Venango and Fort Machault

On November 30, 1753, a young George Washington described "Venango" [Franklin, PA] 

in his no-nonsense journal:  

"This is an old Indian Town, fituated at the Mouth of French Creek on Ohio [the Allegheny]... We found French Colours hoifted at a Houfe which they drove Mr. John Frazier, an English Subject, from; I immediately repaired to it.... Captain Joncaire invited us to fup with them and treated us with great Complaifance.  The Wine, as they dofed themselves pretty plentifully with it, foon banifhed the Reftraint which at firft appear'd in their Converfation, and gave a Licenfe to their Tongues to reveal their Sentiments..."  

Of course, in the mid-1700s, they used the letter "F" in many places where we now use an "S."  The John Fraser mentioned here was a Pennsylvania man who had a trading post on this spot until the French evicted him, laying claim to the entire region.  Three years after George Washington's errand into the French-occupied wilderness of Western Pennsylvania, Fort Machault was constructed to guard Paris's claims to the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains.  The below photo shows the spot where French Creek empties into the Allegheny River.  It's a mini-Pittsburgh in that it was a strategic meeting place of two important, navigable waterways into the interior of the continent.  There was a large Delaware Indian village at the point where the two waterways meet.  The French had a fort here.  Then the English had one.  Then, in the 1790s, the Americans had another one.  

I'm from a much younger town just a few miles up the river from Franklin, the straw-fire boomtown that is Oil City.  Some parts of Oil City are still nice, but it was always an industrial town.  Franklin is older, classier, and much prettier, with a charming main street and one of the most interesting old courthouses I've ever seen.  I was back in the area today for a family birthday and had a chance to paddle around the historic confluence in  my kayak. The current was nearly impossible to fight, as I tried to travel upriver from the site of old French Fort Machault to the site of the English Fort Venango.  In the second photo, see the little point of land that probably looks much today as it did in the 1750s--except that virgin forest in the region was largely hemlock and beech.  French Creek is the leftward stream.  It's hard to believe that the mightiest empires of Europe once vied for this spot.