Downtown Bridges & Culture Walk

Welcome to Pittsburgh, and to Point State Park, known locally as The Point. Here, the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River, a spot long called the Forks of the Ohio. The French built Fort Duquesne here in 1754, and held it early in the French and Indian War, turning back General Edward Braddock's expedition in 1755. On November 25, 1758, the Forbes Expedition, under General John Forbes, captured the site, the day after the French destroyed the fort.

The British then built a much larger fort, Fort Pitt, named after William Pitt the Elder. Local Delawares and Shawnees besieged Fort Pitt in 1763, but the fort was too strong to be taken. The park itself was built on industrial land acquired in the 1950s, and opened in August 1974. The outlines of both forts are marked in the park, and the Fort Pitt Museum is housed in the fort's Monongahela Bastion.

This little building is the Fort Pitt Block House, sometimes called Bouquet's Blockhouse. It was built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt, which makes it the oldest surviving structure in Western Pennsylvania, and the oldest authenticated structure west of the Allegheny Mountains. Henry Bouquet had several of these redoubts built around the fort, and this is the only survivor. It has never been torn down, completely rebuilt or moved, and much of its timber, brick and stone is original.

How did it last? In 1785, Isaac Craig converted it into a private house. So when Fort Pitt was demolished in 1792, the Block House was left alone, because someone was living in it. In 1894, philanthropist Mary Schenley gave the deed to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In 1902, industrialist Henry Clay Frick bought all the land around it and offered the Daughters 25,000 dollars to move it to Schenley Park. They refused, and after long litigation the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The Daughters still own it, and visitors can tour it.