Fort Loudon
Peters Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Built 1756 by Provincial government. Start of Forbes' expedition to take Ft. Duquesne, 1758. In 1765 colonists under James Smith forced the withdrawal of a British garrison from the fort.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Built by the provincial government in 1756, Fort Loudon guarded the frontier during the French and Indian War and in 1758 served as a staging point for Gen. John Forbes's expedition that captured Fort Duquesne. In 1765 the fort became a flashpoint of a different kind when frontiersmen led by James Smith — the "Black Boys" — forced a British garrison to withdraw, an early act of armed colonial defiance. The site thus spans both the imperial war and the friction that would build toward revolution.
Why it matters
It links the French and Indian War's western campaign to the earliest colonial resistance against British authority, a decade before the Revolution.
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Related people
- · John Forbes
- · James Smith
Related events
- · Forbes Expedition
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Black Boys Rebellion
Peters Township, PA · est. 2013
In 1765, on the frontier west of here, a band of settlers known as "The Black Boys"—led by James Smith—clashed with British troops from Fort Loudon over the reopening of trade with Native peoples. Still raw from recent frontier attacks, the settlers disguised themselves and repeatedly disrupted British supply trains bound for the western forts; in one skirmish colonist James Brown was wounded. Many consider this defiance the first armed resistance to British authority in the colonies.
Fort Wadell
St. Thomas Township, PA · est. 1947
General Edward Braddock's crushing defeat near the Monongahela in 1755 tore open the Pennsylvania frontier, and settlers answered by building a chain of small stockaded forts as places of refuge. Fort Wadell was one link in that improvised line, standing ready when raiding parties struck the scattered farms of the Cumberland Valley. These were homemade defenses, thrown together by the very families they protected.
Rev. Steel's Fort
Montgomery Township, PA · est. 1947
On the mid-1750s frontier, the line between pulpit and battlement often blurred. The Reverend John Steel, pastor of the Upper West Conococheague congregation, was commissioned a militia captain, and his church at Church Hill was stockaded in 1755 to shield the community from raids during the French and Indian War. A house of worship thus doubled as a fortress in the war's most dangerous years.
Big Spring Graveyard
Ayr Township, PA · est. 1989
This burial ground holds victims of the Great Cove Massacre, a raid carried out on November 1, 1755, near present McConnellsburg during the violent opening of the French and Indian War on Pennsylvania's frontier. Delaware and Shawnee warriors led by the Delaware leader Shingas burned homes and killed or captured some fifty settlers. When word reached the Provincial Council in Philadelphia days later, it spurred Governor Robert Hunter Morris to press the Assembly for stronger defenses along the exposed backcountry.