The Forks of the Ohio

Stand at the tip of Point State Park today and you are standing at one of the most fought-over pieces of ground in North American history. Two rivers come together here, the Allegheny from the northeast and the Monongahela from the southeast, and they merge into the Ohio, which runs west twelve hundred miles to the Mississippi. The French saw it first among European powers, and they understood immediately what it meant. Whoever held this point controlled the path to the interior of the continent.

In seventeen fifty-four, a French force of five hundred soldiers arrived and forced out a small British garrison that had only just begun building a fort here. The French named their construction Fort Duquesne, after the governor-general of New France. They would hold it for four years, through the early disasters of what the colonists called the French and Indian War.

A British army of six thousand soldiers under General John Forbes marched west from Carlisle in seventeen fifty-eight, following a newly hacked road through the Pennsylvania forest. The French, badly outnumbered, burned Fort Duquesne to its foundations and withdrew the night before Forbes arrived, on November twenty-fifth, seventeen fifty-eight. The British built Fort Pitt in its place, the largest British fortification in North America at the time, named for William Pitt, the secretary of state who had reorganized the war effort.

The village that grew up around Fort Pitt took the name Pittsburgh, an anglicization honoring that same politician. It was chartered as a borough in seventeen ninety-four and as a city in eighteen sixteen.

Today the fountain that shoots sixty feet into the air at the park's tip marks the exact confluence. The outline of Fort Pitt is traced in brick in the grass nearby. The Fort Pitt Museum sits within the one remaining original blockhouse, a structure that survived everything that came after it: revolution, industry, fire, and time.