The cantonment occupied a strategically brilliant position. Nestled on the western side of the Second Watchung Mountain, just north of Pluckemin village, the site overlooked the plains stretching toward New Brunswick, where British forces had been stationed in 1777. The First Watchung ridge provided an additional layer of natural defense. The artillery park was the specialized wing of the second Middlebrook encampment, housing not just troops but an entire military-industrial operation: a laboratory for repairing and producing ammunition, a magazine for powder storage, a military store department, and the academy itself. General Knox arrived on December 7, 1778, and made his headquarters in the Jacobus Vanderveer House, the only building associated with the cantonment still standing today.

Knox recruited Christopher Colles as the academy's preceptor -- essentially its headmaster and sole professor. Colles taught mathematics, ballistics, and what Knox called "this so essential & necessary Branch of Science." The General's own words, recorded in the Regimental Orderly Book on February 23, 1779, made his expectations clear: officers were to apply themselves "in good earnest" and let "the duty they owe themselves" and "the just expectations of their Country" drive their studies. It was a remarkable statement of ambition for an army that was, at the time, barely holding together. Knox was not just training gunners. He was building the intellectual framework for a professional military, an institution that would outlast the war that created it.

On February 18, 1779, the cantonment hosted a lavish ball to celebrate the first anniversary of the French alliance. General Nathanael Greene attended with his wife. George Washington was among the notable visitors to the site during its months of operation. The event was a striking contrast to the privation that defined most of the war's winter encampments -- a deliberate display of optimism and civilization amid the crude wooden barracks. The ball at Pluckemin was a statement that the Continental Army was not merely surviving. It was becoming something worth celebrating.

Knox departed Pluckemin on June 3, 1779, moving toward Pompton with the army. The cantonment's wooden structures were abandoned and eventually consumed by time and weather. For more than a century, the site lay quiet beneath an overgrown woodland. The first archaeological investigation came in 1916, when New Jersey State Archaeologist Henry Schrabisch spent eleven weeks excavating the countryside. His field notes were never found, and only local newspaper articles documented the work. The modern Pluckemin Archaeological Project began in 1979, led by John L. Seidel, Clifford Sekel, and Anne O'Brien. Excavations continued through 1989, employing techniques like overhead photomosaics and remote sensing that were advanced for their era. The artifacts they recovered -- buttons, musket balls, ceramics, glass -- painted a picture of daily military life that textbooks had largely overlooked.

Today the Pluckemin Continental Artillery Cantonment Site is not open to the public. There are no trails, no interpretive signs, no buildings. The land, now owned by Bedminster Township, has returned to overgrown woodland. The only place to learn about the cantonment is the nearby Jacobus Vanderveer House and Museum on Route 202/206. It is one of the most significant Revolutionary War sites in New Jersey, and one of the least visited -- a place where America's first military academy operated for half a year, hosted a grand ball, and then vanished back into the forest floor.