Fort Hyndshaw
Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built in 1756 by order of the Province of Pennsylvania. Northernmost of a line of defenses erected during the French and Indian War.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1756, with the French and Indian War exposing Pennsylvania's undefended backcountry to devastating raids, the colonial government ordered a chain of frontier forts built along the mountains. Fort Hyndshaw anchored the northern end of that line, a stockaded refuge and garrison post guarding the settlers of the upper Delaware. These modest works were less battlefields than shelters where frontier families could ride out the terror of wartime raiding.
Why it matters
It was the northernmost link in Pennsylvania's colonial defense line, a reminder of how the French and Indian War forced the peace-minded colony to fortify its frontier.
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Related events
- · French and Indian War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nicholas Depuy
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1947
Nicholas Depuy came to this stretch of the Delaware around 1727, among the very first Europeans known to settle the region. When the French and Indian War brought raiding to the frontier after 1755, his stockaded and garrisoned home was pressed into service as Fort Depuy, one of the fortified farmsteads that dotted the wartime backcountry. Such homes-turned-forts show how thin the line was between domestic life and frontier warfare.
Old Mine Road
Walpack Township, NJ
The Old Mine Road ran roughly a hundred miles from the copper mines along the Delaware to Esopus (today's Kingston) on the Hudson, one of the earliest long roads carved through the colonial backcountry. Along its route stood a frontier fort raised during the French and Indian War and the 1750 stone house of Isaac Van Campen, a way-station substantial enough that travelers of note broke their journeys there. It threads through a landscape of early mining, Dutch settlement, and colonial defense.
Dansbury Mission
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1947
About 1744, frontier founder Daniel Brodhead raised a building here for Moravian missionaries, part of the remarkable Moravian effort to carry their faith to settlers and Native peoples along the Pennsylvania frontier. The mission stood barely a decade: in 1755, as the French and Indian War set the backcountry aflame, it was destroyed in the raiding that emptied the region. Its site lay beside what is now the cemetery.
Colonel Jacob Stroud - PLAQUE
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1931
This graveyard began as the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury, a Moravian outpost started in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. The mission chapel was destroyed during the Indian uprising of 1755 amid the French and Indian War, then rebuilt. Colonel Jacob Stroud — the frontier officer and founder of Stroudsburg — lies buried here.