Fort Bedford: Grand Central of the Forbes Campaign

Historians who have studied General John Forbes's seventeen fifty-eight campaign against the French at Fort Duquesne call Fort Bedford the Grand Central Station of the entire operation. That description is apt. Everything flowed through here: men, horses, wagons, flour, gunpowder, rum, artillery, and the endless machinery of an eighteenth-century army trying to project force five hundred miles from the coast into the Ohio Country.

Colonel Henry Bouquet, Forbes's deputy, chose the site at the confluence of Raystown Creek and the Juniata River in present-day Bedford, Pennsylvania. Construction began in the summer of seventeen fifty-eight. The result was a star-shaped log fortress of five bastions enclosing one and a half acres, surrounded by a dry moat up to nine feet deep. The fort was originally called the Camp at Raystown, after the creek and a trader named John Wray, before being renamed for the Duke of Bedford, a minister of the Crown who had championed the campaign.

For weeks and then months the fort swelled with men. Forbes himself was gravely ill, carried in a litter for much of the campaign, writing orders from a stretcher. From Bedford, he directed the construction of the road that bears his name, a path cut through the Allegheny ridges that would eventually form the spine of the Pennsylvania highway system.

When Forbes's force finally took Fort Duquesne in November of seventeen fifty-eight and the French blew it up rather than let it fall intact, the Ohio Valley opened to British settlement. Fort Bedford's strategic role evaporated almost immediately. Pontiac's Rebellion in seventeen sixty-three briefly revived the site.

The fort site in downtown Bedford is now marked by a replica bastion and a museum holding one of the finest collections of French and Indian War artifacts in Pennsylvania.