Prickett's Fort
by Linda Sannuti
Title
Prickett's Fort
Artist
Linda Sannuti
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Prickett's Fort State Park is a 188-acre West Virginia state park north of Fairmont, near the confluence of Prickett's Creek and the Monongahela River. The park features a reconstructed refuge fort and commemorates life on the Virginia frontier during the late 18th century
Historic Prickett’s Fort was built to defend early European settlers of what today is West Virginia from raids by hostile Native Americans, a portion of whose territory the settlers appropriated after the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768). After a band of settlers led by Daniel Greathouse perpetrated the Yellow Creek massacre in 1774, initiating Lord Dunmore's War, all settlers in the Ohio River Valley were in peril from Native American attack.
Because there was safety in numbers, the settlers built a number of refuge forts, including one on the homestead of Jacob Prickett.[4] Fairly simple in design, Prickett’s Fort was little more than a hundred-foot-square log palisade built around Prickett’s house. Native Americans tended to avoid such strong points, preferring to ambush small work parties.[5]
When the frontiersmen believed they were in danger of Native American attack, families gathered at such a fortified area, a procedure called “forting up.” In 1774, there were at least a hundred such palisades, blockhouses, and “stations” in the Monongahela Valley, many within a thirty-mile radius of Prickett’s Fort.[6] Perhaps as many as eighty families—several hundred people—gathered at Prickett’s Fort during crisis periods, where they stayed for days or even weeks. Prickett’s Fort was never attacked, although militiamen from the confluence area were killed by Native Americans elsewhere.[7]
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July 25th, 2020
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