This expedition, too, followed the road to Vestal's Gap and Washington, as was his habit, kept a journal of his experience. By the mischance of events this journal was to be captured later by the French at Fort Necessity; but in 1756, to bolster their claim that this English expedition was an unprovoked attack against a friendly power in time of peace, they published in French so much of it as served their purpose. Unfortunately the published portion did not include the march through Piedmont; but in Washington's accounting with the Virginia government we find these items: "1754 "Apl. 6 To expences of the Regim^{t} at Edward Thompson's in marching up 2´´16.0 8 To Bacon for D^{o} of John Vestal at Shenandoah & Ferriges over 1.9"[63] [63] _Journal of Washington 1754._ Edited by J. M. Toner M. D. Edward Thompson was a Quaker who lived near the present Hillsboro and who was to leave numerous descendants in Loudoun. From the Shenandoah the little force pressed on into Western Maryland where at Will's Creek (the present Cumberland) then a trading station of the Ohio Company, 140 miles west from their objective, Colonel Fry was stricken with an illness which, a short time later, was to prove fatal. Leaving their colonel behind, the Virginia militia, now under the command of Major Washington, advanced very slowly cutting a narrow road through the forest and sending a small force ahead to begin work on the proposed fort at the confluence of the rivers. That work was hardly begun, however, when a greatly superior force of French and Indians, arriving suddenly on the scene from the north, drove the Virginians away, took possession of the place and continued the fort's construction naming it, on completion, Fort DuQuesne after Canada's French Governor.