A large portion of the front of the present Citadel Hill was originally private property; a small redoubt stood near the summit with a flag staff and guard house, but no traces of any regular or permanent fortification appear until the commencement of the American Revolution. There were several block houses south of the town--at Point Pleasant, Fort Massey and other places. A line of block houses was built at a very early period of the settlement, extending from the head of the North West Arm to the Basin, as a defence against the Indians. The foundation of the centre block house was still to be seen in 1848 in the hollow below Philip Bayers' pasture. During Governor Lawrence's time, the Indians made an attack upon the saw mills at the head of the North West Arm, which stood near the site of the present mills, and murdered three men; their bodies were buried by the soldiers near one of the block houses, and were three times dug up by the Indians in defiance of the guard, for the purpose of securing the scalps. These block houses were built of square timber, with loop-holes for musketry,--they were of great thickness, and had parapets around the top and a platform at the base, with a well for the use of the guard. In 1755, four batteries were erected along the beach--the centre one, called the middle or Governor's Battery, stood where the Queen's Wharf now is, being then directly in front of Government House; another where the Ordnance Yard was afterwards built, called the Five or Nine-gun Battery; the third was situated north of the present Fairbanks' wharf; and the fourth called the South or Grand Battery, still in existence at the Lumber Yard. They were composed of stone and gravel, supported by cross logs, covered with earth and planted with grass, having battlements in front and the two ends, elevated about twenty or twenty-five feet above the water. These fortifications were removed about the year 1783, and the grounds appropriated to their present purposes. The Ordnance Yard, then a swamp around the battery, and the King's Wharf, were both filled up and levelled by stone and rubbish removed from the five-acre lots of the peninsula which were beginning to be cleared about this time.