninety feet on a side and enclosed about 1/5 acre.

Blockhouse A blockhouse is a small fortification, usually consisting of one or more rooms with loopholes, allowing its defenders to fire in various directions. It is usually an isolated fort in the form of a single building, serving as a defensive stro ...

s were built at each of the four corners. A

barracks Barracks are usually a group of long buildings built to house military personnel or laborers. The English word originates from the 17th century via French and Italian from an old Spanish word "barraca" ("soldier's tent"), but today barracks are u ...

to house fifty men was constructed within the stockade. It was built by Captain

William Cocke William Cocke (1748August 22, 1828) was an American lawyer, pioneer, and statesman. He has the distinction of having served in the state legislatures of four different states: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and was one of t ...

's First Company of Rangers under orders of

George Washington George Washington (February 22, 1732, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of th ...

dated October 26, 1755. It has been suggested that the fort was probably completed within a month. It was constructed south of George Parker's land. This was on Lot 13 of the Lord Fairfax's Patterson Creek Manor. The fort was constructed on the east side of

Pattersons Creek Patterson Creek is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed August 15, 2011 tributary of the North Branch Potomac River in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, in the United State ...

, on a flat terrace above a rocky shelf overlooking the creek bottom, about south of present

Headsville, West Virginia Headsville is an unincorporated community in Mineral County, West Virginia, United States. It is part of the Cumberland, MD- WV Metropolitan Statistical Area. It lies between U.S. Route 50 and West Virginia Route 46 alongside Pattersons Creek. F ...

. Being it was small, Fort Cocke was a place of limited refuge for settlers living in the

Valley. After the capture of Fort Duquesne, troops garrisoning the fort were gradually withdrawn. In a 1770 trip down Pattersons Creek

pointed out the place where the fort had stood indicating it has fallen to nothing within 15 years.

See also