The Venango Path: George Washington Walked Here

Just west of this spot ran one of the most consequential Native American trails in colonial America. The Venango Path connected Pittsburgh, then called the Forks of the Ohio, north to Venango, present-day Franklin. In seventeen fifty-three, a twenty-one-year-old Virginia militia officer named George Washington traveled this path north to deliver a message to the French at Fort Le Boeuf, warning them to leave territory claimed by the British crown.

The French refused. That refusal helped ignite the French and Indian War. Thirty-four years later, in seventeen eighty-seven, an officer is said to have widened the same path for troops heading to build Fort Franklin.

At Mayes Forks, there is said to have stood a hotel and stagecoach stop in the nineteenth century. A dirt trail walked by Washington became a postal road. Roads have a long memory in western Pennsylvania.