Bedford County: From Indian Trails to Tourist Resorts
Written by William Clark in the County Feature category and the Spring 1986 issue Topics in this article: Aaron Burr, agriculture, Andrew Carnegie, Appalachian Thruway, Bedford and Bridgeport Railroad, Bedford County, Bedford Springs Hotel, Benjamin Harrison, Black Boys, Braddock, Broadtop Mountain (Hopewell Bedford County), Chalybeate Hotel, Chaneysville, Chessie System, coal, dairy farming, David Espy, David Espy House, Dred Scott Decision, Dutch Corner, Everett, farmers, Fishertown, Forbes expedition, Forbes Road, Fort Bedford, Fort Duquesne, George Washington, Grand View Ship Hotel, Hyndman, Indian trails, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Jane Smith, John Andre, John Armstrong Sr., John Lukens, Juniata River, Morrison's Cove, Mt. Dallas Cut, Native Americans, Old Bedford Village, Penn Family, Pennsylvania Railroad, Pennsylvania Turnpike, Quakers, railroads, Ray's Tunnel, Raystown (Bedford), Religious Society of Friends, Robert MacRay, Rutherford B. Hayes, Rye, Six Nations, Sulphur Springs, taxes, Thomas Powell, tunnels, Underground Railroad, United States Supreme Court, William VanderbiltIn the summer of 1728, thirteen brave pioneers made their way north through the wilderness from Virginia. The trail brought these Virginians into the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, where they settled, only returning to Virginia to bring their families north. The area was rich with game and several trapped along the streams. One built a gristmill and another a trading post. These members of the Thomas Powell expedition were the first settlers in Bedford County, but, ironically, they most likely assumed their new homes were in Virginia, which also claimed this region.
Bedford County was crossed by a series of Indian trails. The one used by Powell’s group followed a narrow valley north and slightly east, along the eastern side of Evitt’s Mountain. Two valleys to the west, another trail paralleled this first. A third ran east to west, meeting the other two along the Raystown branch of the Juniata River. These trails served as secondary routes between the region’s two great Indian trails, Nemacolin’s Trail to the south and Kittanning Path to the north. A network of hunting trails cut through the mountains and valleys. At the time of the white man’s arrival, no significant number of Indians had a settlement here. However, only a century earlier, a substantial Monongahela village stood along the banks of the Raystown near the east-west trail.
When Robert MacRay, another trader who came north from Virginia, established his trading post in 1750, he selected a location along the small river that flows east, then north, through the area. MacRay, after whom the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River is named, was here only a few years before he died in 1755. But by that time others had followed the trails in the wilderness to settle here. One of them was Garrett, who purchased land along the Raystown from the Chiefs of the Six Nations in 1752. He constructed a sturdy trading post – designed for protection from Indian attack – near the river where Bedford now stands. Within a few years hostile Indians, urged on by the French, who claimed western Pennsylvania for their own, drove Pendergass and others from the region.
Although named after MacRay, it was the area where Pendergass established his post that became known as Ray’s Town. Here, along the Raystown Branch of the Juniata, west of a break in the mountains the river passes through, was the westernmost settlement of the frontier. Because of the Indian attacks and a Jack of refuge, the frontier receded as early settlers were forced! to return east to Carlisle, or south to Virginia. Bedford County became part of the vast, uninhabited wilderness for a few more years.
The British failed to drive the French from western Pennsylvania during campaigns between 1753 and 1755, but in 1757, a bold, new assault was planned. Rather than follow either of the great Indian trails to the north or south, a well-prepared force would travel over a new route to Raystown. Early that year Lieut. Col. John Armstrong was ordered to encamp a detachment of three hundred men near “Ray’s Town, a well-chosen situation on this side of the Allegheny Hills, between two Indian roads, [along] the only known road of the Indians to invade this province.”
Perhaps on the advice of Pendergass, who was at Carlisle, Armstrong proposed to build a fort at Ray’s Town. In June, Capt. Hamilton Jed a scouting party to Ray’s Town. In June, Capt. Hamilton led a scouting party to Ray’s Town and met no Indians. No further progress was made by the British troops until the following summer. Col. John Forbes, the British Army’s Brigadier General in America, had organized a force superior to that of Braddock’s failed campaign several years earlier. He designated Ray’s Town as the rendezvous point for the combined forces of the Royal American troops, the Scotch Highlanders, Pennsylvania and Virginia. More than fifty-eight hundred troops and one thousand wagoneers would converge at Ray’s Town.
During the summer and fall of 1758, a fort was hastily constructed at Ray’s Town. A year later it would be named Fort Bedford, in honor of England’s Fourth Duke of Bedford. Through the fall of 1758 the men cut the first road through this region following the old Indian trails. Forbes’ campaign was a military success. Fort Duquesne was taken without a fight.
Fort Bedford, like others to the east and west, remained an outpost of the frontier, keeping the lines of communication and supply open to Fort Pitt. It served as a refuge from the Indians who continued to terrorize the settlers who followed the army west . The settlers cleared land in the mountain valleys. By 1761, a survey showed twenty-seven log homes near Fort Bedford; a community was forming. Bedford, like other settlements of the era, developed near crude roads through the wilderness. Other settlements and individual settlers put down roots near the Indian trails, which often were not wide enough for a wagon to pass.
For a time, Bedford was the western limit of the frontier. As part of the agreement to end the French and Indian War, the British agreed to limit settlements to the east of the Allegheny Mountains. This restriction, although never strictly enforced, aided in the development of Bedford County. Pioneers headed west became settlers in the mountain valleys of Bedford County. Bedford, as the community that grew up around the fort was soon named, grew in size. During ten days in June, 1766, Pennsylvania’s Surveyor General, John Lukens, laid out the town, bounded on the north by the river, on the south by John Street, and by East and West streets. Other streets were named in honor of members of the Perm Family. As in other early towns of the province, Bedford was patterned on a grid, creating wide streets, large, equal-sized lots, with a portion of the land designated for public use.
Fort Bedford fell into disrepair, but soon it was the scene of another important event, a harbinger of the Revolution. The peace with the Indians on the western frontier was an uneasy one. The growing influx of settlers and the expansion of the white man’s territory made the Indians uneasy and actively hostile. Families were burned out, killed and scalped, or taken prisoner. Indian raids were common. One such raid wiped out the Tull family, who lived on a hill five miles west of Bedford. Farmers were found scalped in the fields.
The settlers opposed trade with the Indians, which in spite of laws against it, flourished. Eastern traders could turn a handsome profit with a cache of weapons exchanged for furs or other items. The Quaker-dominated provincial government would do little. The British soldiers at the forts took no action against the traders. The frontiersmen were forced to take matters into their own hands. Traders’ wagons were stopped, either forced to turn around or burned by groups of angry frontiersmen. One such group was known as the Black Boys because of the black paint they smeared on their faces for disguise.
In 1768 renewed Indian raids led the settlers to band together again to stop the traders’ pack trains. After one such raid, some of the Black Boys were captured by soldiers from the fort and imprisoned there. James Smith, the leader of the original Black Boys of the early 1760s, just back from a long expedition to Kentucky, collected some of his band and in a daring dawn raid captured Fort Bedford in order to free their compatriots. Smith later claimed that Fort Bedford was the first British fort to fall to the American rebels.
Only a short time later, in 1771, Bedford County was formed out of Cumberland County. For a brief time Bedford County encompassed all of western Pennsylvania. The growing population in the region west of the Alleghenies, in the region of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, soon necessitated that additional counties be formed. Within a few years the size of Bedford County was reduced significantly. Before the Revolution the flow of settlers continued over the mountains. Increasingly, they came from Philadelphia and the eastern part of Pennsylvania, although the number arriving from Virginia and Maryland was considerable. And after westward expansion made Bedford a stopping place along the way, taverns and inns were built. In less than forty years, the Indian trails had become the road west. But there was trouble brewing in western Pennsylvania, too. Trouble that would threaten the existence of the new country. Trouble that would return Pres. George Washington to Bedford County.
Farmers in the western part of the county and those farther west opposed a federal tax on whiskey. Violence followed. Tax collectors were assaulted, openly defied. Those who paid the tax had their homes or stills destroyed and their lives threatened. The situation in 1794 appeared serious enough that Washington rode to Bedford, the staging area for the campaign into the western counties. About seven thousand troops converged at Bedford, camping at farms near town or at Mount Dallas to the east. Washington came north over the trail he had ordered cut when leading troops in Forbes’ campaign against the French in 1758. He stayed four days, conferring with his top generals and reviewing the troops. It was the last time a president has taken direct field command of his army.
Like the Forbes Campaign, most of the troops who gathered at Bedford went home without a fight. The young federal government’s show of strength made the Whiskey Rebels of Westmoreland and Fayette counties back down. During his stay, Washington lodged at the home of David Espy. The house still stands along Pitt Street in downtown Bedford, a National Historic Landmark.
With the peace maintained, the iron wheels of the pioneers’ wagons wore traces in the bedrock of the Forbes Trail. Stagecoach lines were traversing the Pennsylvania Road, as the trail was known by 1800, in just seven days. Following the War of 1812, the early turnpike era began with the development of the Chambersburg and Bedford and Bedford to Stoystown turnpikes, which generally followed the Pennsylvania Road. Another road was developed later and carried travelers to Somerset. A stage line also served those wishing to travel from Bedford to Cumberland, Maryland.
“Taverns and Inns stood at frequent intervals, and daily stagecoaches afforded traveling facilities for thousands yearly,” as one old account of the era described the scene. At the time, Bedford boasted two newspapers, several hotels and a growing, thriving business community. Yet just as Bedford was enjoying its position on the stagecoach and wagon route, the development of the railroad would bring about its decline as a commercial and travel center. The decision that the major rail route through western Pennsylvania would run north of the county ushered in a new era.
The discovery and development of the Bedford Springs had a profound effect on the nearby community of Bedford. Some said the curative powers of the springs’ waters were known by the Indians and used by the earliest settlers. The land was purchased by John Anderson about 1804 and he erected a hotel on the site. Aided by claims that its magnesia spring water could cure a variety of maladies, the springs became a fashionable resting place for the wealthy and influential. Aaron Burr stayed at the Bedford Springs in 1806 while his grandson recovered from an illness. James Buchanan used the springs as his summer White House fifty years later to escape the heat of Washington’s summers. The Supreme Court discussed its Dred Scott Decision while relaxing on the hotel’s porches. Chalybeate Springs was opened northeast of Bedford and drew a steady stream of dignitaries. Presidents Hayes, Garfield and Benjamin Harrison were among those whose names appear in the Chalybeate Hotel logbook.
Bedford County’s position along the southern tier of the state made the resorts popular with southerners who traveled by coach, and later by train, from Cumberland to Bedford. Carriages regularly met the trains in Bedford to carry guests south to the Bedford Springs.
There were other visitors from the South, too, but their names are not recorded for history. Instead of hotels and inns, they stayed in barns and cellars. They rode on the back of a wagon, covered with hay, or more likely, they walked barefoot along the roads or through the wood.lands. These were the fugitive slaves, escaping from the shallow South. Like the first settlers a century earlier, they traveled north through the narrow valleys. The route through Bedford County was one of the most direct from Virginia and western Maryland. It was also one of the most dangerous. The topography and the southern sympathies of those living in the southern part of the county made the passage perilous. Residents could make a year’s wages for returning a valued slave. In the valley south of Bedford there were no stops on the Underground Railroad.
But runaways who made their way to Bedford could find shelter at several homes, some of which stand today. From Bedford, many slaves journeyed to Fishertown, a Quaker community located ten miles to the northwest. Because of the Quakers’ antislavery beliefs and cooperation with the fugitive slaves, the area was closely observed by slave catchers, making it almost as dangerous as the valleys to the south. From Fishertown the runaways would travel north and west, putting more distance between themselves and those in pursuit.
Near Chaneysville, not far from where Thomas Powell’s expedition settled, the graves of thirteen runaways lie in a family cemetery, marked by stones from nearby fields. Legend is, the slaves, with their captors closing in and not wishing to return south, begged to be killed.
Despite Bedford’s proximity to the Mason-Dixon line, the Civil War remained to the south and east. Numerous regiments were raised in the county, although some volunteers signed up in other counties where the bounties of enlistment were higher. It is not surprising that “some county officials and other men of influence at the county seat [Bedford] expressed both privately and publicly their sympathies with the secessionists; and in various sections of the county political differences became so strong as to result in acts of violence.” Bedford County, despite its many volunteers for the Union cause, was more that geographically linked to the South. During the course of the war, rumors spread from time to time that Confederate troops would invade the county. The troops never came, invading to the east in McConnellsburg, burning Chambersburg and meeting Union forces at Gettysburg. In retrospect, Bedford was likely spared invasion for the same reason the railroads didn’t come its way, the mountains.
Eventually the railroads were linked to the area. The first railroad in the county was an extension of the Huntingdon and Broad Top Railroad, which reached Saxton, located in the northeast corner of the county, about 1855. A year later the line was extended south to Hopewell to service coal and ore mines in the locality. The line continued further south to Mount Dallas, six miles east of Bedford and just west of Bloody Run (now Everett), at the start of the Civil War. Several spurs from this line ran to coal and iron-ore sites in the Broad Top coal fields in the northeast corner of the county. The coal, said to be discovered as early as 1760, was first shipped east on rafts floated down the Raystown Branch of the Juniata. The railroad was built to haul these raw materials north to meet the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Following the Civil War, local interests constructed the Bedford and Bridgeport Railroad, which connected with the Huntingdon and Broad Top at Mt. Dallas and traveled west through the center of the county to Bedford, before turning south to Hyndman in the southwest corner of the county. The line was leased, and eventually sold, to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pittsburgh and Connellsville line was built about the same time, traveling from Cumberland, Md. to Connellsville through Hyndman. A line from Bedford to Cessna, five miles to the north, was constructed to handle the output of short-lived iron-ore mines in the 1880’s. The final rail construction took place in 1893 when a line was laid from Cessna to Altoona.
The development of mining operations in the Broad Top, and the short-lived ore mines in Dutch Corner, near Everett and elsewhere, helped produce rapid development of small communities around the county. The county’s population grew more rapidly than at any other time, from 26,763 in 1860 to 39,468 by 1890. But the iron ore was of inferior quality to that elsewhere in the state and these operations quickly ceased. Coal mining continued until the close of World War II. When the mines closed, so did the Huntingdon and Broad Top Railroad. Other portions of the rail network have all been shut down or abandoned since 1970. Only the Pittsburgh and Connellsville line, now operated by the Chessie System, continues to function. All of these rail lines were of a secondary nature, serving parochial needs and transporting coal from Broad Top and guests to the Bedford resorts.
In the summer of 1884, however, work was already wider way on a major railroad through Bedford County. William H. Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie stood near the working face of a tunnel that would connect Bedford and Fulton counties for their South Penn Railroad. Their plan was to build a railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh to rival the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railroads. The plans called for seven tunnels on a path that would cut across the center of Bedford County. The construction provided many jobs and created anticipation of new opportunities in a county isolated from major rail service.
After Vanderbilt had spent $10 million and twenty-seven men had lost their lives digging the tunnels, the new railroad was sixty percent complete by the summer of 1885. Suddenly the work came to a halt. Vanderbilt and the Pennsylvania Railroad had arrived at a compromise that doomed the South Penn. The completed route was sold off, the nearly completed tunnels stood silent and empty. Bedford County’s hope for a great railroad disappeared.
Despite the flurry of activity associated with the mines, the railroads and the earlier wagon roads, the county has been from its inception an agriculturally oriented area. The pioneer farmers cut timber from the valleys and hillsides to build their homes and barns. Rye was their principal crop, much of which was transformed into whiskey at one of the twenty-five stills the county contained by 1792. Much of the land remained forested, marginal pasture or unimproved. By the Civil War, however, a new pattern of agriculture emerged, one that would persist for nearly a century. Corn became the main crop, with smaller quantities of oats, barley, rye and wheat. Morrison’s Cove, located to the north in a broad valley, and Friends Cove, to the south, provided the prime farmland. Here the settlers of German descent built their farms. By 1860 there were more than two thousand farms, averaging 183 acres and totaling sixty thousand animals. Much of the production was for local consumption. During the growth period following the Civil War, the number of farms jumped to thirty-two hundred by 1880 and thirty-six hundred by 1900. The pattern of diversified farming that developed by the Civil War continued through the end of the nineteenth century. However, wheat became the main cash crop.
During this period, village industries flourished and failed. Bedford had a wholesale grocery firm, wholesale peanut distributor, a keg factory, several gristmills and a planing mill, all located on the north side, across the river from the original part of the town. Everett, whose growth was slow until after the Civil War, blossomed with the railroad. A blast furnace was constructed in the 1880s and an inventory of business at the time indicated a glassworks, foundry, planing mills, machine shops and two newspapers in the community. Everett quickly became the second-largest community in the county. Hyndman also prospered with the railroad. Founded in 1840, Hyndman contained a brick factory, cigar factory, a tannery and two rail lines. Nearby coal mines also provided work, but the railroads were the major source of employment. Most communities had phone service by 1900.
But these smalJ industries began to fade as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Bedford’s population remained virtually unchanged from 1890 to 1930 and the county lost one thousand in population during the same period. Even the mines in the Broad Top started trailing off with the development of bituminous operations to the west of Bedford County. Today only 300,000 tons a year come out of the Broad Top, all from strip mines.
In 1920 the number of farms in the county peaked at 3,627. Ten years later the figure dropped to 3,462, beginning a drop that continues today. Dairy farming grew in importance, with regional trade taking surplus products to surrounding counties. Dairy farming continues to be the dominant form of agriculture. Bedford County currently ranks fifteenth in the state in production of farm products. Milk from Bedford County farms is carried east and west on the turnpike, now the county’s main link with the outside.
Vanderbilt and Carnegie could scarcely imagine that the sleepy little village of Breezewood, from which they watched the tunnel work, would serve as a junction of two major highways, Interstate 70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the latter built over the right-of-way of their abandoned railroad fifty years later. Perhaps no other event in the history of the county has had such a profound effect as the decision to build the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the middle of its one thousand square miles. At first it provided new construction jobs as the road was built, starting in 1938. It ushered in a new era of transportation as motels and trucking terminals sprang up around the interchanges at Bedford and Breezewood. The road opened up the county to new manufacturers who came because of the road and the labor supply.
The development of the turnpike, and more recently the development of the Appalachian Thruway (Route 220), has also opened the area again to travelers and tourists, generating thousands of new jobs. Recreational and historical attractions have produced a trade that rivals agriculture in economic significance.
In spite of such development, Bedford County contains a rural atmosphere, forested mountains and fertile farms, and small communities along its many winding roads. The same forces that isolated Bedford County from major development and industrialization also preserved it. Today travelers stop to walk the treelined streets of Bedford, visit Old Bedford Village, a reconstructed community filled with original log houses, relax on the porches of the old Bedford Springs Hotel, or spend just a night, as their ancestors may have done more than a century ago.
For Further Reading
Baldwin, Leland D. Whiskey Rebels. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968.
Blackburn, Howard E. and William H. Welfley. History of Bedford and Somerset Counties, Pennsylvania. New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906.
Garbrick, Winona, ed. The Kernal of Greatness. Bedford: Bedford County Heritage Commission, 1971.
Shover, John L. First Majority – Last Minority. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976.
History of Bedford, Somerset and Fulton Counties, Pennsylvania. Chicago: Waterman, Watkins and Co., 1884.
William H. Clark, a resident of Bedford’s National Register Historic District, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. A staff writer for the Bedford Daily Gazette, he also serves as the vice president of the Pioneer Historical Society of Bedford County. This is his first contribution to Pennsylvania Heritage.