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"Fort Morris Was Virginia Defense Post"

The Dominion News
September 25, 1963

Fort Morris, Preston County, West Virginia: When the fort was built, it was in Virginia. Dr. Joseph Doddridge in "Doddridge's Notes of Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1793-1783" wrote: "My father (John Doddridge) with a small number of his neighbors made their settlements in the spring of 1773. (This was in Independence Township, Washington Co., Pa.) Though they were in a poor and destitute situation, they nevertheless lived in peace; but their tranquility was of short duration. Those most atrocious murders of the peaceable inoffensive Indians at Capitiana andYellow Creek brought on the war of Lord Dunmore in the Spring of the year 1774. Our little settlement then broke up. The women and children were removed to Morris Fort in the Sandy Creek Glade (now Preston County, W. Va.), some distance to the East of Uniontown. The Fort consisted of an assemblage of small hovels, situated on the margin of a large and noxious marsh, the effluvia of which gave the most of the women and children the fever and ague. The men were compelled by necessity to return home and risk the tomahawk and scalping knife of Indians, in raising corn to keep their families from starvation the succeeding winter."

James Veech in "The Monongahela of Old" makes mention of this reference to the father and family of Dr. Doddridge passing over the "Sandy Creek Road" in 1774. Morris Creek was on Sandy Creek in Virginia, just outside the Fayette County (Pa.) border. It was much resorted to by the early settlers on the upper Monongalia and Cheat Rivers and from Ten Mile. Inscription on the Stone Erected at Glad Farms, Preston County, reads:

"This tablet marks the site of Old Fort Morris, 1774. Unveiled Aug. 28, 1915...In Memory of the Early Pioneers of The Sandy Creek Glades (Va.) W. Va."


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