Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/191

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MILITARY ROAD TO THE WEST
187

of troops and ammunition from which both eastern and western commanders received supplies.[1] Garrisons along the Pennsylvania Road were ordered at the close of the war to report at Carlisle for their pay.[2] Hannastown, thirty miles east of Fort Pitt and three miles northeast of the present Greensburg, was the first collection of huts on the Pennsylvania Road between Bedford and Pittsburg dignified by the name of a town. At the breaking out of the Revolution it was the most important settlement in all Westmoreland County save only those about Forts Pitt and Ligonier. "These huts scattered along the narrow pack-horse track among the monster trees of the ancient forest, was that Hannastown, which occupied such a prominent place in the early history of Western Pennsylvania where was held the first court west of the Alleghany where the resolves of May 16, 1775, were passed."[3] From this rude little cluster of huts on Forbes's Road, deep in the Allegheny

  1. Lincoln to Irvine, July 25, 1782.
  2. Id., June 23, 1783.
  3. Egle's History of Pennsylvania, pp. 1153, 1154.