Fort Halifax - PLAQUE
Halifax Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
One of the chain of frontier defenses of the province of Pennsylvania in the French and Indian Wars stood 500 feet to the west. Built 1756 by its commander Colonel William Clapham.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When the French and Indian War set Pennsylvania's frontier aflame in the mid-1750s, the province threw up a chain of forts to shield its scattered settlements. Fort Halifax was one such post, built in 1756 under Colonel William Clapham along the Susquehanna corridor. Little more than a stockaded strongpoint, it anchored the line of defense that kept the war from rolling deeper into the colony.
Why it matters
Forts like this one show how a Quaker-founded colony, unaccustomed to war, hastily militarized to survive the first true world war fought on American soil.
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Related people
- · William Clapham
Related events
- · French and Indian War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Halifax
Halifax Township, PA · est. 1946
In 1756, at the height of the French and Indian War, Col. William Clapham built Fort Halifax on the Susquehanna as one link in a chain of provincial forts strung along the Pennsylvania frontier. These stockades sheltered settlers and supplied troops during a war that saw brutal raids sweep the backcountry. The fort itself was short-lived, but it anchored the colony's defensive line during the conflict's most dangerous years.
Col. Timothy Green
Dauphin, PA · est. 1948
Timothy Green's life traced the whole arc of Pennsylvania's revolutionary generation. He first bore arms as an officer in the French and Indian War, then in June 1774 joined his neighbors in signing the Hanover Resolves, a bold early declaration of readiness to resist British authority. Through the Revolution that followed he stood out as a leader of this Susquehanna-region community, and he rests today in the graveyard just south of the marker.
Fort Hunter - PLAQUE
Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 1916
Built in the anxious winter of 1755–56, Fort Hunter was a blockhouse ringed by a stockade, one link in the chain of defenses Pennsylvania threw up along the Susquehanna after frontier raids began. It served less as a battlefield than as a supply depot and gathering point for troops moving through the valley during the French and Indian War. By 1814 the danger was a memory, and its last traces vanished when a new building rose on the ground.
Fort Hunter
Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 1947
As the French and Indian War set the Pennsylvania frontier ablaze, colonists built a stockaded blockhouse here in 1755–56 to shelter settlers and to stage the construction of Fort Augusta upriver on the Susquehanna. For a few tense years it was a link in the province's chain of defenses; once the danger passed after 1763, it was abandoned and crumbled into ruin. The ground today holds the Fort Hunter Museum.