Fort Pitt, Birthplace of Pittsburgh

When the smoke cleared from the ruins of French Fort Duquesne in November of seventeen fifty-eight, the British set about building something far grander on the same ground. Fort Pitt, named for William Pitt, Britain's wartime secretary of state, would become the largest and most elaborate British fortification ever constructed in North America.

The fort was an engineering achievement built at enormous expense. Its five-sided bastioned plan required an entire construction army of laborers working through seventeen fifty-nine and into the seventeen sixties. At its peak it covered seventeen acres with walls of brick and earth, mounting dozens of cannon. The town of Pittsburgh began to grow up in its shadow almost immediately, as traders, settlers, and soldiers established themselves around the garrison.

Fort Pitt's greatest test came in seventeen sixty-three during Pontiac's War, when an alliance of Native nations launched coordinated attacks on British posts across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. Fort Pitt came under siege for forty days. The garrison survived, but the episode revealed the fragility of British control in the west. The siege is also the occasion for one of the earliest documented instances of biological warfare: British officers discussed, and possibly carried out, the deliberate distribution of blankets from the fort's smallpox hospital to Delaware negotiators, with the explicit intent of spreading disease.

By the time of the American Revolution, the British had largely abandoned the fortification, and the Continental Army used it as a western supply base. In seventeen seventy-eight, the first formal peace treaty between the new United States and a Native American nation, the Delaware, was signed here.

Today Point State Park covers the ground where the fort stood, and the Fort Pitt Museum preserves the blockhouse that is the only surviving original structure from the garrison, the oldest building in the Pittsburgh region.