Fort Cumberland once stood on the site now occupied by Emmanuel Episcopal Church and in the 1750's became a focal point in the opening battles of the final struggle between the British and French for control of North America. Early in that decade, the Ohio Company tried to enforce its land claims across the Appalachian Mountains in western Pennsylvania against the French and in the early summer of 1754 sent a force of Virginia militia west under George Washington. His defeat at Fort Necessity on July 3, 1754, prompted the British government to act by sending General Edward Braddock to North America with an army to drive the French from the trans-Appalachian west. At the place where Will's Creek met the Potomac River, already a trading center and Ohio Company base, Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia ordered a fort built to receive Braddock's army. During the winter of 1754-1755, militia under Colonel James Innes completed and improved the post, first named Fort Mount Pleasant, while Braddock ordered it renamed Fort Cumberland in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, Captain General of the British Army. Most of the fort was a log palisade of eighteen-foot timbers driven six feet into the ground to form a wall twelve feet high, with a bastion and artillery at the western end, an overall size of about 400 feet by 160 feet, and eastern walls tapering to a sharp point facing the creek. Braddock's army used Fort Cumberland for several weeks before marching into the wilderness in 1755, but on July 9 the French routed his forces in the Battle of the Monongahela near Pittsburgh. Indian uprisings then drove the frontier back hundreds of miles and left Fort Cumberland isolated. After the British captured Fort Duquesne in 1758, the fort lost its importance, and the British abandoned it in 1764. Without maintenance, it soon decayed and disappeared, though its brief prominence left a mark in American history.