Fort Allen - PLAQUE
Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built and commanded by Col. Christopher Truby, officer of the revolution, was located 150 yards to the south of this marker. A frontier Fort of Dunmore's War 1774, the Indian War, and the War of the Revolution, It was also known as Truby's Blockhouse. From here a petition to Governor John Penn sent by eighty inhabitants of Westmoreland County, headed by Wendel Oury, asked for aid in the threatened Indian uprising of 1774.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Fort Allen, also known as Truby's Blockhouse, was built and commanded by Col. Christopher Truby to shelter the scattered settlers of Westmoreland County on the exposed western frontier. It stood through the turmoil of Dunmore's War in 1774, later Indian conflicts, and the Revolution, when frontier families lived under constant threat of raid. From here in 1774, eighty inhabitants led by Wendel Oury petitioned Governor John Penn for aid against a feared uprising.
Why it matters
Frontier blockhouses like Fort Allen were the fragile backbone of settler defense in western Pennsylvania, marking the violent edge where the Revolution met Native resistance.
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Related people
- · Col. Christopher Truby
- · Wendel Oury
- · Gov. John Penn
Related events
- · Dunmore's War, 1774
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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William Crawford was a frontier soldier and surveyor who settled near the Youghiogheny River after 1766, serving as George Washington's western land agent at a time when Virginia and Pennsylvania families were pushing across the Appalachians. During the Revolution he took up arms on the frontier, leading a 1782 expedition against Native villages along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The campaign ended in disaster: Crawford was captured and put to death, a killing that became notorious in the bitter borderland warfare of the era.
Colonel William Crawford - PLAQUE
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Simon Girty (1741-1818)
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2017
Born near Harrisburg, Simon Girty was captured and adopted by the Seneca as a teenager in 1756, and he came to move fluidly between Native and colonial worlds. He worked as an interpreter at Fort Pitt before defecting to the British in 1778, after which he advised and accompanied Native war parties in raids on frontier settlements during the Revolution. Reviled by many American settlers, he remains a deeply contested figure and is buried in Canada.
Fort Allen
Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946
A little to the south once stood a fortified post raised in 1774 by Pennsylvania German pioneers of the Brush Creek and Harrold's settlements. In an era of frontier violence, such a stockade offered ordinary farm families a place to shelter during Dunmore's War and the American Revolution. It was a small but vital node in the network of refuges that let settlement cling to this exposed edge of colonial Pennsylvania.