Fort Loudoun was erected on the old road in 1756, one mile east of the present village of Loudon, Franklin County. The spot was historic even before it was fortified, the settlement here being one of the oldest in that section of the state. This point was a famous rendezvous both in the early days when the Old Trading Path was the main western highway, and in after days when the path became Forbes's Road. From here the pack-horse trains started westward into the mountains loaded--two hundred pounds to a horse--with goods which had come this far in wagons from Lancaster and Philadelphia. The site of Fort Loudoun therefore marks the western extremity of the early colonial roadways and the eastern extremity of the "packers' paths" or trading paths which offered, until 1758, the only route across the mountains.[49] Fort Loudoun was built late in 1755, after considerable debate as to its location. Colonel Armstrong, after examining a spot near one Barr's, finally determined to locate it "on a place in that neighborhood, near to Parnell's Knob, where one Patton lives ... as it is near the new road; it will make the distance from Shippensburg to Fort Lyttleton two miles further than by McDowell's." Ten miles southwest of Shippensburg, Benjamin Chambers, a noted pioneer, erected Fort Chambers at Falling Spring, the present Chambersburg. It was a private fort completed in 1756; by some means the owner had secured two four-pound cannon which he mounted in his little fort, the roof of which he had already covered with lead. It was feared that Chambers's little fort would be captured by the savages and the guns turned upon Shippensburg and Carlisle. But their owner repudiated the insinuation and even held the guns from Colonel Armstrong, who was armed with the governor's order to surrender them. Incidentally, also, he made good his boasts and held the fort with equal pugnacity from the savages. Colonel Chambers was of great assistance to General Forbes in the days of 1758, and, as an aged man, sent his three sons, raised in the lead-roofed fortress with its "Great Guns," to Boston in 1775 to fight again for the land he had helped to conquer from the Indians in the dark days of Braddock and Forbes. Such men as Benjamin Chambers made Forbes's Road a possibility. The state road built westward over the track of Forbes's and Bouquet's armies is well known in eastern Pennsylvania as the "Chambersburg and Pittsburg turnpike."[50]