AUGUSTA -- Old Fort Western is more than just a fort. It's also an old-house museum and an old-store museum -- all on one attractive site on the Kennebec River.

Built in 1754, it is America's oldest surviving wooden fort. It was located at the farthest point that schooners could sail up the Kennebec. The ships would unload at the fort and their goods would be transferred to smaller boats and sent to Fort Halifax, 17 miles upriver in Winslow.

Fort Western was never attacked, although one of its soldiers was captured while journeying to Fort Halifax and held prisoner. And although the fort was an important part of the community from the time it was built, it served as a military installation for only 12 years.

Today, costumed guides conduct 45-minute tours of the fort that cover the transformation of the complex over the generations. Two blockhouses on the site have been reconstructed, and it's there guides tell visitors about the fort's military mission during what was called the Seven Years War in Europe and the French and Indian War in North America.

At the blockhouses, visitors get to see replicas of cannons and mortars, muskets, a replica of a bateau -- a six-man, flat-bottomed boat used to carry freight upriver -- and a bit of a history lesson. The 20 or so soldiers at Fort Western were led by Capt. James Howard. The boats would haul up to two tons of goods from the storehouse at Fort Western to Fort Halifax, which was manned by almost 200 soldiers. Fort Western closed in 1766, although it did serve a brief military role in 1775 when Benedict Arnold and his men -- including Revolutionary War hero and later vice president Aaron Burr -- stopped there to repair their boats on their way to invade Canada.

When the fort closed, Howard bought the site. His sons, William and Samuel Howard, ran a store out of the fort's storehouse from 1762 to 1812. The original storehouse remains and is stocked with fabric, buttons, shingles, china, pots, pans, tobacco, port, rum and almost everything else people living in the wilderness in the late 18th century would have needed.

The store portion of the tour is especially educational for children -- tour guides show tools that were used to make buttons, spoons, shingles and other housewares, and children are asked to play the parts of people delivering goods. The home part of the tour covers the most space and the most time. The barracks section of the storehouse was converted to a home for William Howard's family around 1770, and Samuel Howard moved in about 1774. The house is furnished based on a probate inventory taken at Samuel Howard's death in 1799, and includes some furnishings original to the house as well as some reproductions. The tour guide describes cooking in the Colonial period, along with what the family did for entertainment and some family history -- including how one brother, John, was kept in the house as an invalid after he accidentally killed a surveyor during a surveying expedition.

After the tour, visitors have a chance to play games that the Howard family would have played when they lived there. One room in the building is set up as a tenement, showing what life was like for workers from Augusta's shoe and woolen mills who lived in small rooms and apartments created after the Howard family left.

It shows how an entire family would have lived in a small room, complete with a stove and some beds. The building remained as a tenement house until 1920, when the Guy Gannett family donated the complex to the city of Augusta, which in turn preserved the structure and turned it into a museum. Museum Director Jay Adam said there are plans to expand the tenement section with more rooms and furnishings.