LATROBE AREA HISTORY
1700 to 1799

When white men first crossed the Alleghenies into this area of Pennsylvania, they found heavy forests of chestnut and oak, teeming with game. The area then was populated with Indians-Delaware, Shawnee, Seneca, and Mingo-who lived here and hunted and fished. Loyalhanning, one of the leading villages of the Delaware, was at the present site of Ligonier, about eight miles east of where Latrobe is now located.

The first white man appeared in the vicinity of Latrobe about 1750. Christopher Gist was a surveyor, the first to give a detailed description of the areas of Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. At the outset of the French and Indian War, he accompanied the young George Washington on missions into the Ohio Country.

The French and Indian War gave more white men a glimpse of the area. In 1758, British General John Forbes cleared a road through this area enroute from Philadelphia to present day Pittsburgh. His soldiers erected Dagworthy's Breastworks in the area now known as Lawson Heights, just south of Latrobe.

Few people settled permanently in the area before 1769, when the Pennsylvania Land Offices were opened by the Penn propietaries. As early as 1765, Christian Soxman (Saxman) was living east of Latrobe, near what is now Machesneytown, while John Proctor had a farm to the west, between the St. Xavier property and Unity Cemetery. Among the first land titles granted by the Commonwealth for the Latrobe area were those made to George Clark (who acquired the application rights of David and Samuel Sloan) and to Samuel Sloan, who built the first house in what is now the city of Latrobe.

Other early settlers in or near what are now Latrobe, Youngstown, and Unity Township were Archibald Lochry, who settled here with his brother William and whose restored blockhouse still stands near the intersection of Routes 30 and 981; William Findley, who served as the first Congressman from the area and whose mill along the Loyalhanna in west Latrobe was the first industry within the present city; Henry Kuhn, whose land later became the site of St. Xavier; George Ruffner, who led five German families from Berks County to settle on the site of St. Vincent College; Joseph Baldridge, who built a mill about 1789 south of Latrobe; and Peter Tittle and Benjamin Beatty, veterans of the American Revolution who joined the growing settlement here, establishing their homesteads near Unity Cemetery.