Braddock's Road to War

Richard Robbins
Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004 12:00 a.m. | Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004 12:00 a.m.

In the summer of 1755, soldiers faced heat, disease and enemies as they marched across a quarter of the American continent to do battle.

That summer, some 2,400 French and Indian War troops under the command of British Gen. Edward Braddock walked from Virginia to stage what turned out to be a botched assault on the Point in Pittsburgh, the key to westward expansion and in the firm grip of the French and their Indian allies in the 1750s.

"These were tough people," mused tourist Douglas Roach, as he rested on a bench next to Braddock's Grave along Route 40 in Fayette County.

Roach, a descendant of Connellsville's 18th-century surveyor-explorer-soldier William Crawford, moments earlier paused before Braddock's original resting place after he was fatally wounded at the Battle of the Monongahela, in the middle of the forest path named in his honor, Braddock's Road.

"I knew that's where he had been," said Roach, who had traveled from his home in Maine. "I knew they had rolled the wagons over the grave. It was a common practice, not unusual at all. To keep the Indians away. To disguise it."

Several years ago, the National Park Service re-engineered the area around Braddock's grave. The agency erected new signs explaining the British expedition against Fort Duquesne, paved a parking lot and built steps leading to what historian-preservationists call a "trace" of the 249- year-old road, a cleared path that angles slightly downhill about 100 feet from Braddock's next to final resting place.

First-time visitors often are startled to discover signs of the 1750s road and traces of the grave site -- signs that the French and Indian War was a real event with bloody consequences.

According to historians, Braddock's crude grave was a military and humanitarian necessity. Because scalps were highly prized as symbols of a warrior's bravery and skill in battle, marauding Indians likely would have plundered the general's body if they had discovered it.

Old maps, 19th-century land records and contemporaneous diaries all attest to the road's location.

The road's 21st-century following -- scholars, amateur historians, the curious -- testifies to its enduring ability to speak to the imagination. When historian Frank Cassell, the president of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, recently glimpsed a tracing of the road in Westmoreland County, he could envision troops marching past.

"I can see them now," he said of the 1,500 or so soldiers who accompanied Braddock to a blood-soaked hill above the Monongahela River in present-day Braddock, Allegheny County.

When the road was young, the area was a vast forest, populated here and there by small Indian settlements and even fewer settlements populated by white Europeans. In the 1750s, the white population on the Ohio frontier was composed largely of a few thousand military -- British and French regulars and Virginia colonials.

The world was natural and raw. For a man to get around he needed to know the lay of the land -- the ravines, hollows and uplands, locations of natural springs and the places where the forest gave way, however briefly, to a clearing and civilization.

A western Pennsylvania road map in the 1750s would have been sparse. The path from Wills Creek, present-day Cumberland, Md., to the forks of the Ohio River, was a 6-foot-wide clearing across the peaks of the Allegheny Mountains and into the undulating lowlands of the lower Youghiogheny and Monongahela valleys.

This trail became Braddock's Road, a military route expanded to 12 feet wide by British sailors expert with timber and ax who served under Braddock.

Last summer a $12,000 federal grant paid for a mapping of Braddock's Road in Fayette County. Brian Reedy, a National Park Service ranger at Fort Necessity National Battlefield, headed the mapping expedition.

Reedy said a familiarity with Braddock's Road is one of the requirements in understanding early British and Colonial frontier history.

"The British needed the road to get over the mountains," he said, adding that they needed it because the French controlled water routes to Pittsburgh.

Reedy indicated that "99 percent" of Braddock's Road today runs through private property in Fayette County. Traces of the road can be found in the forests east of Fort Necessity, along the southern edge of Route 40. Where the land has been farmed, the trail has been pretty much wiped out.

Because the Park Service wants to guard the privacy of landowners, it has chosen not to make its mapping results public. Cynthia Kral, who helped with the mapping, said most of the landowners have assumed a caretaker role toward the road.

"There are some really nice traces," Kral said. "Others were OK. Some areas there was nothing."

Braddock's Road rims Great Meadows, the clearing where Washington built Fort Necessity in 1754, a year before the Braddock expedition.

Herb Clevenger, a park service ranger, said the British under Braddock traveled an average six miles a day -- standard distance for any British army of the period. But Washington, very much Braddock's junior, thought the pace was much too slow, Clevenger said.

The biggest myth about Braddock's Road is that it approximates the path of Route 40, otherwise known as the National Road, Clevenger said.

This is especially true in western Pennsylvania, where the road starts to head north (while Route 40 continues west) at Braddock's grave. A few miles on it passes through the parking lot constructed by the Park Service at Jumonville Glen and then parallels the macadam road that cuts between the glen and Jumonville Methodist Training Center. The old road tumbles off the mountain a few hundred yards north of Shady Grove Park in North Union Township before heading toward Connellsville, Reedy said.

ENTERING WESTMORELAND

Reedy said the British army crossed the Youghiogheny at Connellsville not as traditionally understood, at William Crawford's cabin, but a quarter mile down river from there.

There are no traces of the road as it leaves present-day Fayette County into Westmoreland County, over Jacobs Creek.

The patriarch of Braddock Road historians, John Kennedy Lacock, was a Harvard professor who searched out the road early in the 20th century. Ironically, Lacock suffered a fatal fall from the rocks at Jumonville Glen -- the same rocks from which the first volley of the French and Indian War blazed.

James V. Steeley, director of the Westmoreland County Historical Society, has mapped the Westmoreland County portion of the road with the help of Cassell and his wife, Elizabeth Cassell. Steeley, a retired history teacher, has determined -- based on the journals of Christopher Gist, Washington's good friend and fellow surveyor who was on the Braddock expedition -- that Lacock mistakenly placed the site of Braddock's "Camp Near Jacobs Creek," sometimes known as the Great Swamp Camp, a mile and a half west of where it actually was.

Lacock, who produced a dazzling display of photographs that became popular postcards of the period, never had access to the Gist diary. Steeley, who did, believes Camp Near Jacob's Creek was just below tiny Mt. Pleasant Airport, on property farmed today by Dave and Tina Cross and in the Junick family for generations. Dave said his grandfather, Ed Junick, once discovered several cannon balls in the field behind the family barn.

"I don't know too much about it," Dave Cross said.

As far as Cross is concerned, the siting of the camp along Gimlet Hill Road may be right, but it is just as likely to be wrong. Those early property maps are not to be trusted, he noted. Either way would be fine with him.

"Maybe it's a good thing; maybe not. We're a working dairy farm -- we'd end up being a tourist attraction if it were," he said.

Just beyond the Cross-Junick property and a nearby man-made pond is the intersection with Hammondsville Road. Braddock's Road, according to the Cassells, "probably ran exactly along Hammondsville Road, crossing Jacob's Creek at this point. The army then marched in a northwesterly direction."

The road passed not far from McCloy Tire Service, run today by the founder's nephew, Ray McCloy. McCloy, who was a child in the '70s, recalled playing along what the locals referred to as Braddock's Road. Later, he trapped small game there.

"I'm sure we were on it several times. It was awesome," McCloy said of his boyhood experiences and their proximity to history. "I'm not often lost for words, but it was awesome."

Steeley noted that the army, with few exceptions, marched toward the northwest, and that it kept to the ridge line. High ground is standard military doctrine even today.

According to Steeley, Braddock "played it by the book."

"Whenever we ran into a questionable area we looked to the ridge," he said. "Invariably, we got back on the trail."

Braddock's Road followed Eagle Street in Mt. Pleasant, passing through what is now Frick Hospital and the former Ramsay High School building. Following the ridge, it exited the town through the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery.

On a recent tour, Steeley was chagrined to discover a trace of the road that had once been visible had disappeared. Later, he suggested that in most instances development trumps historical preservation.

Kim Donnelly, of the Westmoreland County Planning Office, conceded that traces of the road may been destroyed. She said she wasn't aware of it until now, and that in any case that portion of the road may not have been set aside for preservation.

Despite the bulldozing that has transformed this part of Westmoreland County into a haven for new industrial facilities, certain topographical features -- specifically the Braddock Road ridge line -- have remained essentially undisturbed.

The military road crossed four-lane Route 119, lined on either side by small bluffs, remnants of not just the 1750s but of far earlier times. Steeley noted Braddock's Road ran through the center of the American Video Glass plant before heading off in the direction of Hunker and Madison.

Steeley noted that the best trace of Braddock Road in Westmoreland County is in Madison, a picturesque little community in the countryside not far from busy Interstate 70. In Madison, at the end of Main Street, visitors can find the location by going up a steep hillside rather than turning right onto Route 136. At the Hilltop Methodist Church, there is a downgrade that leads to to a clearing four to five feet wide, with a path that slopes about 100 feet downhill.

"This lane has been here for centuries. It was once used as a farm lane," Steeley explained.

Donna Graft, a church member who said she'd practiced driving there before she got her license, said she wasn't aware of its historical significance.

"I'm terrible at history," she said.

INTO ALLEGHENY

The rugged, back country gives way to urbanization a few miles to the northwest in Allegheny County's White Oak, where Braddock's unlucky army camped the night of July 8, 1775. Today, Lincoln Way crosses Foster Street at the former campsite, where some 500 officers and men spent their last night alive.

The historical plaque commemorating Braddock and his army has been placed at the municipal swimming pool several streets away.

Ken Obusek is a paramedic for White Oak EMS, headquartered on Lincoln Way. He also works as a part-time paramedic at Kennywood Park, where there is a statue of Washington.

Riders on the park train are informed of the British army's crossing of the Monongahela River and of its clash with the French and Indians, in the town of Braddock, across the river from Kennywood.

According to Kennywood Park's Andy Quinn, a lot more is being planned, although money for execution may be a problem.

"We believe history sells," said Quinn, adding that in addition to the state historical marker on the highway outside the park, the park itself promotes an interest in Braddock's march.

Several months ago, Quinn toured French and Indian War sites with Robert Messner, of the Braddock Historical Society's battle of Braddock study panel. Quinn said Messner tried to get the park interested in virtual reality technology that would enable visitors to the park to look across the river at Braddock and "see" the 1775 countryside.

"If we were Disney it probably wouldn't be a problem," Quinn said. However, because of the expense involved, he said the reality of that undertaking will have to wait a few more years.

According to historical accounts, Braddock and his men and long train of supplies splashed across the river in the early afternoon of July 9, 1775. Within hours, the army was reduced to a shambles. In a space measuring little more than a football field, Braddock's troops were cut to ribbons by a smaller force of French and Indians.

Braddock suffered his fatal wound in the third hour of battle, after five horses had been shot from under him. He proved to be a courageous, though flawed, leader of men.

Today, the scene of such carnage is the North Braddock Little League Field, where ball diamond sits at one end of an oval surrounded by seating. Years earlier, this had been a high school football field.

Mike Chancey, a Braddock native who is the manager of the 10-year-old all-stars, said you can't grow up in Braddock and not know of the battle that took place here.

"These boys here may not learn it in school, but they go to the Carnegie Library where there's a big display," he said. "Maybe the town doesn't do enough to recognize the battle, but there are people here who are concerned about it. The fighting took place all over this hill."

Braddock was buried July 14, 1755, as the broken remnants of his army made their way back to Wills Creek.

Nearly half a century later, in 1804, shards of bone and strands of an officer's uniform were discovered by workmen making improvements to Braddock's Road. The remains were moved several feet to a permanent resting place atop a small rise.

The general's life was commemorated early in the 20th century with a ceremony attended by troops from his old regiment, the Coldstream Guards.

War for Empire schedule of events

The following is a schedule of French and Indian War anniversary events through spring 2006.

Aug. 28-29: Old Stone House, Butler, French and Indian War encampment at intersection of routes 8, 528 and 173. More information is available from Dr. David Dixon, 724-738-2408.

Sept. 18-19: Colonial Michilimackinac, Mackinaw, Mich., King's (British) Eighth Regiment Encampment. See www.mackinacparks.com .

Sept. 25-26: Fort Frederick State Park, Big Pool, Md., seminars, demonstrations and exhibits on Colonial Maryland and American Indian diplomacy and life. For information call 301-842-2155.

Sept. 25-26: Rogers Island Visitors Center, Fort Edward, N.Y., French and Indian War encampment. See rogersisland.org .

Oct. 2-3: Fort de Chartres State Historic Site, Prairie du Rocher, Ill., French and Indian War Assemblage featuring military drills and competition. See www.greatriverroad.com .

Oct. 9-19: Fort Ligonier, Ligonier, Fort Ligonier Days with Scottish Highlanders, American Provincial troops and French Marines. See www.fortligonier.org .

Oct. 22-23: Shenandoah University, Winchester, Va., French and Indian War Conference featuring lectures, tours, exhibits and performances. See www.TheKnowledgePoint.org .

Nov. 5: Old Fort Niagara, Youngstown, N.Y., French Heritage Day, with 20 French and Indian War interpretative stations and hands-on activities. See oldfortniagara.org .

Nov. 6: Braddock Road Preservation Association, Jumonville, Hopwood, French and Indian War seminar. See www.braddockroadpa.org .

March 1-July 30, 2005: Shenandoah University Historical and Tourism Center, Winchester, Va., coordinates the 250th anniversary of the movement of troops under the command of Gen. Edward Braddock, from Virginia to Braddock, Pa., where the Battle of the Monongahela was fought. See www.braddocksmarch.org .

April 21-23, 2005: The National Council of History Education conference, Pittsburgh, features historians Fred Anderson and David McCullough. See www.nche.net .

May 1, 2005-April 30, 2006 : Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania's traveling exhibit of the French and Indian War debuts at The Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center. More than 300 objects and works of art on display. See www.pghhistory.org .