The English merchant William Trent had established a highly successful trading post at the forks as early as the 1740s, to do business with a number of nearby Native American villages.

They controlled New France (Quebec), the Illinois Country along the Mississippi, and La Louisiane, the ports of New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama.

Robert Dinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of the Virginia Colony, thought these forts threatened extensive claims to the land area by Virginians (including himself) of the Ohio Company.

In late autumn 1753, Dinwiddie dispatched a young Virginia militia officer named George Washington to the area to deliver a letter to the French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, asking them to leave.

Following Washington's return to Mount Vernon in January 1754, Dinwiddie sent Virginians to build Fort Prince George at the Forks of the Ohio.

[4] Washington, who was lieutenant colonel in the newly created Virginia Regiment, set out on April 2, 1754, with a small force to build a road to, and then defend, Fort Prince George.

The French held the fort successfully early in the war, turning back the expedition led by General Edward Braddock during the 1755 Battle of the Monongahela.

In May 2007, Thomas Kutys, an archaeologist with A.D. Marble & Company, a Cultural Resource Management firm based in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, discovered a stone and brick drain on the Fort Duquesne site.

Colonel Washington is depicted on horseback in the center, while General Forbes, who was debilitated by intestinal disease, is shown lying on a stretcher.

The stamp also depicts Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was second in command to the ailing Forbes, and other figures who represent the Virginia militia and provincial army.