Point State Park is at the tip of Pittsburgh?s ?Golden Triangle.? It commemorates and preserves the strategic and historic heritage of the area during the French and Indian War (1754 - 1763).

By the early 1950s, the area had deteriorated into a commercial slum. It has been reclaimed and is now one of the nation?s outstanding historical parks and tourist attractions. The park is a National Historic Landmark.

The Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet at Point State Park to form the Ohio River. During the mid-1700s, the armies of France and Britain were attracted to this area, each vying for control of the Ohio Valley. The intensity of the conflict was evidenced by the construction of four different forts at the site, within a period of ten years.

In 1754, French forces captured an outpost at the Point that had been erected by a force of Virginians. George Washington was sent to recapture the fort for the Virginians, but suffered his first and only defeat at Fort Necessity, 50 miles to the southeast.

The French then built Fort Duquesne at the Forks, which gave them control of the Ohio Valley until 1758. The only threat to their control occurred in 1755 when General George Braddock was defeated at the Battle of the Monongahela, only eight miles from the fort.

In 1758, an army of 6,000 lead by General John Forbes, marched west from Carlisle. Forbes stopped at Fort Ligonier, 50 miles to the southeast and made final preparations for the assault on Fort Duquesne.

The French, realizing they were badly outnumbered, burned the fort and departed two days before the British arrived on November 25, 1758. Soon Fort Pitt was under construction on the same site and was to be the most extensive fortification by the British in the American Colonies.

The French were never to regain control as their other outposts fell to the British. The only further action at Fort Pitt was in 1763 when it withstood American Indian attacks during Pontiac?s Insurrection.

Fort Pitt was finally abandoned in 1792. It had served to open the frontier to settlement as Pittsburgh became the ?Gateway to the West.??