Fifty years ago premiered Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon. Based on a novel from 1844 by William Makepeace Thackery, it depicts the misadventures of a young rogue from Ireland. Lyndon’s exploits include military service in the British army and seeing combat against the French at Warburg, in what is now western Germany, during the Seven Years’ War. In North America, that conflict is often called the French and Indian War, and Lyndon’s story calls to mind a significant outpost of that war, Fort Ligonier.

Around ten years ago a local historian took me around our part of western Pennsylvania to see battlefields from the French and Indian War. On fine summer days we walked around Jumonville Glen, Fort Necessity, Bushy Run, and Fort Ligonier. These places have been preserved and restored and help visitors exercise their historical imagination about that era.

Enter Barry Lyndon. In Chapter 4 of Thackery’s novel, Lyndon, as narrator, says, “It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the cause of the famous Seven Years’ War in which Europe was engaged.” He goes on, “Its origin has always appeared to me to be so complicated, and the books written about so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of chapter than at the beginning, and so shall not trouble my reader with any personal disquisitions concerning the matter.”

Lyndon is what literary critics call an unreliable narrator, and so it could be he never got within arm’s length of any book about the Seven Years’ War. All the same, he is right that the causes, as well as the conduct, of that war are complicated, and with the warring nations having colonies around the globe, recent historians have come to see it as really the first world war. For example, battles related to that European war occurred in India as well as in North America.

To my surprise, I was asked to join the board of trustees of Fort Ligonier for a three-year term starting in 2025. A special concern of the trustees and the staff is how best to use the site to explain the complex history of the Seven Years’ War. That task can become more challenging when more than one visitor has come there thinking it was a fort from the American Civil War.

When arriving at Fort Ligonier, visitors enter a stone and clapboard museum and then tour the reconstructed wooden fort. Fluttering in front of the museum is a row of modern reproductions of the British flag in use in the mid-1700s. Above the door to the museum is the coat of arms of John Ligonier, who during the Seven Years’ War served as commander-in-chief of the British military. He was born Jean Louis de Ligonnier and was a Huguenot refugee from France. At age seventeen he fled France, where for more than a century Protestants had been unwelcome and where new legislation suspended their rights. Once in England, he joined the British army and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a field marshal and being ennobled as Lord Ligonier.

His representative in western Pennsylvania was a Scotsman, General John Forbes. In 1758, in a massive undertaking, Forbes had his men cut a road through the dense forests westward from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Their objective was what the French called Fort Duquesne, what the conquering British renamed Fort Pitt, what is now Pittsburgh. Also in 1758, Forbes ordered construction of a fort at a point on that road, on a hill overlooking the meandering Loyalhanna Creek. It stood some fifty-five miles east of Fort Duquesne, and Forbes named the new fort in honor of Ligonier.

As it happens, the name of Ligonier recalls Barry Lyndon mentioning the complexities of the Seven Years’ War. British forces were commanded by a man who had come from France, and that Frenchman’s Protestant faith reminds us not to simplify that war as a conflict between British Protestants and French Catholics. As Lyndon notes, “Most of the low fellows enlisted with me were, of course, Papists,” most of them being his fellow Irishmen. Lyndon added that these Irish Catholic lads were fighting for a Protestant British king and alongside the troops of the Protestant King of Prussia, known to history as Frederick the Great, and allied with the Catholic French were the Protestant Swedes.

As Lyndon’s story reflects historical reality, among the British troops marching along Forbes’ road would have been a number of Catholics, whether from southern Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland. Especially to the east of Fort Ligonier, in the small towns of Bedford and Carlisle, there lived numerous Scots-Irish Presbyterians.

These religious differences aside, Forbes building a fort roughly half-way between Fort Duquesne and Bedford proved to be a wise decision. On the drizzly autumn night of 12 October, 1758, French and Indian forces from Fort Duquesne attacked Fort Ligonier, and Forbes’ troops defended their stockaded hilltop successfully. As a result, in November, 1758, the British used Fort Ligonier as a base for marching to and capturing Fort Duquesne. Had Fort Ligonier fallen in October, the course of the war, and of history, would have been far different.

In 1766, three years after the end of the Seven Years’ War, the British abandoned Fort Ligonier, and the old wooden fort steadily decayed and disintegrated. In 1934, the Daughters of the American Revolution acquired the site, and Fort Ligonier remains privately funded, receiving occasional government grants.

In 1947, local historians conducted archaeological digs to locate the fort and begin reconstructing it. Archaeological excavations, these days led by Jonathan Burns of Juniata College, continue at the fort and nearby. Only recently, on a site two miles from the fort, the archaeologists discovered where in November, 1758, a young colonial officer, George Washington, found himself entangled in a friendly fire incident.

Every year, on the weekend near 12 October, the town of Ligonier hosts a street fair, Fort Ligonier Days. Visitors to the fort itself get to see historical re-enactors, as well as people who keep alive the arts and crafts of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, the museum always finds new ways to use its thousands of artifacts, from broken pottery to George Washington’s pistols, to tell the complex and important story of the fort and its pivotal place in American and world history.