Fort Loudoun: The Road to the Ohio Starts Here

Near the village of Fort Loudon, Pennsylvania, a historical marker sits beside Route Thirty at a bend in the road, pointing toward land where a wooden fort once stood. Most drivers pass without slowing. The fort that stood here was, in its moment, an important supply post on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Fort Loudoun was built in seventeen fifty-six, a year into the French and Indian War. Pennsylvania had resisted building frontier forts for years. The colonial assembly, dominated by Quaker pacifists, repeatedly refused military appropriations. But the raids on frontier settlements were becoming catastrophic. Delaware and Shawnee warriors, allied with France, were burning homesteads from the Susquehanna west to the Alleghenies. Hundreds of settlers had been killed or captured.

The Pennsylvania Assembly finally relented, and Colonel John Armstrong built Fort Loudoun in the fall of seventeen fifty-six on Conococheague Creek, at the western edge of the settled Cumberland Valley. It was named for the Earl of Loudoun, the British commander in North America. The fort served as the eastern anchor of the Pennsylvania frontier defense line and, crucially, as the jumping-off point for the Forbes Road expedition of seventeen fifty-eight.

General John Forbes staged supplies and troops here before his column moved west, cutting the road through the mountains that would eventually become Route Thirty, then the Lincoln Highway. The road you are on now owes its path, in part, to the military logic that this fort established.

The fort's role changed quickly once the French threat receded. By seventeen sixty-five it was already being described as in disrepair. It was abandoned not long after. Today the site is an archaeological preserve, and excavations over the decades have uncovered the trench of the original palisade, a stone-lined well, and the remains of buildings. It is a quiet place, but the road running past it carries more than two and a half centuries of continuous traffic westward.