Blue Mountain Forts: The Paxton Rangers' Line
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
During the seventeen sixties, the ridge you see ahead marked the edge of the colonial frontier. After Pontiac's War erupted in seventeen sixty-three, Pennsylvania authorized local forces to hold the line. A chain of log-house stations ran between the Susquehanna River and Swatara Creek, spaced close enough that settlers could reach one on foot.
Fort Hunter anchored the northern end on the river. A similar chain had existed earlier in the French and Indian War. These weren't stone fortresses.
They were rough timber blockhouses manned by local riflemen, funded by a colony that could barely afford them, defending a boundary that kept shifting westward as colonial settlement pressed deeper into territory that Indigenous peoples had held for generations.
