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.
Thus, although there is still some debate about the exact age of the Earth and the Solar System, scientists are quibbling only about the first one- or two-tenths of a billion years. The age of the Earth is known to within about one part in 45, i.e., about two percent.