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Just beyond the playground, off into the woods, is the place SRV students call "Fort Town" or "Fortland" or sometimes "Fortdom". It is the place where many SRV students spend most of their recess time foraging, planning, engineering (some forts have two floors) and constructing an ever-changing landscape of very elaborate forts. There are multiple forts in Fort Town, all with different names, different rules, and representing different groups of students. The usual themes around fort play relate to the actual activity of building, the quest for territory and resources, and the issues of fairness and community. The fort theme seems not to be so much about controlling territory and resources but around economics and belonging.

Here in Fort Town the lessons of free market economy are explored every day. There are children collecting raw materials – some "mining" clay and valued kinds of rocks, some searching for ideal sticks and broken bricks. They are negotiating with other children who have wider boundary privileges and can forage for materials they know are further a field, but can't get themselves. Other children are laboring intensely, manufacturing products, primarily by scraping and grinding sticks, rocks, bricks or charcoal. They are making smoothed sticks, shaped pieces of rock and slate, and various "powders." Some of what they are making is used in play; the charcoal is fun to put on faces, the smooth sticks make good wands and clay is used for spa treatments. They invent new consumer goods (sit-upons woven from plants are a recent market craze) to capture a bigger share of their fellow fort towners' disposable "income". They teach themselves how to barter, how to hold out for good trades, and how to work together to make desirable products.

Currency at the moment is slate coins chipped from larger rocks. Previously it had been mica, but the mica ran out causing a Fort Depression and a need for the economy to reset itself. As in our larger economy, scarcity of an item makes it more valuable. Value is also determined by how many uses a particular item has and how many things it can be turned into. For instance, graphite is valuable because its form can easily change. Rikki rope is very valuable since it provides a fundamental engineering function, allowing fort builders to tie sticks to trees. An old tire is so valuable it's worth the price of an entire fort. Vegetation is also a commodity and this involves knowledge of local plant life. Onion grass, for instance, has a big role in Fort life as do rhododendrons, pine boughs, and celandines (mashed into a paste for bruises), but poison ivy, obviously, does not. The basic rules of supply and demand are in constant use in Fort Town.

Questions of ethics arise continually. Is it okay, for instance, to trick a fort into making a trade? Is it okay to steal things if no one knows? What will the rest of your fort think if you trade away the fort's slate without talking to them first? Often a good part of recess is devoted to working out the rules and solving disputes and in this way students learn about governance. Who makes the decisions in these forts? Who is in charge? How are disputes resolved? What rules need to be in place for the system to work effectively? Rules about hoarding, spying, passwords, voting, and leadership are always being refined and worked out. Rules have actually been formalized and written out. For instance, someone must work for three days on a fort before that person can vote. Piles of sticks that are not built into forts after three days are then available for everyone to use. Student Government sometimes gets involved and recently a fort police has been set up to help resolve disputes. Oldest Group students act as fort police because they have the largest boundary area and because they are no longer directly involved in fort making, but are keenly interested in the system they were so very much a part of in earlier years. Fort leaders need to learn how to keep fort workers happy or everyone will leave their fort and start another, so leadership skills are being practiced.

Play is a key element of the SRV curriculum and, as is apparent from the elaborate world described above, Fort Town is a great example of the learning that happens naturally with play.