The letter is still extant in Stoddard's own hand, dated July 20, 1744, in which Capt. William Williams is ordered by him "to erect as soon as may be" a block-house sixty feet square "about five miles and a half from Hugh Morrison's house in Colrain in or near the line run last week under the direction of Col. Timo. Dwight by our order." In the same letter, Williams is directed to employ soldiers in the construction of the fort, carpenters to be allowed "nine shillings, others six shillings a day old Tenor." Several other directions are given, and the main outlines of the fort are prescribed; some bills are still extant giving items of money paid out for many different parts of the work; six of the original hewn timbers of the building are in good preservation today in the barn of Orsamus Maxwell in Heath, each stick telling some tale of the original mode of construction; so that, from all these sources of information, a pretty accurate idea of the old fort can be made out to-day, 141 years after it was built. 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.