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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings

	FORT CUMBERLAND SITE (lost site) Maryland
Allegany County, Cumberland.

In 1750 the Ohio Co., formed by a group of English merchants and Virginia planters, built a trading post and small storehouse in Shawnee Indian country at the site of the city of Cumberland. In 1754 George Washington, on returning from his defeat at Fort Necessity, built Fort Mount Pleasant near the trading post. The following year Col. James Inness expanded the fort and renamed it Fort Cumberland. That same year Braddock, in preparation for his campaign against the French, assembled 2,000 men at the fort and marched through the wilderness toward the Forks of the Ohio, near which his forces went down to defeat. No attacks were made on the fort during the French and Indian War. Washington commanded the fort there, and in 1756 he became convinced that the major route from Virginia to the West should be through the Cumberland Valley. Later he was president of the Patowmack Co., which opened the Potomac to navigation from George Town to Cumberland. Abandoned in 1765, Fort Cumberland was not occupied again except for a short period in 1794. At that time Washington, making a final visit to the fort, reviewed troops called out to suppress the Whisky Rebellion.

In 1785 Thomas Beall laid out Washington Town adjacent to Fort Cumberland. Two years later the State assembly renamed the town Cumberland, and in 1789 made it the seat of the newly formed Allegany County. At that time large numbers of settlers were emigrating to the regions west of the mountains and making demands on Congress to build a road that would connect the seaboard with the Ohio country. In 1806 Congress authorized construction of the National Road, also known as the Cumberland Road because Cumberland was its eastern terminus. Work began on the road in 1811. Soon a steady stream of wagons rolled in from Baltimore and Pennsylvania, and Cumberland's business increased as the road extended farther westward. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal gave further hope to Cumberland, but its construction proceeded so slowly that the first train of the Baltimore and Ohio reached the town in 1842, some 8 years before the canal. The probable site of Fort Cumberland is on a hill overlooking Washington and Green Streets.