CARLISLE -- This town was just seven years old when Gen. John Forbes arrived here in July 1758 on his way to take Fort Duquesne.

But the small settlement in the Cumberland Valley already had been the site of several historic events.

Benjamin Franklin arrived here in 1753 to negotiate treaties with Indian tribes.

While Native American warriors never attacked Carlisle during the French and Indian War, they had raided farms to the north and the west. In 1756 -- when French and Indian War violence on the Pennsylvania frontier was at its worst -- Indians had killed and scalped settlers less than 10 miles from the settlement.

That same year, Lt. Col. John Armstrong led a force of about 300 militiamen out of Carlisle on a retaliatory expedition to destroy an Indian village at Kittanning.

If you go: Carlisle

More than 125 French and Indian War-era re-enactors are expected in Carlisle next weekend for an encampment to mark the 250th anniversary of the Forbes Expedition.

The free, two-day event will take place Saturday and next Sunday on the John Dickinson Campus of Dickinson College.

Activities will include a Colonial dance 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday and an 18th century church service at 10 a.m. Sunday. Visitors can visit the encampment and talk with re-enactors from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 8.

The Cumberland County Historical Society's free museum is open 3 to 9 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. The museum is at 21 N. Pitt St. For more information, call 1-717-249-7610 or visit its Web site at www.historicalsociety.com.

Visitors can pick up maps, brochures and guides for other historic attractions. They include a list of two dozen Wayside Markers, all within a few blocks of the town Square, and the community's 18th century Old Graveyard at South Bedford and East South streets.

The Army Heritage Trail, part of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, is located northwest of Exit 49 of Interstate 81, about one mile east of Carlisle's town Square.

For more information call 1-717-245-3971 or visit its Web site at www.carlisle.army.mil, then click on "U.S. Army Heritage Trail."

Following Forbes' footsteps

"Pennsylvania's Forbes Trail," a new travel guide and history from Taylor Trade Publishing, focuses on gateway communities across the state through which Gen. John Forbes passed on his 1758 expedition to capture what is now Pittsburgh's Point.

Staff writers Len Barcousky and Marylynne Pitz are revisiting those communities for a travel series that continues through June 29.

Today's story highlights Carlisle.

See the Travel section for more entries in this series.

The town's early history, however, wasn't linked only with frontier violence. At about the same time as Forbes marched his troops down High Street, both Presbyterians and Anglicans, now Episcopalians, had begun constructing churches around Carlisle's center Square.

"The earliest buildings were made of logs," David Smith said. "Not much remains from those first days." He is a librarian with the Cumberland County Historical Society, which shares space with the Hamilton Library Association on -- where else? -- North Pitt Street.

Plenty of reminders remain from the next two centuries. During that time the town and its citizens would play important roles in the American Revolution, the Civil War and the education both of Native Americans and of Army officers.

The historical society's museum provides an overview of the region's past, starting when it was home to Susquehannock, Iroquois, Lenape and Shawnee people. Five Indian paths converged at Carlisle, including those used by tribes of the Iroquois confederacy in their dealings with the Cherokee and Catawba to the south.

"Every man in Cumberland County is a rioter at heart," Gov. John Penn complained, according to a quotation painted on the museum wall. He must have had people in mind such as James Wilson, James Smith and George Ross. All three Carlisle residents were signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The museum's rooms are filled with paintings, furnishings, photographs and household items used over the past 250 years.

Reminders of long-ago events continue to turn up.

When Gen. Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, Carlisle was occupied by J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry and later shelled by Southern forces. One case in the museum contains two cannonballs recovered after the attacks. A more recent discovery on display is an unexploded Confederate shell found embedded in the wall of a downtown building in 2006.

Other reminders of Stuart's visit are visible around town. One of the pillars of the old Cumberland County courthouse on South Hanover Street shows damage from Southern artillery fire. Several tombstones in the town's Old Graveyard on East South Street also were hit during the shelling.

Another room in the museum is devoted to the Carlisle Indian School, which opened in 1879. Over the next four decades, about 10,000 Native American children from around the country were educated here in an unsuccessful effort to cut them off from Indian culture. The display explains the history of the school and provides short biographers of a half-dozen of its students. Its most famous alumnus was the athlete Jim Thorpe. His contributions to sports are remembered both in the museum and with a stone memorial on the Square.

Starting in 2002, the borough and Historic Carlisle Inc., a nonprofit group formed to promote and commemorate the community's past, undertook a Wayside Marker project to "tell the story of Carlisle's people, buildings and historic sites and events."

A free brochure, describing 23 markers, is available at the museum. When combined with the $5 "Walking Guide of Historic Carlisle, PA," the two publications provide a good introduction to the community's heritage.

One plaque, set up in front of the First Presbyterian Church, describes the arrival in 1764 of white settlers released at the end of Pontiac's War.

Indians originally brought about 200 of their prisoners -- women and children -- to Fort Pitt, and Col. Henry Bouquet then transported many of them to Carlisle in hopes of reuniting them with their families.

A widow named Magdalena Hartman thought she recognized one of the traumatized captives as her daughter, Regina, who had been captured nine years earlier. Magdalena Hartman began to sing a German hymn.

"Regina recognized the song, and began singing it, too, thus providing the most poignant and best remembered of all the reunions of loved ones long lost that took place that day here in this Square," the marker says.

About two plaques are added each year, according to Mary Duxbury, a member of Historic Carlisle. The newest marker, describing the Forbes expedition and road across Pennsylvania, will be dedicated at 2:30 p.m. Saturday.

"In 1758 Carlisle was the last major settlement in Pennsylvania and was the staging area for the expedition," said the Rev. Mark Scheneman, rector of St. John's Episcopal Church and president of Historic Carlisle's board. "Gen. Forbes' army came right down High Street past the Square."

Some of the people who saw the arrival and departure of Forbes' army likely are buried nearby in the town's Old Graveyard.

John Armstrong, who became a general in the American Revolution, rests under an evergreen there, along with his wife, Rebecca.

Not far away are the remains of a prominent Pittsburgh resident, Hugh Henry Brackenridge. An author, lawyer and politician who helped found what became the University of Pittsburgh, Brackenridge ended his days as a state Supreme Court justice. He died in Carlisle in 1816.

The community also is home to the Carlisle Barracks, now the site of the U.S. Army War College and its Army Heritage Trail. The outdoor path follows a one-mile loop that takes visitors through scenes experienced by soldiers from the French and Indian War to Vietnam.

One area along on the trail recreates British fortifications at Yorktown captured by the George Washington's Continental Army in 1781.

Its parapets and gabions have been constructed next to Interstate 81, which must give some drivers a momentary shock. That's because its reproductions of 18-pound cannons appear to be aimed at the heavy traffic flowing by.