Your history book probably has the story of young George Washington and the ultimatum he delivered to the French commander at Fort LeBoeuf in 1753.
It was that moment that he earned his stripes as a military leader. Washington was a Lieutenant in the Virginia-based English army. The details of his brushes with death on the way from Virginia and the reaction of the French nearly put an end to the Father of our country before we had one.
The French had been here before the British. They had established strong holdings in the Ohio Valley. One of the farthest outposts in their system was in present-day Waterford. That brings up two of Waterford’s historic sites aside from the Fort LeBoeuf museum. One of those is gone now. The historians in Waterford spent time and money to preserve a tree. It was the tree that experts believed Washington climbed to look into Fort LeBoeuf before he entered it…