Tag: Oldtown

Oldtown is an unincorporated community in Allegany County, Maryland along the North Branch Potomac River founded in 18th century colonial times. The settlement was initially called “Shawanese Old Town” because it was the site of a Shawnee Amerindian village abandoned about a decade earlier. In later years the explanatory prefix was dropped from the name and the place because known simply as “Oldtown. Oldtown was begun (on a soon to be busy road) with the building of a trading post along an old Native American trail, the Nemacolin Trail, as traders, especially fur traders (and trappers) pushed over the Cumberland Narrows Mountain pass into the Monongahela River valley and found the trail could make a safe descent along a reasonable grade down to the river in the area of a river ford overlooked by the bluffs and mounds of the Redstone Old Fort area, now Brownsville in Fayette County in Western Pennsylvania.
The trading post was established in 1741 by Thomas Cresap, who’d figured…