Connecting the French and Indian War, Lewis & Clark and
the National Road
In the Southwest corner of
Pennsylvania, just about an hour shy of the Ohio state line, sit a couple of national
park units that may not be on your radar.
I wouldn’t call them obscure, but being from the west coast I had not
heard of either until my NPS passport led me there a few months ago. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin’s wilderness
house at Friendship Hill National
Historic Site and Fort
Necessity National Battlefield, a small palisade built by then Lt.
Colonel George Washington at the very beginning of the French & Indian War
introduced me to history that I was only vaguely familiar with. Exploring both sites and reading the Park
Service’s interpretive panels opened my eyes to what was happening in this part of
America back in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.
My girlfriend Craig and I had
spent most of the week grooving on the Revolutionary war sites in Philadelphia;
NPS sites like the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s
home and other interesting sites like Betsy Ross’ House and Elfreth’s Alley,
the oldest residential street in America.
We were headed to Ohio to see Craig’s one year-old grandson, so planned
our drive west on interstate 68 and then north on highway 40 into Uniontown, where
we found food and lodging located centrally to both sites. Our favorite spot was recommended by a local park
ranger and is a great neighborhood Irish pub called O’Gillies. Hidden in a residential part of
town, finding it was totally worth the extra effort. Sitting with a pint of Guinness we planned
our park trip for the next day.
We started our park day with a
short 30 minute drive south out of Uniontown to Friendship Hill. I had heard of Albert Gallatin, but didn’t
really know much about him other than Lewis & Clark named a river after him
in Montana. It turns out that Gallatin
was a pretty influential guy. He spent
13 years as Treasury Secretary for presidents Madison and Jefferson and in that
role he was key to financing the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Lewis &
Clark expedition in 1804. His importance
to that expedition is reflected in Gallatin being the namesake for one of the
three rivers that join to form the Missouri…the other two rivers, also named by
Lewis & Clark, are the Madison and the Jefferson.
Gallatin was Swiss-born and immigrated
to the U.S. in 1780 when he was 19 years old.
He immediately saw the business opportunities in the new United States
and got into land speculation. In 1783,
he and a partner looked west and purchased 120,000 acres in Virginia and in the
Ohio River Valley. He bought the 370
acre farm that is now Friendship Hill in 1786.
However, when his first wife died in 1789 shortly after the original
brick house was finished, he threw himself into politics and spent less and
less time at Friendship Hill. His
political career was extensive. He
served in the Pennsylvania Assembly where he helped write the Pennsylvania
constitution, was elected as both a U.S. Senator and a three term Representative
to Congress. Later in life he was the
U.S Minister to both France and Great Britain.
He helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 and
he was a founder of New York University.
But it was his tenure as Treasury Secretary from 1801 to 1814 that
solidified his legacy as one of the great founders of this country.
He wrote “A Sketch of the
Finances of the United States” in 1796 that led to establishing the Ways and
Means Committee in Congress. He was an
advocate for no public debt and his Treasury tenure saw the national debt cut
in half while still financing the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark
Expedition. He advocated for and formally
suggested a federally funded national system of roads and canals to link the
country together in 1808. While this
idea was initially rejected by Congress, the National Road from Cumberland MD
to the Ohio River Valley was ultimately started in 1811.
The first permanent structure
built on this bluff above the Monongahela River was a small brick house
constructed just before Gallatin’s first wife Sophia died in 1789. By all accounts she enjoyed living in this
wilderness setting. Once Gallatin got
into politics and married Hannah Nicholson of New York City in 1793, he spent
less and less time here as both his work responsibilities and Hannah’s dislike
of “country living” kept him from Friendship Hill. He only visited three times from 1801 to
1824. His last visit was to host the
Marques de Lafayette in 1825.
Even though he spent very little
time there, Gallatin was actively engaged in improving the property with an expansion
of the original brick house in the 1820s.
But the final construction wasn’t what he had in mind when he was directing
the design by letter from France, where he was the U.S. Minister, to his son,
who was overseeing the expansion. One
can only imagine the communication challenges of designing a home in the
wilderness while living in France when the mail went by boat and horseback and
took months to get there. For the full
story, you’ll have to visit in person! Gallatin
sold the property in 1832.
Subsequent owners did three more
additions, so the place looks like a patchwork quilt more than a well-designed
house. But I thought that’s what made it
so cool. There is so much history in
this place, not only Gallatin’s but also of the house itself. When the National Park Service bought it in 1979,
it was pretty run-down and they invested $10 million in building restoration,
with additional funds to develop the grounds, which include about 10 miles of
trail. The visitor center has a couple
videos that help orient you to both Gallatin’s life and the house. We spent a several hours exploring the house,
hiking the grounds and chatting with the very knowledgeable rangers about this
amazing little gem in the Pennsylvania countryside.
About 30 minutes away from
Friendship Hill sits Fort Necessity, whose story is also connected to the
National Road, but way before Gallatin pushed the idea before Congress.
In 1754, Lt. Col. George
Washington, age 22, and a small band of Virginians were sent westward to scout
out a road from what is now Cumberland MD to the Ohio River Valley and to support
a small British fort built where Pittsburgh stands today. The fort was built to challenge the French,
who also were laying claim to this same territory. But the French overran this small fort before
Washington got there and built a larger one of their own.
So tensions were high when
Washington arrived in the region. While
scouting out the road, Washington learned of a French encampment near a “Great
Meadows” where Washington and his command were camped. Washington attacked the French, killing their
commander. Fearing reprisals from the
French, Washington went back to the great meadows and built a small stockade he
called Fort Necessity. The French
attacked Fort Necessity on July 3, 1754. The battle did not go well for
Washington and the French accepted Washington’s surrender the next day. It was the only time in his career that Washington
surrendered. This little skirmish was
the first action in both the French and Indian War and the much larger,
worldwide Seven Years’ War between France and England.
The Park Service has re-created
the fort so you can walk around the circular stockade and marvel at its small size
and see, first hand, how close the enemy was able to approach the fort from the
surrounding forest. It turns out building
a fort in the middle of a marshy meadow closely surrounded by forest is not the
best defensive strategy. It is easy to
see why the French won. Attacking Fort
Necessity was like shooting fish in a barrel.
The visitor center tells not only the story of Fort Necessity and the French
and Indian War, but it also tells the story of the National Road, the same road
scouted by Washington and pushed by Secretary Gallatin. This Visitor Center is one of the best I’ve
seen and is not to be missed.
We found the hiking at Fort
Necessity to be really worthwhile, despite the cold weather and remnants of
snow on the ground. Several loop trails
lead away from and back to the stockade, winding through the same forest where
the French based their attack. And afterwards you can head back down Highway
40, the road Washington pioneered and Gallatin championed, to Uniontown for a
cold beer and a chance to reflect on how a summer house and a small fort are
remembered and experienced today as two small pieces of the much larger puzzle of
our country’s history.
