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Victories over Virginia Colonel George Washington at Fort Necessity in 1754, and British General Edward Braddock at the Monongahela River in 1755, gave control of the strategic forks of the Ohio River (modern Pittsburgh) to the French. This site was the gateway to the west.
In 1758, William Pitt, British secretary of state for the southern department, assigned to John Forbes, a Scottish brigadier general in America, the task of securing the backcountry, which meant seizing Fort Duquesne, the French post at the forks.
Forbes demonstrated the care that military professionals used to protect an army proceeding through enemy country, by favoring a European strategy called the “protected advance.” A deliberate, careful march across hostile territory was advised, consolidating advances by building posts and supply depots. Fort Ligonier was the final post on the Forbes Road and the staging area in southwestern Pennsylvania to attack Fort Duquesne. The most elaborate fortification undertaken in Forbes’s expedition was Fort Ligonier, “The Post at Loyalhanna.”
By 1758, General John Forbes was assigned the daunting task of seizing Fort Duquesne, the French citadel at the forks. He ordered construction of a new road across Pennsylvania, guarded by a chain of fortifications, the final link being the “Post at Loyalhanna”, fifty miles from his objective, to serve as a supply depot and staging area for a British-American army of 5000 troops. The fort was constructed in September 1758. By late October, Washington had arrived at Loyalhanna, but not before the defeat of a British force at Fort Duquesne on September 14, and the successful defense of Loyalhanna from a French attack on October 12. Heavily outnumbered, the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, which Forbes occupied on November 25. He designated the site “Pittsburgh” in honor of Secretary of State William Pitt. Forbes also named Loyalhanna “Fort Ligonier” after his superior, Sir John Ligonier, commander in chief in Great Britain.
Eight acres of the original site of Fort Ligonier have been preserved, with the subsurface features restored and the above-ground elements reconstructed. The inner fort is 200 feet square, defended by four bastions and accessed by three gates; inside is the officers’ mess, barracks, quartermaster, guardroom, underground magazine, commissary, and officers’ quarters. Immediately outside the fort is General Forbes’s hut. An outer retrenchment, 1,600 feet long, surrounds the fort. Other external buildings include the Pennsylvania hospital (two wards and a surgeon’s hut), a smokehouse, a saw mill, bake ovens, a log dwelling and a forge.