Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/63

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A BLOOD-RED FRONTIER
59

Benjamin Chambers, a noted pioneer, erected Fort Chambers at Falling Spring, the present Chambersburg. It was a private fort completed in 1756; by some means the owner had secured two four-pound cannon which he mounted in his little fort, the roof of which he had already covered with lead. It was feared that Chambers's little fort would be captured by the savages and the guns turned upon Shippensburg and Carlisle. But their owner repudiated the insinuation and even held the guns from Colonel Armstrong, who was armed with the governor's order to surrender them. Incidentally, also, he made good his boasts and held the fort with equal pugnacity from the savages. Colonel Chambers was of great assistance to General Forbes in the days of 1758, and, as an aged man, sent his three sons, raised in the lead-roofed fortress with its "Great Guns," to Boston in 1775 to fight again for the land he had helped to conquer from the Indians in the dark days of Braddock and Forbes. Such men as Benjamin Chambers made Forbes's Road a possibility. The state road built westward over the track of