The French and Indian War changed everything. In 1758, British General John Forbes chose Raystown as the site for a fort and supply depot to support his campaign against Fort Duquesne, the French stronghold at the forks of the Ohio River — modern-day Pittsburgh. The outpost was first called Fort Raystown, then renamed Fort Bedford in honor of the Duke of Bedford, a powerful figure in the British government of the day. That name stuck to the settlement that grew up in its shadow, and it’s the name the town carries still.

The town of Bedford was formally laid out in 1766 and incorporated as a borough in 1795, and it wasn’t just a military footnote. In 1794, President George Washington himself passed through, personally inspecting troops mustered to put down the Whiskey Rebellion — the young nation’s first real test of federal authority. He stayed at what’s now known as the Espy House, still standing on Pitt Street, making Bedford one of the few small Pennsylvania towns that can say a sitting president bunked there before the country had even turned twenty.

“Bedford’s development was further enhanced by the construction of key infrastructure, particularly roads that connected the town to other areas of Pennsylvania.”

On Bedford’s early growth as a trade and travel crossroads

By 1771, Bedford had become important enough to anchor its own county — one so large at the time that it originally stretched across nearly a third of Pennsylvania, encompassing land that would eventually be carved into Huntingdon, Blair, Cambria, Somerset, Fulton, and Bedford counties as we know them today. The Bedford County Courthouse, built on the town square, remains one of the oldest county courthouses in continuous use in the entire state.

 Omni Bedford Springs Resort

Just a couple of miles south of downtown, mineral springs bubbling up out of the Allegheny foothills would end up putting Bedford on the national map in a completely different way. What began in the 1790s as a modest bathhouse over those springs grew, over the following century, into one of the great American resort hotels — the kind of place where the country’s most powerful people came to “take the waters” and, not incidentally, to conduct the nation’s business somewhere quieter than Washington.

Today it’s known as the Omni Bedford Springs Resort, and parts of the current building date back to 1796, with the grand Georgian-style hotel taking its recognizable shape through the 1800s. President James Buchanan used Bedford Springs as his own summer White House in the years leading up to the Civil War, reportedly signing the first transatlantic telegraph cable message from the property in 1858. The guest list over the decades read like a survey of American power — presidents, industrialists, and statesmen who came for the reputedly restorative mineral waters and stayed for the mountain air.

What makes Bedford Springs worth the detour isn’t just the history — it’s that you can still experience it the way guests did a century and a half ago. The spa still draws on those same mineral springs. The golf course is still played. Afternoon tea is still served. It’s a rare thing: a genuine 18th-century resort that never became a museum piece, because it never stopped being a working hotel.

If Bedford’s first act was as a military crossroads, its second act was as a highway town. U.S. Route 30 runs directly through the heart of Bedford, and Route 30 is the Lincoln Highway — America’s first road conceived to run coast to coast, from Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. Before the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940 and pulled the through-traffic south onto a controlled-access route, the Lincoln Highway through Bedford was the main east-west artery connecting Philadelphia to the Midwest — and Bedford’s downtown grew up shaped by that traffic.

The Lincoln Highway didn’t just pass Bedford by — it built parts of it. Diners, motor courts, and gas stations sprang up along Route 30 through the 1920s and ’30s to catch travelers making the slow, winding drive across the Alleghenies, back when a trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh could eat up the better part of a day. Some of that roadside architecture still survives, which is part of what makes a drive through Bedford County feel like time travel with a steering wheel.

Up until the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940, U.S. Route 30 through Bedford was the key east-west route connecting Philadelphia to the west.

Bedford Borough, on the town’s highway-era importance

This is Lincoln Highway roadside-Americana country, and Bedford County holds onto more of that original character than almost anywhere else on the eastern half of the route. A few stops that earn a full stop, not just a slow drive-by:

A living-history village assembled from more than 40 historic log, stone, and frame buildings gathered from around the county, arranged to recreate frontier and 19th-century Bedford life — complete with costumed interpreters, working artisans, and seasonal events. It sits at the entrance to the covered bridge driving tour, which makes it a natural first or last stop.

Housed in a former 1859 elementary school, this small but genuinely unique museum celebrates the region’s woven coverlet tradition — a craft that flourished across rural Pennsylvania in the 19th century and rarely gets a museum of its own anywhere else in the country.

Here’s the number that surprises people: Bedford County has fourteen historic covered bridges, one of the largest concentrations left in Pennsylvania — nearly all of them still standing where they were built roughly a century ago, and several still carrying traffic across the creeks and rivers they were designed for. Twelve are Burr-truss bridges, a design patented by 19th-century engineer Theodore Burr that uses an arch working in tandem with a truss system for extra strength, which is a large part of why so many of these structures have survived as long as they have.

The Bedford County Visitors Bureau maps out a self-guided driving tour that hits nine of the fourteen bridges in roughly 40 miles and about 90 minutes of driving time — though nearly everyone I’ve read who’s done it says to budget closer to three or four hours once you factor in getting out of the car at every single one, which you will absolutely want to do. The tour traditionally starts at Old Bedford Village, where the Claycomb Covered Bridge greets you at the entrance, and winds northwest through farmland and small crossroads towns like Schellsburg and New Paris.

Watch: My Weekend Getaway to Bedford, PA.

What I love most about Bedford is that it never really had to reinvent itself. It was a crossroads for the Shawnee and Iroquois long before it was a fort, a fort before it was a town, a spa town before it was a highway town, and a highway town before it became the kind of place road-trippers like us seek out on purpose. Every era just layered on top of the last one instead of erasing it — which is exactly why you can still have afternoon tea where a president once summered, drive across a bridge built when Theodore Roosevelt was in office, and photograph a coffee pot that’s been famous since your great-grandparents’ generation, all in the same single day.

If you only have a weekend, give Bedford a full one. Walk the historic downtown, sit with the fort’s story at the museum, treat yourself to a night at the Springs, and then spend a slow morning chasing covered bridges down back roads with the windows cracked. That’s the whole formula for the kind of trip this blog exists to talk you into — and Bedford delivers it better than almost anywhere else in Pennsylvania.

Until next time!

Susan