Interesting men at Fort McIntosh were not limited to the fort's commanding officers.
Lt. Col. William Crawford, a Virginian, had marched under Washington in both the Braddock and Forbes expeditions and in 1765 settled near what is now Connellsville where, as a surveyor, one of his clients was the Washington Family. He as active in politics, a strong artisan of Virginia in the jurisdictional controversies over Western Pennsylvania. He was commissioned a Lt. Col. in the 5th Virginia, en became Col. of the 7th Virginia. After taking part in all the action of Long Island through Valley Forge, he resigned in 1778, but was called back to lead the militia in McIntosh's Tuscarawas expedition. In 1782, he was called again to lead a militia force against the Indians at Sandusky, but was captured and his death by torture is one of the horror stories of the Revolution.
Lt. Col. Louis Antoine Jean Baptiste Le Chevealier de Cambray Digny, a French volunteer, has been credited with planning and building forts McIntosh and Laurens. He came to America on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, served without compensation in building the fortifications on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and took part in the battle of Monmouth. When Congress authorized the formation of the Corps of Engineers in 1779, he was one of the first to be commissioned. He designed the fortifications of Charleston which enabled the city to withstand the first British attack and for which the South Carolina Legislature voted him a medal. He was captured when the second British attack succeeded and spent the remainder of the war as a paroled prisoner of war - along with his old commander General McIntosh and a young French Captain named L'enfant, who was later to lay out the nation's capital.
Captain Thomas Hutchins, the Geographer of the United States, first saw this country as a lieutenant in the Royal Americans, a regiment composed primarily of British officers and Colonial enlisted men. As a cartographer of international fame, he refused to serve against America, was imprisoned in London, but escaped and joined General Greene in South Carolina. He had mapped almost all of colonial America and in 1785 after Congress had passed the Land Ordinance, he was ordered to begin the survey of the vast lands of the Northwest. Protected by troops from Fort McIntosh, his surveyors established the base point on the Ohio-Pennsylvania line on the north shore of the Ohio River at present-day Glasgow from which all future territories of the United States would be measured.
The name of Captain Abraham Lincoln of Rockingham County militia appears only once in the orders of the campaign when he was named Deputy Commissary of Hides, which probably meant it was his responsibility to turn the hides of the slaughtered beef cattle into shoes for the troops. He emigrated to Kentucky after the war, was killed by the Indians, but his son Thomas married a girl by the name of Nancy Hanks and a legend was born.
Lt. Col. Stephen Bayard of the 8th Pennsylvania was from eastern Pennsylvania. After commanding the last detachment of the 8th at Fort Pitt, he settled in Pittsburgh, became a leading industrialist, built a boatyard on the Monongahela and founded the town of Elizabeth.
Arthur Lee, one of the Commissioners at the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, was a member of the famous Lee family of Virginia. The youngest of 11 children, he was educated at Eton and Edinburgh, receiving a medical degree at the latter institution. In Williamsburg the talk of rebellion kindled his interest in the law and he returned to London to study in the Middle Temple. He also became the British Agent for Massachusetts, a confidential -agent of the Continental Congress, and replaced Jefferson as one of the three commissioners seeking a French Alliance. After the war he served in the Virginia legislature and the Congress and opposed the Constitution.
Another Commissioner, Col. George Rogers Clark, had been a driving force in the settlement of Kentucky and by the time of the Revolution was a veteran of the scalping parties, burned-out villages and murderous attacks of frontier warfare. In 1778, he led a force of Virginians to capture Fort Sackville, the British post at Vincennes. When Vincennes was recaptured he led his famous late winter expedition of 1779, marching his little force through shoulder deep water to again capture the fort, this time taking the entire British garrison prisoners and breaking the British grip on the mid-West. He never was able to achieve his ambition to take Detroit, and never was appreciated by Virginia, whose legislature refused to repay the expenditures of his own funds by which he paid his troops.
General Richard Butler, the third commissioner, was one of five brothers who served in the Revolution. He came to the West with the Forbes-Bouquet expedition, remained to become a successful trader, was captured by the Indians and released by Bouquet. In 1775, because he was respected by the Indians, he was commissioned by Congress to travel to the Indian towns to seek their neutrality. As a major in the 8th Pennsylvania, he made the epic march to the East, but was transferred to Morgan,s Rifle Corps. In 1779, he led one of the wings in Anthony Wayne's successful attack on Stony Point, and in 1781, marched with the Pennsylvania Line to Virginia. He was the first American officer to greet Rochambeau's French troop and was one of the first on the ramparts when the Americans planted their flag on the British works at Yorktown. He became a very important citizen of Pittsburgh, and like Col. Gibson, an incorporator of the Pittsburgh Academy, the First Presbyterian Church, and the Western Theological Seminary. He was killed while commanding the militia in the St. Clair campaign of 1791.
Major Ebenezer Denny, Adjutant of the 1st American Regiment, was a product of the frontier. As a boy of 13 he carried dispatches from his home in Carlisle to Fort Pitt. After a year on a privateer he was given an Ensign's commission in the Pennsylvania Line in 1780, marched with Wayne to Virginia and took part in the fighting around Williamsburg, and then in 1781, was the first man to plant the American flag on the ramparts of Yorktown. Denny began a second military career as an Ensign with the 1st American Regiment, and his Military Journal is the major source of information on the problems before and during the Indian Wars. He rose to the rank of Major, and it was his reports to Washington after the defeats of Harmar and St. Clair that persuaded Congress to abandon the idea that an army of militia could defend the country. He left the service in 1791, and in 1816 became Pittsburgh's first mayor.
Few individuals associated with Fort McIntosh had more effect on Beaver history than Alexander McLean. The youngest of seven brothers, (all surveyors but one), he helped run the Mason Dixon Line; then moving to Western Pennsylvania he settled near and laid out the town of Uniontown. After serving as a quartermaster in the McIntosh expedition, he became the first President Judge of Fayette County. When the Land Office opened in 1784, he was appointed Deputy Surveyor for all of Fayette, and parts of Washington, Somerset, Greene, Westmoreland, and Allegheny counties. While one of his greatest services was surveyor of the First District of the Depreciation Lands, to local residents he will be remembered as the man who laid out the Beaver Reserve and on his map recommended the site of Fort McIntosh as ideal for a town.
Of equal interest is the story of Daniel Leet. Born in New Jersey, he later moved to Virginia, where he attended the College of William and Mary, receiving a diploma in surveying. Coming to the frontier he assisted William Crawford in surveying for the Washington family and settled near what is now Washington, PA. During the war he was Regimental Quartermaster for the 13th Virginia in 1778, and was Brigade Major in the Virginia militia. He succeeded to command of the ill-fated Crawford expedition in 1782 after Crawford was captured and the second in-command wounded. While living near Washington, he was one of the surveyors for the Depreciation Lands. In 1829, he moved to the Sewickley Bottoms estate of his daughter, Mrs. David Shields, where he founded Leetsdale. More important to local history is the fact that in 1785 he laid out the town of Beaver.