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Garards Fort

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Garards Fort, named for a family home that had been fortified and used as a fort in the late eighteenth century, has an interesting combination of buildings typical of the county's rural villages. At its western edge is the former farm of Andrew Lantz, with two handsome white frame barns from 1877. The smaller of the two barns is a board-and-batten structure with a fanciful cupola. The larger barn is sheathed with tongue-and-groove siding and has a peaked cupola at the ridgepole. Both have multiple framed louvers on their side walls. The barns now mark the entrance to the State Game Lands No. 223. South of Garards Fort Road (PA 2011) on Warren Roberts Road, the White covered bridge crosses Whitely Creek. This is the longest queenpost bridge in the county at just over seventy feet. Garards Fort has the smallest post office in Greene County (1942–1943; Garards Fort Road), a miniature white frame gable-roofed structure approximately the size of a large walkin closet. The large red brick Gothic Revival Corbly Baptist Church (originally Goshen Baptist Church, c. 1900; 107 John Corbly Lane) at the eastern edge of the village is named for the Reverend John Corbley [ sic], a Scots-Irish preacher whose family was killed before his eyes by Native Americans in 1782. Corbley spent his remaining years preaching and opposing what he saw as unfair proclamations by an inept federal government. He was imprisoned for his role in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, asking his neighbors why they should pay taxes to a government unable to protect them. Baptist churches, whose preachers needed neither formal education nor ordination, appealed to subsistence farmers in remote areas and greatly outnumber all other denominations in Greene County. Corbley established more than thirty Baptist churches in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Lu Donnelly et al.

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