Fort Wadell
St. Thomas Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
One of a line of forts built by settlers in this region for refuge from Indian attacks following Braddock's defeat in 1755. It stood just to the north.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Fort Wadell captures how frontier communities organized their own survival during the French and Indian War, forming a defensive network the overstretched British army could not provide.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Braddock's Defeat
- · French and Indian War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Loudon
Peters Township, PA · est. 1947
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.
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 McCord - PLAQUE
Hamilton Township, PA · est. 1914
On April 1, 1756, Fort McCord — one of the small stockaded refuges thrown up along Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley frontier during the French and Indian War — was overrun, and twenty-seven settlers were killed or carried off. A militia party that gave chase was itself ambushed days later at Sideling Hill, where many of the pursuers fell. The marker names the women, children, and provincial soldiers lost, preserving a roll of the dead from one of the war's bloodiest weeks on the backcountry.
Fort McCord
Hamilton Township, PA · est. 1947
In the tense years of the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley settlers threw up log stockades like Fort McCord to shelter their families when frontier violence flared. Named for the settler John McCord, this refuge was overwhelmed and burned on April 1, 1756, in a raid that left 27 people dead or dragged into captivity. Such attacks were part of the wider war between Britain and France, in which allied Native nations struck deep into the exposed backcountry.