Fort Pitt Museum July 17, 2018

Copyright © 2018                               John F. Oyler 

July 17, 2018

Fort Pitt Museum

The final program in the Bridgeville Area Historical Society 2017-2018 season was an interesting presentation on the Fort Pitt Museum, by its Director of Education, Kathleen Lugarich. Her talk was entitled “Point of Empire: A Brief Overview of Fort Pitt”, an obvious pun on Pittsburgh’s Point and the clash of French and English empires that collided there.

Ms. Lugarich began by explaining the significance of the Ohio River to three different cultures. A small number of Native Americans – Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo – made their home in the Ohio Country after being displaced by English settlers on the eastern seaboard. The French colonies in Canada and Louisiana needed the Ohio/Mississippi river network as a transportation link between them. And the English colonies needed western lands to support their rapidly expanding population. Conflict was inevitable.

The French staked their claim with expeditions down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers in 1739 and 1749, followed by a full-scale invasion in 1753. Alarmed, Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie dispatched twenty one year old Major George Washington to Fort LeBoeuf to persuade the French to return to Canada and sent Captain William Trent to the Forks of the Ohio to construct a fort there.

Trent and a small force of men built the first fort there, a modest stockade enclosing a cabin, which was promptly named Fort Prince George. Finished in early 1754, it was the first of five forts to occupy that area in the late eighteenth century. When a massive armada of French bateaux and Indian canoes arrived down the Allegheny River, the Virginians quickly surrendered and returned home.

The French then built Fort Duquesne, a respectable four-sided stockade with bastions at each corner, large enough to house two hundred soldiers. Located very close to the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, it was frequently flooded. It survived until 1758 when General John Forbes’ advance across Pennsylvania forced the smaller French contingent to evacuate, razing the fort before they left.

Being fatally ill, Forbes returned to Philadelphia, leaving Colonel Hugh Mercer in command. Mercer quickly constructed a modest temporary fortification, which posterity has named “Mercer’s Fort”. The fourth fort at the Forks of the Ohio was a masterpiece, named for the powerful English Secretary of State, William Pitt.

Constructed between 1759 and 1761, Fort Pitt was one of the largest and most elaborate fortifications in North America. It was a pentagram, with five equal sides, and bastions at each corner. The sides were earthen ramparts, made of the material excavated to form a moat encircling the fortification. The ramparts on the land side were reinforced with brick facing.

Inside the ramparts long buildings paralleled each side, enclosing a large parade ground. During the three month long siege of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s War in 1763, the parade ground served as refuge for several hundred civilians. In 1764 six redoubts were built outside the ramparts; one of them has survived, the Fort Pitt Blockhouse. 

The fort had a brief reincarnation in 1774 as Fort Dunmore, during the confrontation between Pennsylvania and Virginia over this area, known as Dunmore’s War. It later served as headquarters for the Continental Army’s western theater during the Revolutionary War. 

By 1792 the combination of deterioration and frequent floods on Fort Pitt prompted the Federal Government to build the fifth fort at the Forks, Fort Lafayette (sometimes called Fort Fayette). Located on the Allegheny shore roughly where ninth and tenth streets exist today, it was a modest fortification intended to provide a supply link for Fort McIntosh, downstream on the Ohio River near the point where the Beaver River enters it. 

Ms. Lugarich’s presentation was so effective that my grandson Ian McCance and I elected to visit the Fort Pitt Museum the following Saturday. We were rewarded with an excellent experience, largely because we encountered an outstanding docent as tour guide. We have had the good fortune of getting to know Mrs. Marian Hutchinson, another enthusiastic history buff who is a big supporter of the Bridgeville Area Historical Society.

I knew she was a volunteer docent at the Museum and was delighted when we were able to join one of her tours. The combination of her enthusiasm, her commitment to effective communication, and her detailed knowledge of her subject have resulted in an outstanding tour guide.

I usually am full of complaints about amateur docents and their ignorance of their subject; I could only find two extremely trivial disagreements with Mrs. Hutchinson’s presentation, both of which are probably the result of things she was told when she was trained for this assignment.

When she discussed the difference between the level of the rivers in colonial times and that today, she credited the flood control dams built after the 1936 flood with eliminating the areas where one could wade across them. The elimination of shallow water resulted from the construction of locks and dams to permit year-round navigation, which began at Davis Island in 1885.

She also reported that, according to George Washington’s Journal, he was tall enough that he had waded across the Monongahela at the Point. I am skeptical of this and have challenged her to confirm it in his journal. I do concede that Braddock’s entire army waded across the Mon just prior to its tragic defeat, but even then I suspect Washington was on horseback.

The Fort Pitt Museum is full of interesting exhibits and is a resource that most of us fail to exploit. We strongly recommend a visit there, especially if you are fortunate enough to have a docent as capable as Mrs. Hutchinson.