On a Baltimore County cul-de-sac a few turns off Interstate 695, a 20-by-40 stone structure with two-foot-thick walls stands amid ranch-style homes.

The three-century-old structure — one of the oldest in the state — is Fort Garrison Fort. While next-door neighbors have been part of its preservation for two centuries, if you don’t live next door there are few opportunities to learn about the fort’s history.

Neighbors, who have sought to use the site to teach about history, asked the county to update and replace a historical marker removed a few years ago.

Built in 1692 to house rangers patrolling colonial settlements and paths from today’s Pikesville to the banks of the Susquehanna river, the site was chosen to defend settlements being built on the land of the Lenape and Susquehanna indigenous people. Lacking the doors you can see on the fort today, rangers would climb up and down a ladder to enter the fort through the top, carrying muskets, wood and other supplies.

A second floor was added in 1798 to house enslaved people who worked the surrounding plantation.

Other similar strongholds have disappeared, pillaged for their rock or toppled for farmland or housing, but generations of owners maintained Fort Garrison while everything around it became a suburb. The fort itself stood hollow, its stories untold.

When Kirk Dreier, senior naturalist and manager of Cromwell Valley Park, first visited the fort in his 20s over 30 years ago, it was a place to play hide and seek and tag for the kids of the relatively new subdivision.

“It was filled with junk,” Dreier said.

Outside, a bronze historical marker from the 1930s told an incomplete story of the fort’s purpose to “protect against hostile Indians.”

It was Dreier’s job to help preserve the site, but he also saw its potential.

Dreier worked to recreate the lives of the fort’s first inhabitants. He built a large dining table from scrap wood and worked with local Boy Scouts to build beds and other tables, using their hands and tools of the 17th century.

Dreier sourced materials to complete a living picture of life at the time: a clay chamber pot, glazed on the inside, that rangers used for urinating at night; a tanned deer skin strap bag to carry their belongings on trips into the woods; an iron Dutch oven to roast vegetables and cook soup; and an early rotisserie oven that used reflected sunlight to cook meat.

For a while, the fort hosted school field trips. Kids started a fire from a flint, made biscuits with honey and butter, and learned about clothing, the lives of women and the environment in the 17th century before development.

For decades, Dreier and a team of living historians have hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at the fort on the Sunday before the holiday. A small team of volunteers would don period clothing — linen shirts, stockings and leather boots — and cook peas, salted ham, a pie, even a full turkey, using handmade tools and clay pots on a flint-started fire. To make it easier on themselves, Dreier said, they would largely cook the food ahead of time and then reheat it at the fort.

Debra Barren has visited the fort on the day of the dinner every year since she was 5.

The volunteers would take her through every historical piece present in the fort and explain it to her.

“I was incredibly curious, and they took the time to tell me stories, and build up a love for what isn’t widely known,” Barren said.

“I never thought that people who saw you once a year could care so much about you, but they really did.”

Barren brought the volunteers hot chocolate and coffee. They made her a leather bag using period techniques.

“It was a way of saying we love you,” said Terry Crawford, a living historian who spent weeks tanning and fashioning the bag.

Barren is now studying at Towson University to be an elementary special education teacher, in part because of the experiences she had with the fort’s volunteers growing up.

“I wanted to have the same impact on kids that they had on me,” said Barren.

School field trips have halted since the pandemic, and that has some worried that the fort’s story is fading despite surviving for 300 years.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving is the only day of the year where the fort’s doors are open. Dreier said he doesn’t have enough staff or resources through the county to do more.

He said that the fort’s historical marker was removed by the county in 2019 after a local minister objected to language describing indigenous tribes as “hostile Indians.”

Michele Barren, next-door neighbor to the fort for over 20 years, said no one in the community was consulted on the decision to remove the marker.

“I wish they could have edited it,” said Barren, also Debra’s mother. She sees people walking and driving by with curiosity on their faces but no explanation of the unusual building.

Whether it’s a historical marker or more educational programming, neighbors wish that more could be done to tell the fort’s story.

“It’s underused, which is a shame,” said Crawford, the living historian.