Fort Ligonier: Gateway to Pittsburgh

You are passing close to Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and the site of Fort Ligonier, the last British fort built in the Alleghenies and the one that saved the campaign to take the Forks of the Ohio.

It was the autumn of seventeen fifty-eight, and Britain was trying again. Two earlier expeditions to wrest the Ohio River valley from France had ended in catastrophe. General Edward Braddock's column had been ambushed three years before, losing nearly a thousand men in a single afternoon. Now General John Forbes was pushing a new road westward through the Pennsylvania mountains, a road that still traces much of what you are driving today on Route Thirty.

Forbes and his second-in-command, Colonel Henry Bouquet, chose a meadow at Loyalhanna Creek to build their supply base. They named it Fort Ligonier after Field Marshal John Ligonier, Britain's senior military commander. Workers drove stakes into the earth and raised a stockaded fort with diamond-shaped bastions at each corner. It was engineered to be defended on the cheap, with angled walls that let a small garrison cover all approaches with overlapping musket fire.

The French knew it had to be stopped. On October twelfth, seventeen fifty-eight, a French and Native American force of roughly fourteen hundred men struck Ligonier from the surrounding forest. They captured the British horse herd and drove the grazing cattle off. For hours, the defenders, numbering perhaps five hundred, exchanged fire from behind the walls. The French pulled back as darkness fell, leaving the fort intact.

Six weeks later, Forbes's army marched the final sixty miles and took Fort Duquesne without a fight. The French burned it and retreated rather than be surrounded. Pittsburgh was born from that moment. Fort Ligonier had made it possible.

The fort was never taken. It supplied Bouquet's relief column during Pontiac's War in seventeen sixty-three, then quietly faded as the frontier moved west. A full reconstruction opened in nineteen fifty-three and stands today in the center of Ligonier, its wooden bastions and earthen walls accurate to the original surveys. The on-site museum holds one of the finest collections of French and Indian War artifacts in the country.