Moorhead's Fort
White Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
About 1781, Fergus Morehead, pioneer settler, built a fort near the buildings about 200 yards south, to protect his family and neighbors from hostile Indians. It was the first permanent settlement in this vicinity.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Around 1781, in the final years of the Revolution, pioneer Fergus Morehead built a fortified refuge here to shelter his family and neighbors amid the violence of the western frontier. Fortified homesteads like this were the frontline of settlement in the Pennsylvania backcountry, where isolated families faced raids and had no army to protect them. Moorhead's Fort anchored what became the first permanent settlement in this part of Indiana County.
Why it matters
It captures the hard reality of frontier expansion during and after the Revolution, when settlement advanced one fortified cabin at a time through contested Native homelands.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Fergus Morehead
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Indiana County
Indiana, PA · est. 1982
Established in 1803 from once heavily forested land, Indiana County took a name meant to memorialize the region's first inhabitants — the Native peoples who lived and traveled here long before American settlement. The county seat was laid out two years later on ground donated by George Clymer, a Pennsylvania merchant who had signed the Declaration of Independence. It was a quintessential early-republic moment: a Revolutionary founder helping plant an orderly new town in the western Pennsylvania woods.
Brady's Bend
Brady Township, PA
This great bend of the Allegheny River bears the name of Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), a frontier scout whose exploits grew into legend. In June 1779, in what was then Seneca country, Brady led a party to answer the killing of a settler and her four children and the capture of two more. His force surrounded a small band of Seneca and Munsee, killed their Munsee leader, and freed the two captive children.
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.
Fort Armstrong
Manorville, PA
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.