Kittanning or Attiqué Indian Town
Kittanning, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Kittanning or Attiqué Indian Town was located on this river flat. The chief settlement as early as 1727, of the Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians in their early westward movement from the Susquehanna River, became the most important Indian center...
The Story
By the 1720s the Lenni-Lenape, or Delaware, were being pushed off their homelands along the Susquehanna and moved west toward the Allegheny River. On this broad river flat they built Kittanning, also called Attiqué, which by 1727 had grown into the largest and most important Delaware town on the frontier — a hub of trade, diplomacy, and Indigenous life at the western edge of European contact. It stood as a center of Delaware power for a generation before the pressures of the colonial era reached the Allegheny.
Why it matters
Kittanning marks the westward journey of a displaced Native nation and the Allegheny frontier where Indigenous, French, and British worlds collided in the mid-18th century.
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Nearby & related markers
Kittanning
Applewold, PA
For a generation before the French and Indian War, Kittanning was the largest Delaware (Lenape) town beyond the Allegheny front, a thriving community on the Allegheny River whose name carried the sense of the "great river" that fed the Ohio country. From the 1730s it grew into a hub of Native life and, by the 1750s, a staging ground for raids on frontier settlements. In September 1756 a Pennsylvania force under Lt. Col. John Armstrong marched west and burned the town, one of the war's few colonial strikes deep into Indian country.
Kittanning
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For roughly a generation, this bluff above the Allegheny River held Kittanning, the largest Delaware (Lenape) town west of the Appalachian ridges — a thriving community whose name honored the "great river" it overlooked. During the French and Indian War it became a staging ground for raids on Pennsylvania's frontier settlements, and in September 1756 a colonial force under Colonel John Armstrong marched over the mountains and burned it. The destruction of the village broke a key node in the borderland war and became one of Pennsylvania's most celebrated frontier exploits.
Fort Armstrong
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In the summer of 1779, as the American Revolution raged along the western frontier, Continental soldiers threw up this small outpost on the bank of the Allegheny River. It was a staging point for Col. Daniel Brodhead's expedition northward against the Seneca — one arm of the wider campaign that year to break the power of the Iroquois nations allied with the British. The fort's usefulness was brief: raised in June and given up by autumn, once the campaign had passed through. It honored Maj. Gen. John Armstrong, a veteran Pennsylvania frontier officer.
Blanket Hill
Kittanning Township, PA
During the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania's frontier was raided repeatedly by warriors based at Kittanning, a Delaware (Lenape) town on the Allegheny River. In September 1756, Lt. Col. John Armstrong led a force of provincial soldiers on a bold overland strike against the town, and this rise marked one of their stopping points on the march. The expedition destroyed Kittanning, and tradition holds the hill took its name from the blankets the men discarded here as they moved fast toward their objective.