Fort Juniata Crossing: First Link in Forbes Road

Near present-day Breezewood, Pennsylvania, where Interstate Seventy and the Pennsylvania Turnpike now converge in a tangle of fuel stations and fast food, a fortified supply depot once marked the first major river crossing on the road to the Ohio Country. In the summer of seventeen fifty-eight, Captain Jacob Morgan's men broke ground here on June twenty-first and finished three weeks later. The result was Fort Juniata Crossing.

The fort sat where Forbes Road forded the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River, about two and a half miles west of modern Breezewood. British General John Forbes was cutting a new road west through the Pennsylvania mountains, aiming to capture the French garrison at Fort Duquesne, present-day Pittsburgh. The road required a string of fortified way-stations to push supplies forward as the army advanced. Fort Juniata Crossing was the first of those links.

Its job was unglamorous but essential: warehousing flour, powder, and livestock; repairing wagons; funneling men and materiel toward the larger base at Fort Bedford to the west. No battle was fought here. No famous general made his name at this crossing. The fort did exactly what it was built to do, then quietly fell into disrepair after Forbes took Fort Duquesne in November of seventeen fifty-eight and the French withdrew from the Ohio Valley.

By seventeen sixty-three, with the French threat gone, the crossing had been abandoned. Pontiac's Rebellion briefly made it relevant again as settlers retreated east, but no effort was made to reoccupy the site. The river crossing that had routed an empire's supply line returned to being a ford in the Pennsylvania backcountry.

What makes the site worth pausing over is what it represents: the logic of westward movement. The same geographic imperative that made this river crossing militarily essential in seventeen fifty-eight made it commercially essential in the eighteen hundreds and now makes it the most densely packed interchange in Pennsylvania. The landscape chose the route. Everything else just followed.