Lewis’ plan of Fort Necessity: A, B, N, S, M, C.
Enlarged triangle (containing “1/3 of an acre”): A, B, F.
Sparks plan: A, B, L, W, K, C.
Remains of Eastern embankment: O.
Variation of Lewis’ triangle (given in “Fort Cumberland”): A, B, N, R, P, M, C.
Actual shape of Fort Necessity according to last survey: K, C, A, B, E;
the projection to the water may have been E, D, K, or E, H, K, or L, W, K.
This detail is immaterial.
The irregular square A, B, K, C, gives the general outline of the fortifications, CA, (save where the lane crosses it) AB, BE and O being still visible in 1901.
[Select for larger version]

Relics from Fort Necessity are rare and valuable, for the reason that no other action save the one Battle of Fort Necessity ever took place here. The barrel of an old flint-lock musket, a few grape shot, a bullet mould and ladle, leaden and iron musket balls, comprise the few silent memorials of the first battle in which Saxon blood was shed west of the Allegheny Mountains. The swivels, it is said, were taken to Kentucky to do brave duty there in redeeming the “dark and bloody ground” to civilization.

But, after all—and more precious than all—our study of this historic spot in the Alleghenies and the memorials left near it becomes, soon, a study of its hero, that young Virginian Colonel. Even the battles fought hereabouts seem to have been of little real consequence, for New France fell, never to rise, with the capture of Quebec—“amid the proudest monuments of its own glory and on the very spot of its origin!”

And it is not of little consequence that there was here a brave training school for the future heroes of the Revolution. For in what did Colonel Washington need training more than in the art of manoeuvring a handful of ill-equipped, discouraged men? What lesson did that youth need more than the lesson that Right becomes Might in God’s own good time? And here in these Allegheny glades we catch the most precious pictures of the lithe, keen-eyed, sober lad, who, taking his lessons of truth and uprightness from his widowed mother’s knee, his strength hardened by the power of the mountain rivers, his heart, now thrilled by the songs of the mountain birds, now tempered by a St. Piere’s hauteur, a Braddock’s blind insolence, or the prejudiced over-rulings of a Forbes, became the hero of Valley Forge and Yorktown, the immeasurable superior of Piere, Braddock, Forbes, Kaunitz or Newcastle.

For consider the record of that older Washington of 1775 beneath the Cambridge elm. He had capitulated at Fort Necessity, with the first army he ever commanded, after the first battle he ever fought! He had marched with Braddock’s ill-starred army, in which he had no official position whatever until defeat and rout threw upon his shoulders a large share of the responsibility of saving the army from complete annihilation. He had marched with Forbes, only to write his Governor begging to be allowed to go to England to tell the King the sad story of the campaign—of “how grossly his glory and interest and the public money, have been prostituted.” For the past sixteen years he had led a quiet life on his farms.

Why, now, in 1775, should he have had the unstinted confidence of all men, in the hour of his country’s great crisis? Why should his journey from Mt. Vernon to Cambridge have been a triumphal march? Professor McMaster asserts that the General and the President are known to us, “but George Washington is an unknown.” How untrue this was in 1775! How the nation believed it knew the man! How much of reputation he had gained while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero—of many defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill, after many a wary, difficult retreat and dearly fought battle-field! Aye—but he had been to school with Gates and Mercer, Lewis and Stephen and Gladewin, on that swath of a road in the Alleghenies which led to Fort Necessity.

Half a century ago multitudes were pointed to the man Washington in the superb oratory of Edward Everett. But how, if not by quoting that memorable extract from the letter of the youthful surveyor, who boasted of earning an honest dubloon a day? Thus, the orator declared, he presented to his audience “not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy generalities and a mist of vague panegyric, but the real, identical man.” And, again, did he not quote that pathetic letter from the youth Washington to Governor Dinwiddie from the bleeding Virginia border, after Braddock’s defeat, that his hearers might “see it all—see the whole man.”? Was Edward Everett mistaken, are these letters not extant today, or are they unread? Surely the latter supposition must be the true one if the man Washington is being forgotten.