Fort Bedford
Pennsylvania
Bedford sits on the site of a star-shaped log fortress built in the summer of seventeen fifty-eight under Colonel Henry Bouquet. Bouquet named it for the Duke of Bedford and used it as the grand supply depot for General Forbes's campaign against the French at Fort Duquesne, the site of modern Pittsburgh. Historians have called it the Grand Central Station of the Forbes campaign.
The fort featured five bastions and a unique elevated water gallery reaching down to the Juniata River, believed to be the only such design ever built in America. The fort held through Pontiac's War in seventeen sixty-three and was garrisoned again in the Revolution, but it was later abandoned and the townspeople carried off its logs. Today the town of Bedford grew up around that site, and a replica blockhouse preserves the story.
