The third weekend in September presented a challenge to local festival-goers. Close to home was the Bridgeville/South Fayette Rotary Chili Cook-off at Fairview Park. Traditionally this weekend is reserved for the Washington-Greene Counties Covered Bridge Festival; this year they had events scheduled for nine different sites. It also is the weekend for Canonsburg’s very popular Pennsylvanian Bavarian Oktoberfest and Stahlstown’s Flax Scutching Festival. Overwhelmed with difficult decisions, I chose to go instead to Beaver for Fort McIntosh Days, and was rewarded with a delightful experience.
The Festival was located on a long, linear park between River Road in Beaver and the top of the hillside leading down to the Ohio River. The park occupies about half of the site of Fort McIntosh, with homes on River Road occupying the other half. The footprint for the fort was a trapezoid about 300 feet long on the riverside, 150 feet deep, and 200 feet long on the landside. Constructed of timbers, the stockade walls had pentagonal bastions at each of its four corners. An archaeological investigation of the site fifty years ago located footers for the walls and fireplaces plus 80,000 artifacts. Inside the stockade were sufficient barracks and officers’ quarters to house 1,500 men.
The fort was constructed in 1778, to provide a stronghold to resist the British troops and their Indian allies at Fort Detroit. General Lachlan McIntosh built it and Fort Laurens seventy miles west at Bolivar, Ohio, as part of a plan to launch a campaign against Detroit. After a year Laurens was abandoned, but McIntosh survived. In 1783, at the end of the Revolution, it became the home of the First American Regiment, commanded by Colonel Josiah Harmar. By 1788 the fort had outlived its usefulness and was decommissioned and demolished.
Prior to its decommissioning, in 1785, it was the site of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh. The previous year the Seneca Nation had given up its rights to the portion of the Ohio Country in Western Pennsylvania. George Rogers Clark, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee were sent to secure similar rights from the nations in what is today Ohio. They persuaded representatives of the Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes to cede the eastern two-thirds of present day Ohio, maintaining a reservation in the remainder. This opened up the Northwest Territory for settlement; however other tribes, notably the Shawnee, did not accept it, leading to major conflicts in later years.
Formed in 1981, the Fort McIntosh Garrison is a collection of men, women, and children interested in living history re-enactment. They are affiliated with the Beaver Area Heritage Foundation, sponsors of this annual event. They provided an impressive number of educational displays relevant to the colonial era in Western Pennsylvania, many of which were specific to Fort McIntosh. The Garrison re-enactors were joined by members of Wayne’s Legion, a similar re-enactment group based at Woodville. The two units had tent encampments with displays of equipment and uniforms, and demonstrated aspects of military life, close order drill, for example. They also fired a cannon several times; I was impressed with its echo coming back from across the river.
The non-military exhibits/demonstrations were set up as if they were there supporting the troops. It would have been impractical to set up a blacksmith shop there on a temporary basis, but the smithy did display an impressive variety of tools and accessories he had forged. The woodworker brought his “bodger’s bench” (a clever device used for clamping a workpiece while planing it with a hand tool); we watched him training an apprentice to shave the edges of a wooden shingle. I had seen Dan Ragaller making good use of a bodger’s bench he built when he was helping the Amish team build the new barn at Woodville. By coincidence, Dan was at Fort McIntosh as a member of Wayne’s Legion.
I was particularly impressed by the herbalist – a lady with a remarkable collection of medicines for nearly every imaginable ailment, all from locally available wild plants. She even had three different concoctions for acne – I wonder if that was a serious problem in colonial times. Like the Native American herbalist we saw at Woodville, she had a rack of useful wild plants, including mullein, which she agreed was a good substitute for toilet paper.
The most impressive demonstration I saw was three ladies making lace using the bobbin technique. This is a neat process which involves an intricate pattern into which the craftsperson inserts pins and then braids threads from a series of individual bobbins in a complicated pattern. Watching these ladies manipulate the bobbins is like watching jugglers. I’m sure automation and high-performance machines have made them obsolete, but I am glad they are keeping this technology alive.
Once again, my efforts to acquire information on Native Americans in this area in colonial times were ineffective. This was particularly distressing because we do know that the Delaware Chief Shingas had a village of some magnitude in the Beaver area. All the experts I asked replied that they had no record of where it was located nor of its extent. There was a young man there selling books he had compiled on Native Americans, but they were much too general for that degree of detail.
I was pleased to see so much interest in local history in the Beaver County communities. The Beaver County Heritage Foundation also operates the Beaver Area Heritage Museum, the 1802 Log House, and Beaver Station, a restored 1897 Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad station. In addition, the Beaver County Historical Research and Landmarks Foundation maintains the William Vicary Mansion in Freedom. Nearly two centuries old, the twenty-room showplace was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Sounds like several candidates for future visits!