(Posted January 3, 2024)

HUNTINGDON, Pa.—A team of history detectives, including two Juniata College faculty and one alumnus, recently published “Finding Fort Roberdeau” in Historical Archaeology. The article recounts the team’s search for the exact location of the Revolutionary War-era fort.  

A Nittany Mineralogical Society meeting in 2015 inspired Juniata College faculty Ryan Mathur ’96, professor of geology, and Jonathan Burns, director of the Cultural Resource Institute and instructor of history and art history, to join with Daniel Bochicchio, Linda Godfrey, Martin Helmke, George Kamenov, Glenn Nelson, Karen Morrow, George Pedlow, and James Stuby ’94 to search for the fort. 

Using remnants of the stones believed to mark the original magazine and chimney, the Daughters of the American Revolution marked what they assumed to be Fort Roberdeau’s site in 1921. Efforts to reconstruct the fort began anew in 1940 but were thwarted by the onset of World War II. The United States Bicentennial celebration in 1976 finally made the project possible. Because the fort was reconstructed based on available information at the time, the original location continued to be a subject of debate. 

“George Pedlow, a retired local geologist, had been studying maps of the area trying to figure out where the lead mines in Sinking Valley had been,” Mathur said, referring to the geographic area located on the border between Blair and Huntingdon counties. “He had been studying maps of the area from the 1800s through today, trying to figure out where the mines were. He pointed out a bare spot where he thought a lead mine had been.” 

Post-Revolutionary War farming, mining exploration, and the placement of the current replica fort obscured the landscape and made it difficult to identify the exact location of the original fort. The limited historical records suggest that the fort’s reconstruction was close to the original site, but little physical evidence remained to confirm its exact position or the mines it protected. 

Lead was a vital commodity in America’s fight for independence and the sources for raw materials used to make munitions were fiercely protected. The surface mining taking place at Fort Roberdeau produced lead ingots which were transported closer to the battle lines.  

“Known as the ‘lead mine fort,’ Fort Roberdeau was a horizontal log fortification built in 1778 to defend the lead mining operation intended to supply the Continental Army with ammunition to fight the British during the American Revolutionary War,” Burns said. “Cut off from English imports like lead, the colonists targeted a known source in Sinking Valley, of which they were aware as early as 1755 during the Seven Years’ War. Fortifications were necessary on the colonial frontier to defend against relentless raids by Tory Loyalists and Native Americans allied with the British.” 

Geology and archaeology are synergistic disciplines in the exploration of history, with the first archaeological studies conducted by geologists. In keeping with this approach, Mathur and his students in a 2016 geophysics course started conducting research at Fort Roberdeau. Resistivity surveys (employing an electrical current into the ground surface to detect differences in conductivity) determined where the soil and substrate may have been disturbed in the past.  

Working together, Burns and Mathur cotaught the geophysics class again in 2021 and employed the use of lidar (light detection and ranging), a remote sensing method used to examine the surface of the earth. Combined with additional drone surveys, the results corroborated the earlier resistivity surveys.  

“The lidar data clearly shows the fort and the road. The road goes right in front of where we originally proposed the fort to be,” said Mathur. “There’s an outpost area there as well where we found eight or nine lead balls, which made sense once we saw the lidar. The pieces all came together.” 

Synthesizing the data collected from the resistivity surveys, lidar, drone surveys, and metal detection conclusively revealed the location of the original fort, the outpost, the blacksmith, and the mine. The original fort location is partially overlapped by the smaller replica currently in place. 

The researchers’ findings will be shared with Fort Roberdeau visitors when the site reopens for the season on May 1, 2024. Fort Roberdeau is overseen by the Fort Roberdeau Association, a non-profit organization committed to preserving the site and providing historical interpretation. 

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.