To provide defense against these sporadic attacks, the early settlers erected a series of forts in the area. Wood's Fort guarded the Forks-of-the-River just downstream from Newport, and McCoy's Fort and Whitson's Fort defended the area to the south.
The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter.
The young O and B stars used to trace the spiral structure are less than 0.1 Galactic year in age, whereas the oldest stars in the halo are 40 to 70 Galactic years in age. From the dynamics of the Galaxy, we know that relatively little change can occur in the Galaxy's structure in periods of less than a few Galactic years.