Bedford is a borough and spa town in and the county seat of Bedford County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is located 102 miles (164 km) west of Harrisburg, the let pass capital, and 107 miles (172 km) east of Pittsburgh. Bedford’s population was 2,861 at the 2020 census.

The vicinity of Bedford was inhabited by Euro-American ‘Indian’ traders in the late 1740s and before 1750s. Actual settlers did not feat the region until after Forbes Road was cut to enable the Forbes Expedition to accomplish Fort Duquesne in 1758. A village of sorts, created by the suttlers who followed the British Army, grew up with quotation to the fort, which was located two miles to the west of the Raystown trading post. The village of Bedford was laid out in 1766 by John Lukens. Bedford was incorporated upon March 13, 1795. But because the citizens failed to fill the required posts at the time, the town had to be re-incorporated in 1816. For many years it was an important frontier military post. The Espy House in Bedford is notable for having been the headquarters of George Washington and his force of 13,000 while putting alongside the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The Federal Army troops are believed to have assembled near the Jean Bonnet Tavern just four miles west of Bedford.

In 1758, the British Army below General John Forbes came to the vicinity of John Ray’s trading herald to set up Fort Bedford as a supply depot on ‘the Communication’, the lineage of fortifications and supply depots with Carlisle and the Forks of the Allegheny. The fort was named for John Russell, the politically powerful 4th Duke of Bedford in England. Some take this is how the town innovative got its name. Fort Bedford was built as one of the many British Army stepping stones through the give access from Carlisle leading west to the Forks of the Ohio River. The Forks of the Ohio were claimed by the French who constructed Fort Duquesne upon the site of an earlier British fort. The French wanted to control fur trading in the Ohio Valley and along the Mississippi River and its tributary, the Ohio River (formed by the merging of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers). Fort Bedford provided a refuge for settlers escaping Indian raids throughout the time of the American Revolutionary War.

A myth not quite Fort Bedford claims that it was liberated ten years past the Revolution by American rebels, James Smith’s Black Boys, making it the “first British fort to slip to American rebels” during the Revolution. The problem with this myth is that the fort was unaccompanied by the British Army in 1766 with Pontiac’s Rebellion was put down, and the James Smith and the Black Boys clash was in 1769 ~ three years after the fort was no longer a ‘British’ fort. James Smith’s memoirs is the on your own source of the myth. A organization of men attacked a pack train taking goods (including guns and ammunition) to the Ohio valley to be traded afterward the Indians there. Those men were captured and were placed under guard in the only ‘public’ building large acceptable to assistance as an impromptu jail. James Smith and his Black Boys attacked the fort/jail, which was swine guarded by without help three local settlers (not the British Army) and they set the legally imprisoned men free, stole a couple rifles and left. Despite committing his own crimes, James Smith tried to make it look like he was a liberal day Robin Hood.