Redstone Old Fort
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Redstone Old Fort or Redstone Fort or Fort Burd was the name of a wooden fort built about 1759 by English explorers on a mound overlooking the eastern shore of the Monongahela River in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The settlement around the fort was also called Redstone, but eventually became known as Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Redstone was a frequent point of embarkation for travelers who were heading west via the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers.
The fort was constructed on the orders of Colonel James Burd about 1759 on an artificial mound left behind by prehistoric Native Americans, known as the Mound Builders. The Anglo settlers called the mounds built by the Native Americans "old forts", and this one had large red sandstone blocks that had been placed at the top. Redstone Old Fort was the terminus of a Native American trail known as the Nemacolin Trail.[1]
Redstone Old Fort proved significant in Lord Dunmore's War (1774), during which it was occupied by Capt. Michael Cresap, who hoped to prevent the local Shawnee Indians from controlling it. Cresap was the owner of a trading post. Under authority of the colonial government of Virginia, Cresap had taken up extensive tracts of land at and below the mouth of Middle Island Creek (now Sistersville, West Virginia), and had gone there in the early spring of 1774 with a party of men to settle his holdings. Ebenezer Zane, afterwards a famed "Indian fighter" and guide, was engaged at the same time and in the same way with a small party of men on lands which he had taken up at or near the mouth of Sandy Creek. A group under the command of James Harrod left the fort 25 May 1774 going down river to settle lands in Kentucky, but returned to the fort due to the threat of hostilities from the Shawnee.[2]
A third and larger group that included George Rogers Clark, had gathered at the mouth of the Little Kanawha River (the present site of Parkersburg, West Virginia), and were waiting there for the arrival of other Virginians who were expected to join them at that point before moving downriver to settle lands in Kentucky.
Redstone Old Fort is mentioned in C. M. Ewing's The Causes of that so called Whiskey Insurrection of 1794 (1930) as being the site of a July 27, 1791, meeting in "Opposition to the Whiskey Excise Tax," during the Whiskey Rebellion, the first illegal meeting of that insurrection.[1]
In 1803 it was a mentioned in a letter from Meriwether Lewis to President Thomas Jefferson detailing his route from Harper's Ferry to Pittsburgh.
