Fort Roberdeau
Antis Township, Blair County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The Revolutionary fort site is located a few miles from here. Built 1778 by Daniel Roberdeau to protect lead mines in Sinking Valley which supplied the Continental army.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
During the American Revolution, frontier Pennsylvania needed lead for musket balls, and the Sinking Valley mines offered a rare domestic source. In 1778 Daniel Roberdeau built a fort here to guard those mines and the miners who supplied the Continental army. The stockade, sometimes called Fort Roberdeau or the "Lead Mine Fort," stood a few miles from this marker.
Why it matters
The fort is a reminder that the Revolution depended not only on battlefields but on securing the raw materials of war, and that the frontier was itself a theater of the struggle for independence.
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Related people
- · Daniel Roberdeau
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Standing Stone
Huntingdon, PA · est. 1955
Fort Standing Stone once guarded this bend of the Juniata River where Stone Creek joins it, throwing up a stockade against raids on the exposed frontier. In July 1778, at the height of the Revolutionary War, Continental troops and militia were ordered here as part of a broader plan to defend the backcountry from attacks. The old fort stood a short distance south of this marker; the settlement it protected grew into Huntingdon.
Capt. Phillips' Rangers Memorial
Liberty Township, PA · est. 1964
This memorial marks the graves of ten frontier militiamen of Captain Phillips' company, killed on July 16, 1780, during the brutal backcountry fighting of the Revolutionary War. Along Pennsylvania's western frontier, British-allied Native war parties raided isolated settlements, and local rangers like Phillips' men bore the danger of defending them. Their deaths were one small, bloody episode in a war whose frontier front is often overshadowed by the great eastern battles.
Phillips' Rangers
Liberty Township, PA · est. 1966
In July 1780, as the Revolution's violence spilled across the Pennsylvania frontier, Captain William Phillips and eleven men of his militia company were captured near this spot by a Native war party. Ten were killed and later buried by a search party, while Phillips and his son Elijah were taken prisoner and not freed until the British released them at war's end.
McAlevy's Fort
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In 1778, as the Revolution reached the Pennsylvania frontier, Col. William McAlevy — a pioneer settler and Revolutionary War officer — raised a blockhouse near this spot to shelter early settlers from raids. Decades later, in the 1840s, the entrepreneur Robert McBurney founded a village here and spent the following years developing it. Nearby 19th-century ironworks and mills fueled the community's growth, layering an industrial chapter atop its frontier origins.