Fort Morris at Shippensburg was building in November 1755; “we have one hundred men working,” wrote James Burd, “... with heart and hand every day. The town is full of people, five or six families in a house, in great want of arms and ammunition; but, with what we have we are determined to give the enemy as warm a reception, as we can. Some of our people have been taken prisoners, but have made their escape, and came to us this morning.” There had, as noted, been some sort of fortification here at an earlier date, Fort Franklin. As said previously, Fort Morris was still uncompleted July 23, 1756. It was in Fort Franklin, undoubtedly, that the magazine was placed during Braddock’s campaign. Fort McDowell, at McDowell’s Mill, was also erected in 1756, being an important point at the junction of the old road into Virginia and the new road to Raystown. The savage onslaughts of the Indians were felt no more severely in any quarter than near here. At Great Cove, in November 1755, forty-seven persons were murdered or taken captive out of a total population of ninety-three. The strategic position of Fort McDowell at the junction of the roads was emphasized by Colonel Armstrong, who, after saying that Forts Lyttleton, Shippensburg, and Carlisle were the only ones that would be useful to the public, added: “McDowell’s, or thereabouts, is a necessary post; but the present fort is not defensible.”
Fort Loudoun was erected on the old road in 1756, one mile east of the present village of Loudon, Franklin County. The spot was historic even before it was fortified, the settlement here being one of the oldest in that section of the state. This point was a famous rendezvous both in the early days when the Old Trading Path was the main western highway, and in after days when the path became Forbes’s Road. From here the pack-horse trains started westward into the mountains loaded—two hundred pounds to a horse—with goods which had come this far in wagons from Lancaster and Philadelphia. The site of Fort Loudoun therefore marks the western extremity of the early colonial roadways and the eastern extremity of the “packers’ paths” or trading paths which offered, until 1758, the only route across the mountains.[49] Fort Loudoun was built late in 1755, after considerable debate as to its location. Colonel Armstrong, after examining a spot near one Barr’s, finally determined to locate it “on a place in that neighborhood, near to Parnell’s Knob, where one Patton lives ... as it is near the new road; it will make the distance from Shippensburg to Fort Lyttleton two miles further than by McDowell’s.”
Ten miles southwest of Shippensburg, Benjamin Chambers, a noted pioneer, erected Fort Chambers at Falling Spring, the present Chambersburg. It was a private fort completed in 1756; by some means the owner had secured two four-pound cannon which he mounted in his little fort, the roof of which he had already covered with lead. It was feared that Chambers’s little fort would be captured by the savages and the guns turned upon Shippensburg and Carlisle. But their owner repudiated the insinuation and even held the guns from Colonel Armstrong, who was armed with the governor’s order to surrender them. Incidentally, also, he made good his boasts and held the fort with equal pugnacity from the savages. Colonel Chambers was of great assistance to General Forbes in the days of 1758, and, as an aged man, sent his three sons, raised in the lead-roofed fortress with its “Great Guns,” to Boston in 1775 to fight again for the land he had helped to conquer from the Indians in the dark days of Braddock and Forbes. Such men as Benjamin Chambers made Forbes’s Road a possibility. The state road built westward over the track of Forbes’s and Bouquet’s armies is well known in eastern Pennsylvania as the “Chambersburg and Pittsburg turnpike.”[50]
These forts west of the Susquehanna were garrisoned by the eight companies of the second battalion of the Pennsylvania regiment. While the work of completing the forts not yet finished went on, a campaign of more importance than was realized was conceived by ex-Governor Morris and explained to Governor Denny and the Council. It comprised a bold stroke by Lieutenant-colonel Armstrong at the Indian-infested region of Kittanning on the Allegheny. Here the Delaware Captain Jacobs held bloody sway, having, according to the report of an Indian spy who had recently visited the spot, nearly one hundred white prisoners from Virginia and Pennsylvania captive at that point.
Fort Shirley was appointed the place of rendezvous and the little campaign was kept as secret as possible. As the map shows, Fort Shirley (no. 23), Fort Lyttleton (no. 24) and Shippensburg form a triangle, the longest side of which marks the straight line between the two latter posts. Fort Loudoun was near this line between Fort Lyttleton and Fort Morris at Shippensburg. Near Fort Loudoun a branch of the old Kittanning Path ran northwesterly by Fort Shirley and onward to the Allegheny.[51] Over this track the bold band, which rendezvoused at Fort Shirley late in August, was to enter the Indian land. It numbered three hundred and seven men, almost precisely the size of Washington’s party which precipitated war in 1754. But with the gloomy fate of Washington’s band and Braddock’s army in mind this must have been a thoughtful company of men that proceeded from Fort Shirley on the next to the last day of August 1756. Their success was all out of proportion to their expectation but not out of proportion to their bravery. Within a week Kittanning was reached, surrounded when it was darkest before dawn, and savagely attacked in the grey of the misty morning. The town was utterly destroyed, some three score savages killed and eleven prisoners rescued and brought back over the mountains. The moral effect of this dash toward the Allegheny was of exceeding benefit to the whole frontier, and Armstrong—always feared by the Indians—became their especial bête noire. The expedition, having been made from lethargic Pennsylvania, had a wholesome effect upon all the other colonies and did much to cement them into the common league which accomplished much before two years had passed. Armstrong, as one of the builders of the new road through Raystown, as efficient officer in the work of fortifying this route, and now as leader of an offensive stroke at once daring and successful, was slowly being fitted for more useful and more important duties when the flower of Pennsylvania’s frontier should be thrown across the Alleghenies upon Fort Duquesne.
This officer’s opinion, already quoted, that the only forts worth the candle west of the Susquehanna were the three or four which fortified the main route westward from Carlisle to Raystown, appears to have met the approval of those in authority by 1757; on April 10, Governor Denny wrote to the Proprietaries: “Four Forts only were to remain over Susquehannah, viz., Lyttleton, Loudoun, Shippensburg, and Carlisle.”[52] If this is considered a backward step it must also be considered as a concentration of energy in a most telling manner. If the frontier from the Susquehanna to the Maryland line could not be held at every point the decision seems to have been that the line of the old road must be secured at all costs, whereupon all the public forts were abandoned save the four which guarded this western highway. But the decision meant more than this. It was in fact an offensive measure. Instead of holding a line of forts at the mountain gaps as a shield to the settlements, the line of the roadway westward was to be protected and even prolonged—a bristling sword-point stretching over the Alleghenies into the very heart of the French and Indian region. This is proved by the building of a new fort yet further west than Lyttleton—at Raystown, near the point where Burd’s road, cut in 1755 toward the Youghiogheny, left the Old Trading Path. This significant undertaking was evidently on the tapis early in the winter. On February 22, Armstrong wrote Burd: “This is all that can possibly be done, before the grass grows and proper numbers unite, except it is agreed to fortify Raystown, of which I, yet, know nothing.” On the fifth of May he addressed a letter to the governor in which he said: “... prompts me to propose to your Honour what I have long ago suggested, to the late Governor and gentlemen commissioners, that is the building a fort at Raystown without which the King’s business and the country’s safety can never be effected to the westward.... ’Tis true this service will require upwards of five hundred men, as no doubt they will be attacked if any power be at Fort Duquesne, because this will be a visible, large and direct stride to that place.” Thus it is clear that every step westward on the new-cut roadway from Fort Lyttleton toward Raystown was a step toward Fort Duquesne, and every fortification built on this track was a “visible, large and direct” stroke at the power of France on the Ohio. A fort was erected at Raystown within the year.