George Washington spent much time in the Will’s Creek vicinity as a young surveyor, ambassador, aide-de-camp to General Braddock, and commander of Virginia military forces, using this cabin as his headquarters for part of that time. By age sixteen he was a skilled surveyor, helped lay out Alexandria, Virginia, and came to the area in 1748 to survey and lay out the Fairfax manors in the South Branch Valley. During that period he slept in a straw bed with lice and fleas, once had his bed catch fire while he slept, visited Thomas Cresap near Old Town, and gained valuable knowledge of frontier living and of the Indians. He left Will's Creek on November 13, 1753, carrying Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia’s ultimatum demanding that the French leave the Ohio Valley, and during the hazardous winter journey of hundreds of miles he fell into the icy Allegheny River and narrowly escaped drowning, while an Indian fired at him from fifty feet away and missed. From Will's Creek in April 1754, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Washington marched with one hundred fifty men to meet the French, and in May he and his Indian allies defeated a party of Frenchmen, a spark that ignited hostilities leading to the French and Indian War. In July he was defeated in his first major battle at Fort Necessity near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. In May and June 1755, while Braddock’s army encamped at Fort Cumberland, Washington studied military customs and tactics from this cabin and then marched as Braddock’s aide-de-camp with the ill-fated expedition against the French. His advice on backwoods warfare was ignored, but he led the retreat of the survivors, with four bullets passing through his clothing and two horses shot under him while he again escaped unharmed. Made commander of all Virginia forces in August 1755, he spent much time in the area over the next three years and wrote ardent love letters to his future bride from this cabin at Fort Cumberland. He also joined General Forbes in the successful November 1758 campaign against Fort Duquesne, and as President in 1794 he reviewed troops gathered there to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.
