Fort Loudon — Frontier Gateway and the Black Boys Revolt

Fort Loudon, raised by Colonel John Armstrong in the winter of seventeen fifty-six, stood about a mile from this spot as one of a chain of stockades defending Pennsylvania's western frontier. During General Forbes's march to Fort Duquesne in seventeen fifty-eight and Colonel Henry Bouquet's expedition of seventeen sixty-four, it served as a staging ground and supply base for British colonial forces.

The fort's most unusual chapter came in seventeen sixty-five, when a group of Scots-Irish frontiersmen called the Black Boys, led by Captain James Smith, attacked pack-horse trains they believed were carrying goods to hostile tribes. When British soldiers arrested several Black Boys and held them at Fort Loudon, Smith's men besieged the fort itself, firing on the garrison until the prisoners were released. It was among the earliest armed colonial defiance of British authority, a decade before Lexington.