Now, why did Mr. Lewis ignore the embankment B E and the triangle A F B which contained these fifty square rods he gave as the area of Fort Necessity? For the very obvious reason that that triangle crossed the brook and ran far into the marsh beyond. By every account the palisades of Fort Necessity were made to extend on the north to touch the brook, therefore it would be quite ridiculous to suppose the palisades crossed the brook again on the east. Mr. Lewis, prepossessed with the idea that the embankments must have been triangular in shape, drew the line B C as the base of his triangle, bisecting it at M and N, and making the loop M S N touch the brook. This design (triangle A B C) of Fort Necessity is improbable for the following reasons: 1. It has not one-half the area Mr. Lewis gives it. 2. It would not include much more than one-half of the high ground of the plateau, which was none too large for a fort. 3. There is no semblance of a mound B C nor any shred of testimony nor any legend of its existence. 4. The mound B E is entirely ignored though there is the best of evidence that it stood in Mr. Lewis's day where it stands today and was considered an embankment of Fort Necessity. Mr. Lewis gives exactly the area of a triangle with it as a part of the base line. 5. Loop M S N would not come near the course of the brook without extending it far beyond Mr. Lewis's estimate of the length of its sides. 6. Its area is only about 5200 square feet which would make Fort Necessity unconscionably small in face of the fact that more high ground was available. In 1759 Colonel Burd visited the site of Fort Necessity. This was only five years after it was built. He described its remains as circular in shape. If it was originally a triangle it is improbable that it could have appeared round five years later. If, however, it was originally an irregular square, it is not improbable that the rains and frosts of five winters, combined with the demolition of the fort by the French, would have given the mounds a circular appearance. Was Fort Necessity, then, built in the form of an irregular square? There is the best of evidence that it was. In 1830--fourteen years after Mr. Lewis's "survey"--Mr. Jared Sparks, a careful historian and author of the standard work on Washington, visited Fort Necessity. According to him its remains occupied "an irregular square, the dimensions of which were about one hundred feet on each side."[16] Mr. Sparks drew a map of the embankments which is incorporated in his _Writings of Washington_ (see plate on page 175). This drawing has not been reproduced in any later work, the authors of both _History of Cumberland_ and _Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania_ preferring to reproduce Mr. Lewis's inconsistent survey and speculation rather than Mr. Sparks's more accurate drawing.