The Pearsalls had been in the South Branch valley since at least the 1730s, when the area was still considered the western edge of European settlement in Virginia. Hunters and traders had been moving through since 1725 or earlier. Tradition holds that the brothers built their first stockade in 1738, but the timing of regional fort construction strongly suggests the real defensive work went up in 1755, in the panic that followed Braddock's defeat on July 9 of that year. The Pearsalls also built a number of homes for incoming settlers that same year. The location was strategic. It sat between the future Indian Mound Cemetery and the river, near where the old Fort Loudoun Road - what would later become the Northwestern Turnpike - crossed the South Branch on its way to Winchester.

Pearsall's stockade was upgraded by the Virginia Regiment, who provisioned it as one of the strings of forts protecting the frontier under the young Colonel George Washington's command. Captain Robert McKenzie took charge of the fort during the French and Indian War. Fort Pearsall was garrisoned intermittently until 1758, holding settlers during raids and sheltering them between alarms. By around 1758, accounts suggest there were at least a hundred people in the general area of Pearsall's Flats - a number that only makes sense if you include the South Branch valley eight miles south to The Trough and fifteen miles north to the river's confluence with the North Branch. Either way, the fort had become the regional gathering point for a thin scatter of frontier families.

After the hostilities subsided, Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron - the same Lord Fairfax whose disputed Northern Neck Proprietary claims had brought the teenage George Washington to the region in the 1740s - saw an opportunity. With the frontier quieter, settlers would pay for orderly lots in a chartered town. In 1762 Fairfax sent a survey party to Pearsall's and laid out 100 lots. He renamed the town Romney, after the Cinque Ports city on the English Channel. The transition was not clean. For decades, the original Pearsall-era settlers and the newer purchasers of Fairfax's surveyed lots contested ownership of overlapping parcels. The land that had been a frontier stockade became, slowly, a Virginia town with paper deeds and a market square.

Oral tradition holds that the old fort was garrisoned one last time in 1774, during Lord Dunmore's War - the brief conflict over Shawnee land claims west of the Ohio - though historical records do not confirm it. After that the fort fades from the record. The structure itself has long since rotted or been demolished, and the land around it has been farmed, built on, and built over for two and a half centuries. Today a marker stands in Indian Mound Cemetery, at the Yellow Banks overlooking the South Branch, commemorating where Fort Pearsall once stood. Beside the marker is a pile of stones believed to be remnants of the old fort's foundation. They are not much to look at. But they are about all that is left of the place Romney started from.