Ohio Company - French and Indian War

French and Indian War

Further information: Great Britain in the Seven Years War

In 1748-1750 the Ohio Company hired Thomas Cresap who'd opened a trading fort and founded Oldtown, Maryland (now part of Cumberland) on the foot of the eastern climb up the Cumberland Narrows along what was soon to be called the Nemacolin Trail, one of only three mid-mountain-range crossings of the Appalachian Ridge and Valley system outside the Hudson-Great Lakes route, or southern Georgia-Mississippi-Western Tennessee plains route. Cresap was given a contract to blaze a mule trail over the mountains to the Monongahela River, and then to start widening this road into a wagon road. In 1750, the Ohio Company hired Christopher Gist, a skillful woodsman and surveyor, to explore the Ohio Valley in order to identify lands for potential settlement. He surveyed by estimating the Kanawhan Region and the Ohio Valley tributaries beginning in 1750, 1751 and 1753. His journals provide valuable insights of the greater Ohio Valley and the Alleghenies. Gist travelled as far west as the Miami Indian village of Pickawillany (near present Piqua, Ohio). Upon the basis of his report, the Ohio Company settled in an area in Western Pennsylvania and present-day West Virginia; Gist and Cresap both receiving sizable settlements on the west side of the mountains. In 1752 the company had a pathway blazed between the small fortified posts at Wills Creek (Cumberland, Maryland), and at Redstone Old Fort (Brownsville, Pennsylvania) overlooking Redstone Creek and the Iroquois' ancient Monongahela River ford, which Cresap and Nemacolin had established in 1750.

The Ohio Valley was also claimed by France, however, as it was nominally part of the vast territory of New France. The French feared the British settlements would cut off the links between Quebec and the Mississippi Valley. To forestall British expansion, in 1753 the French began constructing a series of forts in the Ohio Valley. Robert Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia as well as a shareholder of the Ohio Company, responded by sending a military unit under the command of George Washington to the region, which led to the outbreak of the French and Indian War. The war and its sequel, Pontiac's Rebellion, prevented the Ohio Company from fulfilling its obligation to establish settlements.