When General Edward Braddock landed in Virginia in 1755, one of his first acts in his campaign upon the Ohio was to urge Governor Morris to have a road opened westward through Pennsylvania. His reason for wishing another road, parallel to the one his own army was to cut, was that there might be a shorter route than his own to the northern colonies, over which his expresses might pass speedily, and over which wagons might come more quickly from Pennsylvania—then the “granary of America.” It was i

When, in the middle of the eighteenth century, intelligent white men were beginning to cross the Allegheny Mountains and enter the Ohio basin, one of the most practicable routes was found to be an old trading path which ran almost directly west from Philadelphia to the present site of Pittsburg. According to the Indians it was the easiest route from the Atlantic slope through the dense laurel wildernesses to the Ohio. [1] The course of this path is best described by the route of the old state ro

There is no truer picture of the dark days of 1755-56 along the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia than that presented in the correspondence of Washington at this time. A great burden fell upon his young shoulders with the failure of the campaigns of 1755. Though far from being at fault, he suffered greatly through the faults and failures of others. The British army had come and had been routed. Now, after such a victory as the Indians had never dreamed possible, the Virginia and Pennsylvani

“Between the French and the earthquakes,” wrote Horace Walpole in 1758 to Mr. Conway, “you have no notion how good we have grown; nobody makes a suit of clothes now but of sackcloth turned up with ashes.” The years 1756 and 1757 were crowded with disappointments. With the miscarriage of the three campaigns of 1755, Governor Shirley became the successor of the forgotten Braddock and assembled a council of war at New York composed of Governors Shirley, Hardy, Sharpe, Morris, and Fitch, Colonels Du

So many are the versions of the story of the building of Forbes’s Road through Pennsylvania that it was with utmost interest that the present writer took up the task of examining the only sources of reliable information: the correspondence of General Forbes, Colonel Bouquet, and Sir John St. Clair, as preserved in the Bouquet Papers at the British Museum, and at the British Public Records Office. While these letters were supplemented by frequent personal interviews which have never been recorded

The correspondence included in the chapter preceding affords probably the utmost light that can be thrown today upon the reason of the making of the great Pennsylvanian thoroughfare to the Ohio. It cannot be affirmed, as has often been said, that Forbes was early prejudiced in favor of a Pennsylvania route; he never could have been such a hypocrite as to pen the words to be found on page 94. That his first plans were completely altered at the advice of Sir John St. Clair is very plain from his l

There is another hero of Forbes’s Road. The rough days of that summer of 1758 were only suggestions of what was to come. Other armies than that of Forbes were to pass this way, for, be it understood at once, Forbes’s Road became the great military highway into the West. No single road in America witnessed so many campaigns; no road in America was fortified by such a chain of forts. For a generation this route from Lancaster by Carlisle, Bedford, Ligonier to Pittsburg was the most important thoro

Such had become the importance of the Pennsylvania Road that, soon after the Revolutionary struggle, Pennsylvania took active steps to improve it. On the twenty-first day of September an act of the Assembly of Pennsylvania gave birth to the great thoroughfare at first called “The Western Road to Pittsburg,” and familiarly known since as the Pittsburg or the Chambersburg-Pittsburg Pike. [82] This state road was, as heretofore recorded, one hundred and ninety-seven miles in length from Carlisle to