Pennsylvania

Barren Hill
Battle of the Clouds
Bethlehem
Brandywine Battlefield
Bushy Run Battlefield Park
Carlisle
Chester
Cornwall Furnace
Coryell's Ferry
Crooked Billet Skirmish Site
Daniel Boone Homestead
Durham Village
Easton
Ephrata Cloisters
Forks of the Ohio
Fort Augusta
Fort Bedford
Fort LeBoeuf
Fort Ligonier
Fort Necessity National Battlefield
Fort Zeller
Graeme Park
Greene Inn
Hannastown Site
Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site
Lancaster
Lee (Harry) Memorial
Liberty Hall
Matson's Ford
McKonkey's Ferry
Moland House (Washington's Headquarters)
Muhlenberg House and Graves
Nash (Francis) Grave
Paoli Massacre Site
Pennsbury Manor
Philadelphia
Pocono Indian Museum
Summerseat
Swede's Ford
Thomson Home
Thompson's Island Skirmish (Brodhead Expedition)
Valley Forge National Historical Park
Washington Crossing State Park and New Hope
Wayne Birthplace
Wayne Grave
Weiser Home and Grave
Whitemarsh
Wyoming Valley
York

With the largest city, Philadelphia, which was the principal seat of Patriot government during the Revolution, and with one of the largest land areas, Pennsylvania should have a correspondingly high number of historical sites. There are several reasons why Pennsylvania, like Virginia, takes up fewer pages in this guide than, for example, New York and South Carolina. First, there was considerably less Whig-Loyalist warfare and operations on the frontier. Second, major military operations were limited to the last half of 1777, which ended with the British in possession of Philadelphia for nine months (26 September 1777 to 18 June 1778). Finally, economic prosperity, the greatest enemy of historic preservation, has buried many colonial regions under industrial development.

State historical agencies and many county tourist-historical offices have done an exceptionally thorough job of making available information about colonial and Revolutionary sites.

The Guide to the Historical Markers of Pennsylvania is unquestionably the finest publication of this type, a model for other states. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), as the official agency of the commonwealth for the conservation of its historic heritage, undertook in 1946 a program of erecting and maintaining historical markers at all points associated with "events and personalities of genuine significance to the history of the Commonwealth as a whole." This goal has been achieved with thoroughness. And, of most importance to persons with a mature interest in these sites, the text and location of each marker is included (by county) in the guide mentioned above, and this publication is thoroughly indexed. Revised in 2000, this guide lists over 1,800 markers. It and a variety of other publications that outline the state's colonial past can be purchased by contacting the PHMC. Phone: (800) 747-7790.

Pennsylvania does a remarkable job of maintaining more than fifty state historic properties, state historical museums, National Park Service sites, and landmarks that are administered by independent state commissions. These are listed, briefly described, and plotted in "The Pennsylvania Trail of History," a folder published by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Website: www.phmc.state.pa.us; phone: (866) PATRAIL.

Barren Hill

Barren Hill, northwest suburbs of Philadelphia. When Washington received information that the British were preparing to evacuate Philadelphia, he sent a strong force under Lafayette from the Valley Forge encampment to establish an outpost between the opposing armies. Lafayette was given three missions: to gather additional information of British preparations, to attack enemy foraging parties, and to protect Valley Forge. With more than two thousand troops and five guns, Lafayette marched from Valley Forge on 18 May 1778, crossed the Schuylkill at Swede's Ford, and moved about 4 miles south to set up a strong position on high ground that has retained the name Barren Hill. Lafayette deployed his command carefully, but came close to being trapped and annihilated by a large British force sent out from Philadelphia with this mission. The young Frenchman kept his head and skillfully retreated by way of Matson's Ford (now Conshohocken), using a route unknown to the enemy.

A stone marker on Ridge Pike at Barren Hill commemorates the encampment of Lafayette in this area. The site of St. Peter's Church, where Lafayette set up a delaying position, is occupied by a more recent structure identified by a highway marker on U.S. 422 on Church Road in Barren Hill.

Battle of the Clouds

Battle of the Clouds, Chester County. The action of 16 September 1777 generally associated in the history books with the Admiral Warren and the White Horse Taverns is referred to in markers in Chester County as the Battle of the Clouds. After withdrawing behind the Schuylkill River to the edge of Germantown a few days after his defeat on the Brandywine Battlefield, Washington recrossed the river to contest Lord Howe's advance on Philadelphia. On 15 September he took up positions on what is now called Swedesford Road (Number 15023, running into Pa. 401, then U.S. 30, near Malvern). This was the older and less direct of two "roads to Lancaster." The next day, 16 September, Washington's army ascended hills to the south and set up a line of battle. A major engagement was developing when a record-breaking deluge ruined almost all the forty thousand musket cartridges recently issued to the Patriot army. The British lost little ammunition, being equipped with properly designed cartridge boxes, but Washington had to break off the action and retreat again.

A marker in front of Villa Maria Hall of Immaculata University says the battle took place on or near the 375-acre campus, which occupies the highest ground between Philadelphia and Harrisburg. (The more precise location is given below.) The entrance to the college is on Pa. 352 a little more than a mile south of U.S. 30 (from the junction 3.5 miles west of Paoli).

The Admiral Warren is in good condition and is an upscale eight-suite inn now called the General Warren Inn. It is on a dead-end stretch of the "road to Lancaster" (now the Old Lancaster Highway ) near Warren Avenue in Malvern.

White Horse Tavern (established 1721) is now a private residence on Swedesford Road just west of Planebrook Road. Contemporary accounts refer to the taverns as being about 3 miles apart, which squares with the locations given above and refutes the common assumption that another White Horse Tavern, in the modern village of White Horse, some 6 miles southeast, was involved.

Malin Hall, Washington's headquarters during the battle, is standing on a small side road off Swedesford Road about midway between the taverns mentioned above. It is now a private residence. No longer standing are Boot Tavern, where General Knyphausen's advance guard routed the Pennsylvania militia on Washington's right (west flank), and the Three Tuns Tavern and Hershey's Mill, where General Cornwallis's vanguard hit the opposite flank. The present King Road traces the American line of defense. Known in colonial times as the Indian King Road, it is named for the Indian King Tavern, still standing in the village of Indian King.

The house used before the battle by Cornwallis (marked by a plaque) is on the west side of Pa. 352 about 0.2 mile north of Goshenville.

Bethlehem

Bethlehem, Northampton County. The Moravians, an evangelical sect of Protestants revived in Saxony by Count Nikolaus van Zinzendorf, started settling in Georgia in 1735. When the War of Jenkins's Ear broke out four years later, they looked to the north for a new home. In 1741 the Moravians from Georgia established Nazareth and Bethlehem. By 1775 these places numbered 2,500 people, becoming a strong and lasting force in America's cultural development. The annual Bach Festival stems from the Moravian "service of song" started in 1742. In the city of 73,000 people now more famous for Bethlehem Steel and other manufacturing industries, twenty-one structures survive from the period 1741 to 1775, the oldest being on West Church Street. The six-story Brothers' House (1748) was used during the Revolution as a military hospital. In the Gemeinhouse (Gemein meaning congregation or community), Bethlehem's oldest building (1741), is the Moravian Museum at 66 West Church Street. Phone: (610) 867-0173. The Moravian Archives, a very valuable collection, are on Main Street. For further information on Bethlehem's historic sites call (610) 868-1513.

Brandywine Battlefield

Brandywine Battlefield, Delaware and Chester Counties. The beautiful name and scenic terrain of the Brandywine came close to acquiring very ugly associations in American history. Here Washington's most devoted admirers had cause for grave doubts about his military competence; D. S. Freeman writes, "Washington conducted the Brandywine operations as if he had been in a daze" (Washington, IV, p. 488).

For several months the Americans had been baffled by General Howe's strategic maneuvering from his base in New York City. Washington knew the British would attempt to capture Philadelphia as soon as the weather permitted resumption of military operations in 1777. But would they move overland through New Jersey as they had done the preceding year, or would they take advantage of their naval supremacy to invade from the sea? Late in July 1777 the mystery cleared when the British left New York with a large amphibious force and were subsequently sighted off the Delaware Capes. Washington started moving his army from central New Jersey in the direction of Philadelphia to counter the expected attack, but the British fleet headed back to sea, and its location was unknown to the Americans for the next three weeks. On 22 August it appeared in the Chesapeake, and now Washington finally understood what his adversary was up to. On Sunday 24 August the Rebel army marched through Philadelphia and two days later was in position around Wilmington. The British landed at Head of Elk, Maryland.

Having been at sea for so long, the British needed time to get in shape for offensive operations, and several days passed before Washington could decide on his next move. On 9 September the Americans started leaving the Wilmington area to establish a defensive position along Brandywine Creek to bar the British advance on Philadelphia.

Although this was the obvious place to make a stand, the terrain presented problems. The creek was deep enough to require the British to use established fords, but there were many to chose from.

The British professionals used the standard tactics for a river crossing that can be traced back to Alexander the Great. General Howe sent General Knyphausen and his Germans due east to make a secondary attack against the main fords where the Americans had set up their main line of defense around Chadds Ford. Patriot outposts and delaying forces performed well, and by 8 a.m. the American defenses on the east bank of the Brandywine were eagerly awaiting the expected attack across the creek. There was a spirited exchange of musket and cannon fire across Chadds Ford, but when the enemy showed no inclination to advance farther, Washington must have realized that this was a mere diversionary effort.

Around 11 a.m. the Patriot commander began to receive reports of enemy troop movements that threatened his exposed right flank. But the messages were confusing, not only because the Americans had not properly studied the geography of the region but also because the reports were contradictory. Shortly after 2 p.m., however, Washington was convinced that enough of a threat was developing on his north flank to warrant shifting strength in this direction from positions on the Brandywine that had not yet come under fire from Knyphausen's column. The Americans still believed that Howe's main concentration was opposite Chadds Ford and that no more than two enemy brigades (2,000-3,000 men) were attempting the envelopment.

Actually, it was the main British force, and Howe was repeating the strategy that had been so successful against Washington in the Battle of Long Island (see under new york). Howe personally accompanied this column, which was commanded by Lord Cornwallis and comprised 7,500 of his total force of 12,500 rank and file. Moving north on the Great Valley Road, Howe and Cornwallis led their troops through Trimble's Ford on the west branch of the Brandywine, then eastward across Jeffries' Ford on the east branch, and southeast through Sconnelltown. The British command post was established on Osborne's Hill about 3:30 p.m., line of battle was formed about a mile ahead, generally along Street Road, and an hour later Washington, at his headquarters near Chadds Ford, heard the dreaded sound of enemy cannon far to his flank and rear. At the same time the Germans to his front increased their rate of fire, evidence that their long-expected frontal attack might be starting.

Washington had started the divisions of William Alexander ("Lord Stirling") and Adam Stephen on a march back from the Brandywine toward the Birmingham Meetinghouse after the first reports of an enemy threat in that quarter were received. But he had then sent them orders to halt in place because a new report indicated that no British troops had been seen around the Forks of the Brandywine. At about 2 p.m., however, new intelligence convinced Washington that he should have Alexander and Stephen resume their movement toward the flank and that the division of John Sullivan should also be deployed in this quarter. At 4:30 these three divisions were trying to get their defenses organized when the British attack started. Washington then left the brigades of Anthony Wayne and William Maxwell (with Wayne in overall command) to defend Chadds Ford, ordered Nathanael Greene to move his division cross country toward the Birmingham Meetinghouse from its reserve position around Chadds Ford, and he himself raced to the meetinghouse.

Today a tourist can trace the battle in a driving tour and also, in the spring and fall, a guided van tour sponsored by the PHMC. The driving tour follows a two-lane highway (Birmingham Road) from Sconnelltown, past Osborne's Hill and the Birmingham Meetinghouse through Dilworthtown, down the Old Wilmington Pike to its junction with the new Wilmington Pike (U.S. 202), to the intersection with U.S. 1. All of the driving tour information, as well as all park information, is available by contacting the Brandywine Battlefield Park, which is administered by the PHMC. Park information phone: (610) 459-3342. The battlefield grounds, which make up over 10 square miles, is decimated by development, with the exception of a portion of Sandy Hollow. This area, called Heritage Park, is a designated State Battlefield Site and the grounds of the bloodiest fighting of Brandywine. A considerate local farmer who chose not to sell out to the area's aggressive developers is responsible for this preservation. "The plowed hill" across the highway from the meetinghouse, where the battle started, is now occupied by a large house and crowned by old trees, and most of the ground across which the Guards and Grenadiers attacked is occupied by more of the McMansion-sized, modern-style houses that litter this country's once open fields. A large cemetery covers the area around the meetinghouse, and here a tourist will find the monument to Lafayette and Pulaski. The former was wounded a few hundred yards to the southeast while he was rallying Patriot troops. Young Count Casimir Pulaski had only recently arrived in America when he distinguished himself at the Brandywine while serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp to Washington; four days after the battle he was commissioned a brigadier general by Congress and put in command of the four dragoon regiments recently authorized.

The second position of Washington's was about 0.3 mile southeast of the meetinghouse, on the high ground (now Battle Hill) just beyond today's Wylie Road. Wayne and Maxwell dropped back from the vicinity of Chadds Ford as Knyphausen, pushing forward with overwhelming superiority, joined forces with Cornwallis as night fell. Wayne blocked Knyphausen's attempts to cut off Washington's retreat to Chester, and the shattered Patriot army made good its escape during the night. It had lost eleven cannon and about three hundred men killed; of the six hundred wounded, many were captured. Howe had lost about half that number of men.

A visit to the Brandywine battlefield is interesting to the casual tourist because the region is particularly scenic and rich in associations with the Brandywine School of American art. A personal reconnaissance is rewarding to those who have studied the battle. Many historic points are not marked; except for the previously mentioned van tour, there is no organized self-guided tour of the extensive area over which the opposing forces maneuvered from long before daylight until after dark on that eventful day of 11 September 1777. The PHMC is chiefly concerned with the two historic houses in the 50-acre Brandywine Battlefield State Park; the area encompassed by the battle actually covers more than 30,000 acres. The two houses are the Benjamin Ring House, or "Washington's Headquarters," as it's referred to in the guide; and the Gideon Gilpin House, or "Lafayette's Quarters." The latter has a stunning three hundred-plus-year-old sycamore tree growing so large in the side yard that it takes nine people to reach around it. A reenactment of the battle is held every year in the last week of September (this varies somewhat).

A high-speed, divided highway (U.S. 1) carries a stream of traffic through the southern edge of the battlefield, past the state park in which stand the stone houses used by Washington (burned in 1930 but restored) and Lafayette (original). The houses are open daily for guided tours. The park is about halfway between the village of Chadds Ford and the junction of the Baltimore and Wilmington pikes (now U.S. 1 and U.S. 202) where Washington's army rallied before retreating to Chester. From the village of Chadds Ford the Creek Road (Pa. 100) winds northwest along the foot of the high ground where the Patriots established their main line of defense. This picturesque, two-lane country road provides a view of the bottomland extending a few hundred yards southwest to Brandywine Creek, and a tourist will see clearly why the fords played such a critical role in the strategy of the opposing commanders.

In Kennett Square, on Route 1, 5 miles south of Chapp's Ford, Howe's camp on the eve of battle, the Consolidated School and Presbyterian Home mark the hills on which the British and German troops were bivouacked. Cornwallis and Howe are said to have used the building that survives as Newberrys Store (formerly the Shippen Mansion); Knyphausen's headquarters was in the Unicorn Tavern, Connor's Drugstore in recent years.

The site of Welch's Tavern, where Knyphausen's column made contact with an American patrol about 3 miles east of Kennett Square, is marked at a spot where Pa. 52 turns north from U.S. 1 at Longwood. The Kennett Meetinghouse, where General William Maxwell's light infantry had taken up a delaying position, is standing on U.S. 1, about 1.5 miles west of Chadds Ford and 0.4 mile east of Hammorton, where a marker identifies it.

The Great Valley Road, which Cornwallis followed north, is not today a single road, if it ever was. The British route was initially east on the road to Chadds Ford from Kennett Square for a little more than 3 miles, then north on Schoolhouse Road to Street Road, a few hundred yards east on this road (whose name has been preserved), and then north on the present Red Lion-Northbrook Road. The site of Trimble's Ford on this road is marked on the west branch on County Road 15153, just off Road 15077, and a little more than a mile south of Marshallton.

The latter place is the site of Martin's Tavern, which figures in contemporary accounts of the Battle of the Brandywine. Here Squire Thomas Cheney is alleged to have spent the night before making his legendary ride to warn Washington of the British turning movement. The quiet village of Marshallton dates from the early 1700s. Old buildings, including a Revolutionary War tavern said to be Martin's, have been tastefully restored to form a group of shops and a restaurant.

Taylor's Ford, on the Lancaster Pike east of Marshallton, is now Cope's Bridge, on the outskirts of West Chester. Jeffries' Ford, which Cornwallis reached before 2 p.m., is marked just west of Sconnelltown. From here he moved southeast along the Birmingham Road, as has already been described. In 1915 the major landmarks along this axis of the British advance were marked. Many signs and monuments have since disappeared.

The most useful guide now available is downloadable off the internet at http://www.ushistory.org/brandywine/brandywine.htm. It is also available free at the park. A book on Brandywine is available through the previously mentioned PHMC website. Another good source of information is the Chadds Ford Historical Society, P.O. Box 27, Chadds Ford, Pa. 19317 Website: www.chaddsford-history.org; phone: 610-388-7376.

Brodhead Expedition

Brodhead Expedition. Seethompson's island.

Bushy Run Battlefield Park

Bushy Run Battlefield Park, north of Jeannette and just east of Harrison City, on Pa. 993. On a sultry August day in 1763 a British relief column commanded by Colonel Henry Bouquet (1719–1765) was about 26 miles short of its goal, Fort Pitt, which had been besieged by the Indians. (See forks of the ohio). At about 1 p.m. the advance guard was suddenly attacked by a large force of Delawares, Shawnees, Mingoes, and Hurons who had broken off their siege of Fort Pitt to set an ambush. They obviously hoped to repeat the history of Braddock's defeat, which had occurred near this place in 1755.

Two companies of the main body rushed forward to extricate the advance guard, and then the British force hastily organized a perimeter defense on the best ground immediately available. Already tired from a 17-mile march that day, and having covered almost 200 miles from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in less than twenty days, the British regulars and handful of American volunteers held off the Indians for seven hours, when darkness brought a temporary lull in the fighting. During the night the British unloaded flour bags from the 340 horses in the relief column and stacked these to form a central strong point.

At dawn the Indians resumed their heavy firing and waited for heat and exhaustion to weaken the white soldiers. Around 10 a.m. the Indians could see that enemy troops were being withdrawn from the western side of the defensive perimeter and that a general retreat was obviously under way. Confident of success, the Indians attacked the weakened sector, and had penetrated the defensive perimeter when they came in for a series of devastating tactical surprises.

Bouquet had withdrawn two companies to the rear, as if preparing for a withdrawal, but had sent them on a compass course through the heavy woods to attack the south flank of the penetration. The Indians fled in wild confusion from the bayonet attack that followed the surprise fire of these two companies, and then were ambushed by two additional companies of regulars that had infiltrated forward for this purpose.

About sixty dead Indians were counted, but the British had lost eight officers and ninety men killed and wounded in the two days of fighting—a quarter of their total strength. The regulars buried their dead and marched on to Fort Pitt.

The first step in rescuing this site from oblivion was taken in 1918, when schoolchildren of the county donated their pennies to make possible the purchase of 6.5 acres of the battlefield. This became the nucleus of the present 213-acre state park currently managed by the PHMC. A large granite block marks the site of the "flour-bag fort," and trees have been planted to show the first positions taken by the British. There is a museum and a network of drives and walks through the battlefield. The park also has picnic areas and an arboretum. Website: www.bushyrun-battlefield.com; phone: 724-527-5584.

Carlisle

Carlisle, Cumberland county seat. A great amount of small-town charm survives in modern Carlisle despite its location in a region of great economic development. In or just outside the town are sixteen highway historical markers pertaining to the colonial and Revolutionary War periods, and the chamber of commerce has published an admirable map-guide.

Settlers started reaching the area around Carlisle a few years after the first trader, James Letort, arrived in about 1720. The settlement became the center of military activity in Pennsylvania during the Seven Years' War, the jumping-off place from which expeditions made their way along the chain of forts toward the Forks of the Ohio and the Old Northwest.

Carlisle was the place from which John Armstrong's expedition to Kittanning started in 1756, and from which John Forbes's expedition to the Forks of the Ohio started in 1758. In Pontiac's Rebellion, Carlisle was the town where the Swiss colonel Henry Bouquet assembled a relief column of British regulars—men of the Black Watch, the Seventy-seventh Highlanders, and the Royal Americans—to save Fort Pitt, which was being defended by another Swiss mercenary, Captain Simeon Ecuyer. After winning his notable victory at Bushy Run, Bouquet the next year led an expedition into the Old Northwest from Carlisle and decisively defeated the Indians in Pontiac's Rebellion.

Carlisle claims James Wilson as a citizen. Born in Scotland (1742), educated at St. Andrews, Glasgow, and at Edinburgh, Wilson suddenly decided to emigrate to America, and studied law under John Dickinson in Philadelphia. In 1767 he was admitted to the bar, moved to Carlisle, and quickly became its leading lawyer. Rising to prominence as a frontier politician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, statesman, jurist, and large-scale land speculator, he died suddenly (1798) while visiting a friend in Edenton, North Carolina. His body was moved from its grave on a nearby plantation many years later (1906) and reinterred in Christ Church, Philadelphia. The James Wilson Hotel on Pitt Street in central Carlisle is on the site of one of Wilson's many homes (he left for Philadelphia in 1778). The hotel is said to incorporate portions of the original structure.

Dickinson College, at High and West Streets, on Route 11, was founded as a grammar school in 1773 and was named for John Dickinson when chartered as a college in 1783. (The Dickinson School of Law, the oldest law school in Pennsylvania, was not founded until 1834.)

John Armstrong, elderly "hero of Kittanning" (see mention above), served as a brigadier general during the Revolution and was a member of Congress. Although he was at Charleston in June 1776, at the Brandywine in September 1777, at Germantown three weeks later, and with one of the relief columns to the Wyoming Valley in July 1778, he achieved the distinction—quite honorably—of seeing no action at any of these historic places. The site of his home is marked at the northeast corner of High and Bedford Streets, and his grave is two blocks away in the Old Graveyard.

William Irvine's house site (also marked) is across the street from Armstrong's. A British naval surgeon during the Seven Years' War, he resigned and settled in Carlisle (1764). Practicing as a physician, he also became an active Patriot politician and was commissioned in January 1776 to raise a regiment of Pennsylvania Continentals for the invasion of Canada. He was captured with Thompson at Trois Rivières in Canada (see below) and paroled less than two months later, but not exchanged for almost three years (6 May 1778). Made a general a year later, he commanded a brigade under Anthony Wayne in New York and New Jersey before taking command at Fort Pitt in March 1782. On the frontier General Irvine continued his unsuccessful military career, raising volunteers to augment the small garrison of two hundred regulars he found there and sending out the expedition that ended in disaster near modern Upper Sandusky, Ohio (4-5 June 1782). Irvine left Fort Pitt and resigned from the army in the winter of 1783. Remaining active in public life and military affairs, he moved to Philadelphia around 1800, and died there in 1804.

William Thompson, who led the First Regiment of Pennsylvania Riflemen from Carlisle in July 1775 to join Washington's army around Boston, was another famous man of the region, and he is buried in the Old Graveyard. Born in Ireland, Thompson settled near Carlisle and became a surveyor and justice of the peace. He was a captain in Armstrong's expedition to Kittanning (1756). With Edward Hand as his second in command, Thompson led the remarkable march of his frontiersmen to Boston, where they became the terror not only of the besieged British but also of those responsible for discipline in the American camp. Congress promoted Thompson to brigadier general on 1 March 1776, before Washington could express his opinion that this aggressive but otherwise limited leader was not fit for such high command. Leading reinforcements up the Hudson to Canada, General Thompson commanded the disastrous attack on Trois Rivières on 8 June 1776, and was among the 236 taken prisoner there. He was paroled and went to Philadelphia, but was not exchanged (for Baron Riedesel) until four years later. Meanwhile, he became so offensive in agitating for his exchange that Congress censured him and Thomas McKean won a libel suit against him, being awarded almost £6,000 in damages. Thompson died in Carlisle less than a year after being exchanged, and is buried there.

Ephraim Blaine's house site is marked opposite the site of the Green Tree Inn (where Benjamin Franklin stayed in 1753 while making an important treaty with the Indians). Blaine started as commissary of the Eighth Pennsylvania, became commissary of supplies for the Continental army on 1 April 1777, and during the Yorktown campaign was commissary general of Washington's army (with the rank of colonel, not general). The surviving Blaine House, at 4 North Hanover Street, was built in 1794 for a son. It has handsome external features visible from the street and is very well preserved.

The public square has been the center of Carlisle life since it was laid out in 1751. Just to the west is the site of the first fort authorized by Pennsylvania, laid out "in the middle of this town" by Governor Morris in July 1755 after news was received of Braddock's defeat. Later called Fort Lowther by some writers, it is referred to in a revised highway marker as Carlisle Fort. (The map location is between Hanover and Pitt Streets on West High Street. The latter is U.S. 11.) Conspicuous in this vicinity is a stone building known as the Main Magazine, so identified in the National Survey list of "Sites Also Noted" (1964), but for some reason not recognized by a state highway marker or mentioned in chamber of commerce literature.

Many historic or architecturally significant structures still stand in Carlisle. One is the Thomas Butler Gun Shop (1764), a small stone house on the south side of Dickinson Alley and 50 feet west of Pitt Street. Thomas Butler and his five sons served in the Revolution. Just outside Carlisle on U.S. 11 is Carlisle Barracks, on the site of a munitions works erected in 1776 and then called Washingtonburg, the first place in this country named for George Washington. The powder magazine, now called the Hessian Guardhouse, a one-story stone structure built in 1777 by Hessian prisoners, has been restored as a museum (hours limited; phone: [717] 245-4101).

The Old Graveyard, just east of the highway marker on South Hanover between South and Walnut Streets, contains the remains of several important Revolutionary War persons in addition to Armstrong and Thompson, mentioned above.

"Molly Pitcher" is the most publicized attraction of Carlisle today. A German Palatine servant, Mary Ludwig married a barber, John Caspar Hays, who marched off to the war five years later. Like many other women, Ludwig went along. In the Battle of Monmouth, on one of the hottest days since temperatures were recorded in America, Molly Ludwig Hays carried water to the troops. ("Molly" was a common nickname for Margaret, Mary, and other names.) When her husband was wounded, she took his place, manning a ramrod to keep a gun in service. John Hays died shortly after the Revolution, whereupon Ludwig married a wartime comrade of her husband's, George McCauley, who turned out to be a shiftless husband. Ludwig left him, supported herself as a washerwoman and nurse, and received some grants of money. She lived in Carlisle to the ripe old age of seventy-nine. The site of her home is about midway between Bedford and East Streets on the south side of North Street, not far from the army post. Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, depicted in the heroic statue of Molly Pitcher in the Old Graveyard as the stocky young woman of her prime (she was about twenty-four years old at Monmouth), was in her later years a pipe-smoking, tobacco-chewing, whiskey-drinking "old soldier" who could swear with the best of them. Website: www.visitccpa.com. Carlisle Chamber of Commerce phone: (717) 243-4515.

(Chamber of Commerce, 112 W. High St., Carlisle 17013.)

Chester

Chester, Delaware River below Philadelphia, Delaware County. The Swedes called it Upland, and William Penn renamed it Chester. It is the second-oldest white settlement in Pennsylvania (after Tinicum, which was founded in 1643), seat of the colony's government from 1681 to 1682. The colonial courthouse (built in 1724; restored in 1920), said to be the oldest public building in continuous use in the United States, is at Market Street near Fifth. Also standing on Market Street near Mary Street is the Friends Meeting of 1736, remodeled in 1883 and used as a meetinghouse until 1926. The Quaker Burial Ground, on Edgemont Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets, established in 1683, contains graves of prominent men of the colonial era.

During the Revolution, Chester figured as the place to which Washington retreated after his defeat at Brandywine and as the place for the encampment for his army on 5 September 1781, after the soldiers had passed through Philadelphia en route to triumph at Yorktown, Virginia. That campsite is marked on U.S. 13 east of the present city line, at Morton and McDowell Streets.

Cornwall Furnace

Cornwall Furnace, Lebanon County, on U.S. 322 in the town of Cornwall. Rich sources of iron ore in this area (the "Cornwall Banks" are still being mined and were not surpassed in yield until the Lake Superior ranges were developed) were acquired by Peter Grubb in the 1730s. In 1742 he established the furnace at Cornwall, which remained in operation until 1883. The furnace produced forty-two cannon and other items for the Continental forces during the Revolution. One-third of the workers during the Revolution were slaves or indentured servants. The furnace was bought in 1798 by Robert Coleman and given to the state of Pennsylvania by his great-granddaughter in 1932. It is one of the best preserved of the early ironworks, and today's visitor will see the red sandstone structure that dates from a remodeling of 1856 to 1857. The PHMC manages the site and makes available a thorough interpretive center with guided tours, and a visitors center which serves as a museum. It is open Tuesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone: (717) 272-9711. (See hopewell village national historic site.)

Coryell's Ferry

Coryell's Ferry, on the Delaware River where U.S. 202 crosses the river between New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Lambertville, New Jersey. This ferry figures prominently in accounts of military operations of the Revolution. Washington's army used it on four occasions. D. S. Freeman notes in his biography of Washington that "the crossing was a 'base point' in the reckoning of marches. In Gates Papers … is a table of distances from 'General Washington's Camp … to Coryell's Ferry' and thence, stage by stage, to Albany. The distance from the ferry to Albany was reckoned at 220 miles" (Washington, IV, p. 447n). (It is actually 192 miles.)

Cornwallis marched on the ferry site, hoping to find boats to continue Lord Howe's pursuit of the Patriot army across the Delaware, in early December 1776. Part of Washington's army camped at Coryell's en route to the Brandywine (others crossing at Trenton and Easton), and moved through there from Valley Forge in the maneuvers that led to Monmouth.

Crooked Billet Skirmish Site

Crooked Billet Skirmish Site, Hatboro, Montgomery County. The morning of 1 May 1778 a force of seven hundred British light infantry and mounted troops from occupied Philadelphia surprised the detachment of fewer than sixty Pennsylvania militia under General John Lacey at Crooked Billet. Although virtually surrounded and opposed by two exceptionally able British leaders, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Abercromby and Major John Graves Simcoe, Lacey fought his way out, retreated 2 miles, and shook off pursuit by suddenly changing direction. The Patriots lost twenty-six killed, about ten seriously wounded, and all their baggage. British losses were nine men wounded.

A monument to this battle lies near where the Hatboro elementary school is located.

Daniel Boone Homestead

Daniel Boone Homestead, 1 mile north of Birdsboro in Berks County at 400 Daniel Boone Road. The entrance is marked by a state historical marker. Another marker is on U.S. 422, about 5 miles southeast of Reading, at Baumstown.

The present two-story stone structure, restored and now serving as a museum, was built on the foundations of the log cabin where Daniel Boone was born in 1734. It is believed that Daniel's father built part of the existing house before he took his family to North Carolina in 1750.

America's most famous frontiersman started acquiring his skills at the Boone homestead, where he lived until he was sixteen. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has directed the restoration of the house and, in addition to preserving 579 acres of open space, has created a museum of the Pennsylvania pioneer. Near the house are a blacksmith shop, a stone smokehouse, a bank barn, and other structures of the frontier farm and village. A visitors center, picnic facilities, and hiking trails are on the site, which is open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. (Reduced schedule during January and February.) Phone: 610-582-4900.

Durham Village

Durham Village, near Riegelsville, Bucks County. The foundation of Durham Furnace (1727–1789) survives in the base of an old mill (marked). The furnace in the wilderness was fed ore from Rattlesnake and Mine Hills, making cannon and shot in the Colonial Wars and during the Revolution. Less well remembered but more important, perhaps, than the output of the furnace were the heavy-cargo boats designed and built by Robert Durham at the mouth of Durham Creek. Of shallow draft, 40 to 60 feet long and 8 feet wide, sailed or poled by four or five men, and able to carry as much as 15 tons, Durham boats were for river transportation what the Conestoga wagon was for colonial roads. (Schenectady, New York, became a major center of their construction about the time of the Revolution.) The most famous action of Colonel John Glover's Marbleheaders's amphibious careers came when they manned the unfamiliar Durham boats in subzero weather to put 2,400 Rebel troops, eighteen cannon, and horses of Washington's army across the Delaware and bring them all back within a space of thirty-six hours and without a loss. This was, of course, the famous crossing of the Delaware in December 1776 for the raid on Trenton, New Jersey.

Easton

Easton, at the junction of Lehigh River with the Delaware, in Northampton County. Since colonial times the settlement laid out in 1752 at the Forks of the Delaware has been a communications center. A famous Indian treaty was negotiated here in 1758, in which Pennsylvania agreed to limit westward expansion of settlement to the Allegheny Mountains. From Easton principal colonial roads went northwest through the Great Swamp and the Shades of Death to Wilkes-Barre in the Wyoming Valley and northeast to Goshen, New York. The site of David Martin's Ferry, important during the Revolution, is in the park at Front and Ferry Streets. The Sullivan-Clinton Expedition (see under new york) was organized at Easton. The house of George Taylor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, built in 1757 by William Parsons, surveyor general, is standing at Fourth and Ferry Streets.

Ephrata Cloisters

Ephrata Cloisters, Lancaster County. Eleven extensively restored eighteenth-century buildings of this communal religious community of Seventh-Day Baptists founded in 1728 to 1733 are preserved as a state historic shrine by the PHMC. Germanic in culture, Ephrata Cloisters had a significant impact on colonial intellectual life although it numbered only three hundred persons at the height of its prominence in about 1750. In September 1777 several hundred casualties from the Battle of Brandywine were brought here. Two of the three orders at the Cloisters died out in the early 1800s, and the surviving buildings ceased to be used in 1934. A highway marker on U.S. 222 just south of the U.S. 322 underpass gives directions to the nearby site.

Forks of the Ohio

Forks of the Ohio, Point State Park, in Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle." One of America's most important historical sites, Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle is all the more remarkable as a triumph of cultural conservation. The 36-acre Point State Park, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to form the mighty Ohio, has been created in recent years by stripping away the overgrowth of steel and concrete of industrial prosperity. Fifteen acres of railroad tracks were removed, commercial structures were blasted, and bridges and traffic arteries were relocated. Archaeological work has established the sites of Forts Duquesne and Pitt and uncovered much valuable historical data. Plaques throughout the park interpret the area's historical significance. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources operate Point State Park. Phone: (412) 471-0235.

The Fort Pitt Museum has been built on the site of the Monongahela bastion. It features a model of Fort Pitt, 20 feet in diameter, that is explained to the visitor by a recorded narration coordinated with a system of miniature spotlights. To depict the long history of the Forks of the Ohio there are sixty exhibits in the main museum area, including full-scale replicas of a trader's cabin, a barracks room, and an early Pittsburgh parlor. The flag bastion has been restored, and a small brick blockhouse built in 1763 by Henry Bouquet has survived. A trace of Fort Duquesne is in the center of the park. Promenades have been constructed along the waterfronts, and stone bleachers for three thousand persons have been erected along the Allegheny side. A modern touch of panache is furnished by the white plume of a water jet in a large circular pond at the tip of the triangle. Phone: (412) 281-9284.

The Forks of the Ohio drew French, British, and American attention like a great magnet from the mid-eighteenth century through the early years of the nineteenth. Not only the European colonial powers but also the American colonists themselves contested possession of this spot in the wilderness, and it was not until 1779 that Virginia agreed that it rightfully belonged to Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, that point was highly academic because there were French and Indian claims to be dealt with.

In 1731 a few Frenchmen tried to establish a settlement at the forks but they were quickly driven off by the Indians. In 1748 the colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia started a vigorous expansion of trading activities into the upper Ohio that caused the French to react by increasing their own efforts. Within three years the French gained the upper hand by starting construction of a line of posts from the Great Lakes toward the Forks of the Ohio, wiping out British posts along the way. (Among these were Pickawillany, now Piqua, Ohio, and Venango, now Franklin, Pennsylvania.)

The twenty-one-year-old Washington was sent in 1753 by the governor of Virginia to warn the French to withdraw. After an arduous trek through the wilderness, visiting the forks in November, passing through Venango, and finally making contact with the appropriate French authorities at Fort Le Boeuf, where modern Waterford, Pennsylvania, is located, the Virginian was told politely but firmly that the French had no intention of abandoning their claims to the upper Ohio.

In January of the next year (1754) the Virginians of the Ohio Company began building a fort at the Forks of the Ohio. Three months later a five-hundred-man French expedition captured the half-completed works, permitted the Americans to withdraw, and then constructed Fort Duquesne on the site. Washington was leading the vanguard of a Virginia regiment advancing to protect the fort builders when he met them on the trail and learned that he was too late. His subsequent operations, setting the stage for the Seven Years' War, are covered under Fort Necessity National Battlefield (below). The British and their colonists continued to pyramid their military misadventures at the hands of the French and Indians, the capstone being Braddock's defeat on 9 July 1755, about 8 miles east of Fort Duquesne.

Three years later, on 25 November 1758, General John Forbes reached his objective at the Forks of the Ohio after a remarkable march and found that the French had burned and abandoned their fort the preceding day. The great William Pitt, for whom Forbes now named the place, had recently come to power in England and was sending competent military commanders to lead British regulars and American volunteers against the French. Already feeling the consequences of Pitt's strategy, the French had wisely decided to abandon their far-flung out-posts in the Old Northwest.

During the three years of its existence, however, Fort Duquesne had been the base for French and Indian raids on frontier settlements of the English colonies. Having run up an impressive record of "too little and too late," the colonial authorities followed up by doing what turned out to be "too much and too late": they built Fort Pitt in the finest tradition of European military engineering, making it the largest and most sophisticated fort on the American frontier. Pentagonal in trace, surrounded by a ditch, it had walls of earth with bastions at each angle. Inside the wall were buildings of frame and brick. Started in September 1759, the work took two years.

The French threat to the frontier had ended, however. In 1763 the power vacuum resulting from elimination of French military leadership in the Old Northwest caused the great Indian uprising known as Pontiac's War, and Fort Pitt was able to justify its existence.

Pontiac's War began in May 1763 and within a matter of weeks the Indians had wiped out nine British posts and innumerable settlements between Niagara and Detroit. On 29 May they killed two British regulars outside Fort Pitt and attacked several isolated settlements.

The commander of Fort Pitt, Colonel Henry Bouquet, was in Philadelphia when the first reports of Pontiac's War reached the colonial authorities. Captain Simeon Ecuyer, another Swiss adventurer in the British service, was temporarily in command of the frontier post, and he was perfectly suited to the task. The American settlers, panic-stricken and ineffectual in their own self-defense, created a refugee problem that seriously impeded Bouquet's efforts to relieve the siege of the fort.

Ecuyer ordered all settlers into the fort and organized the men into two militia companies to reinforce his own regulars. His garrison numbered 250 regulars and militia initially, and increased as refugees straggled in and decreased as disease took its toll. But Ecuyer maintained his confidence and settled down for a siege while Bouquet organized a relief column of 460 regulars at Carlisle, more than 150 air-line miles away.

A little less than two months after they first appeared around Fort Pitt, the Indians launched an unsuccessful final attack on 27 July and then headed east to deal with the relief column that had reached Fort Ligonier, 45 miles away. At Bushy Run Battlefield, 26 miles east of Fort Pitt, they came very close to repeating their triumph of 1755 by annihilating Bouquet's column. But Bouquet, long a student and practitioner of wilderness warfare, beat the Indians at their own game, and on 10 August he reached Fort Pitt. One of the five outworks subsequently built by Bouquet to strengthen the fort has survived.

As political disturbances on the eve of the Revolution increased the need for British regulars, these were progressively withdrawn from the frontier posts. In 1772 Fort Pitt was abandoned by the British and partially dismantled. Early in 1774 the notorious Dr. John Connolly, agent for Governor Dunmore of Virginia, occupied the fort with an armed band. His purpose initially was to strengthen Virginia's claims to the region, but because of his deliberate efforts to provoke the Indians, the episode known as Dunmore's War occurred. This ended with the victory of the colonists at Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Meanwhile, the town of Pittsburgh had been laid out in 1764 and had gained the distinction of being the first permanent English settlement west of the Alleghenies. Most of the early settlers were Virginians, and Pittsburgh grew rapidly as a base for traders, backwoodsmen, and pioneers moving westward. A fifth and last fort, named Lafayette, or Fayette, was built during the winter of 1791 to 1792 a quarter of a mile above Fort Pitt. Needed for protection when Indian troubles flamed for the last time in the Old Northwest, it was a base for the campaigns of "Mad Anthony" Wayne that put out the fire. This post furnished troops in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and was used in the War of 1812 as a training center and supply depot. In 1813 the government sold the site, which is identified today by a marker on Ninth Street just north of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fort Augusta

Fort Augusta, in Sunbury. The pacifistic policies of Pennsylvania toward the Indians had succeeded for almost three-quarters of a century in preventing hostilities on this colony's western frontier, but the colony divided over the proper strategy in the Seven Years' War. The French were building a chain of forts in the upper Ohio River Valley to protect their communications between Canada and Louisiana. Braddock's defeat in 1755 gave the Pennsylvanians cause for serious alarm, though there was no indication that either the French or the Indians would attack the one colony with which they had always gotten along. Benjamin Franklin led a faction opposed to the pacifist policies of the proprietors of Pennsylvania, and the General Assembly voted to raise troops and establish a string of forts to protect the eastern part of the colony.

The largest and most important of the new outposts was built during the period 1756 to 1757 at the junction of the west and north branches of the Susquehanna, which was also a crossroads of important Indian trails. Presumably named for the mother of the future King George III, Fort Augusta was 204 feet in total length on each of its four sides. An outer stockade encircled a moat, inside which was a bastioned fort of conventional European design. A large model of this portion of Fort Augusta has been skillfully constructed on a scale of 1:6 near the original site. Four blockhouses providing a covered way to the river have not been included in this model. The original well and remains of the underground powder magazine have been preserved.

Because of its large size and strong garrison, Fort Augusta was never attacked, and it became an important base for traders and pioneers. During the Revolution it was a strategic position in the defense of the frontier and was the base for General John Sullivan's punitive expedition (see sullivan-clinton expedition under New York) against the Iroquois in 1779.

The fort was allowed to fall into ruins except for the quarters of Colonel Samuel Hunter, the last commanding officer, who continued to live there and eventually obtained title to the property. This house burned down in 1852, and a grandson of Colonel Hunter built the house that stands near the model of the fort. This now serves as a museum. Also on the grounds are a powder magazine and a reference library.

The site, known as the Hunter House Museum, is administered by the PHMC and is the headquarters of the Northumberland County Historical Society. Located at 1150 North Front Street (Route 147), the museuam is open March to December, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 1 to 4 p.m. Phone: (570) 286-4083.

Fort Bedford

Fort Bedford, Bedford Village, in south-central Pennsylvania, off Pa. Turnpike I-76. The fort built here in 1757 and enlarged the next year was an important feature of the wilderness route between the Forks of the Ohio and eastern Pennsylvania. Settled around 1750 and originally known as Raystown, Bedford became a famous health resort in the nineteenth century. It remains an attractive rural village in picturesque country where several important historical sites are identified by markers. The Fort Bedford Museum contains items of frontier life. The restored fort, a blockhouse surrounded by a stockade, is in a park created for the bicentennial celebration of 1958. The museum is open mid-May through mid-October on Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone: (814) 623-8891 or (814) 623-2011

Fort LeBoeuf

Fort LeBoeuf, Waterford. A model of the French fort (1753–1759) is in the Amos Judson House, built on the site of the fort in 1820. The fort, built by Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1760, was destroyed in Pontiac's War, three years later. Foundations of the fort built in 1796 to support "Mad Anthony" Wayne's operations against the Indians are preserved in a small park across the street from the Judson House. There is also a statue commemorating the fruitless visit of Washington to Fort LeBoeuf in 1753 (see forks of the ohio). The Amos Judson House was built in 1820 by Judson, owner of the nineteenth-century Eagle Hotel, and is the headquarters for the Fort LeBoeuf Historical Society. The Eagle Hotel, a National Historic Landmark, is across the street at 123 South High Street; it houses the Fort LeBoeuf Museum, which is operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission of Edinboro University. Judson House phone: (814) 796-6030; museum phone: (814) 732-2573.

Fort Ligonier

Fort Ligonier, at the intersection of U.S. 30 and Pa. Route 711 in Ligonier. Named after Sir John Ligonier, commander in chief of the British army until 1767, it was built in 1758 by General John Forbes. Fort Ligonier withstood an attack by the French and Indians the year it was built, and during Pontiac's War it was menaced by a small party of Indians on two occasions. The fort was also called Loyal Hannon, an English corruption of Loyalhanning ("middle stream"), a nearby Delaware Indian village whose site is indicated by a highway marker on U.S. 30 southeast of Ligonier.

The wooden, stockaded inner fort has been reconstructed and furnished. Visitors can visit the site from May through the end of October every day of the week. A fourteen-minute film places the surroundings in its proper historical perspective, and a museum contains artifacts and documents associated with the fort's prominent role in the Seven Years' War. Phone: (724) 238-9701.

Fort Necessity National Battlefield

Fort Necessity National Battlefield, 11 miles east of Uniontown on U.S. 40. The hasty fortifications erected by Washington at Great Meadows in 1754 were faithfully reconstructed two hundred years later by the National Parks Service. It was not until 1953 that archaeologists finally got their hands on missing documents that enabled them to find the fort's exact location and to establish its outlines.

Today's visitor will see reconstructions on the actual sites of the circular stockade, the storehouse, and the earthworks built by Washington's troops. The park is separated into three different sites that comprise nearly 900 total acres. What is referred to as the "main" unit contains the battlefield and the reconstructed Fort Necessity, in addition to the Mount Washington Tavern and a visitors center. The Braddock Grave is found about 1.5 miles west of there, and the Jumonville Glen section of the park is about 7 miles northwest of the main unit.

The section on the Forks of the Ohio outlines the sequence of events that brought the colony of Virginia into conflict with the French in this region. The twenty-two-year-old Washington, now a lieutenant colonel and second in command of a small regiment of three hundred volunteers raised by Virginia to defend the colony's interests in the upper Ohio Valley, reached Great Meadows with a sixty-man advance guard on 24 May 1754. With great difficulty they had cut a road across the mountains, and their wheeled vehicles and artillery were the first ever to cross the Alleghenies. Meanwhile, the Virginians had met the fort builders driven from their work at the Forks of the Ohio, and Washington proceeded on the assumption—perhaps unwarranted—that the French had committed an act of war.

Learning that a small French force was hiding in the vicinity, Washington launched a surprise attack on the morning of 27 May and killed ten of the enemy, including the French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville. One Frenchman got away and made his way back to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), and Washington's act was subsequently denounced throughout Europe as an "assassination."

Washington wasted no time in preparing for the trouble he expected from the French. On 1 June he noted in his journal that "we are finishing our Fort," and two days later he wrote to Governor Dinwiddie that he was prepared to hold off an attack of five hundred men.

It was a month later, on 3 July, that the attack came. Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, brother of Jumonville, commanded the force of about five hundred French and four hundred Indians who appeared around Fort Necessity in the early afternoon of a rainy day. Driving in Washington's outposts, they probed the position. After suffering some casualties from small-arms fire and from two swivel guns, the French and Indians encircled the fort and a sniping contest got under way. The rain continued to fall, dampening the ardor of Villiers's Indian allies and filling the American trenches with water.

Governor Dinwiddie had called for assistance from other colonies and from Indian tribes in South Carolina, but only the one hundred regulars of Captain James Mackay's South Carolina Independent Company were present with Washington's Virginians at Fort Necessity. The colonials numbered four hundred men, including one hundred who were sick, and Washington had been abandoned by his former Shawnee and Delaware allies. Even the Mingo chief, Half King, who had participated in the surprise attack on Jumonville, had withdrawn.

But the French were worried about rumors of a large force marching to Washington's assistance, and Villiers's troops, tired and wet, were unenthusiastic about gathering new military laurels in the soggy fields of the Great Meadow. Furthermore, the French had consistently pursued a policy of applying the minimum degree of military force necessary to hold their claims to the Upper Ohio. Villiers was therefore able to get the Americans to sign a surrender document that permitted them to withdraw with the honors of war. What Washington did not realize until later, because he did not read French, was that the document to which he affixed his signature referred to Jumonville's death as an assassination. The French remained one up on the British colonists. Villiers demolished Fort Necessity and returned to Fort Duquesne. Washington's force returned on foot to Wills Creek, harassed on the 50-mile march by the Indians.

Described below are places in the Fort Necessity area of interest to students of the military actions of 1754 to 1755.

Jumonville Glen is a secluded ravine sheltered by a 30-foot ledge of rocks where Half King's scouts found a French force hiding, and where the latter was subsequently attacked by Washington and his Indian allies (see above). Seven miles from Great Meadows, it is now part of the Fort Necessity National Battlefield.

Mount Washington Tavern, built in 1818 as a stage stop on the Old National Pike (now U.S. 40), is now a museum exhibiting relics of Fort Necessity and of Braddock's expedition.

Old Orchard Camp, 1 mile north of Fort Necessity, is the site of General Braddock's ninth encampment in his expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1755 and the first place his shattered forces stopped in their panic-stricken retreat after being ambushed by the French and Indians in the Battle of the Monongahela on 9 July. The wounded Braddock died here on 13 July. To keep his body from being found by the Indians, it was buried secretly on the trail and the expedition marched over it to obliterate signs of the digging. When workmen were repairing the nearby highway half a century later they uncovered a skeleton that, because of the vestiges of a British uniform worn by an officer of high rank, was believed to be Braddock's. The remains were moved 100 yards and reburied where a monument now marks the site.

The Fort Necessity National Battlefield site has been operated since 1933 by the National Park Service. There are parking facilities and a picnic area, as well as the usual historical reenactments in the summer. The park, 11 miles east of Uniontown off U.S. 40, is open daily year-round from sunrise to sunset, except holidays. Phone: (724) 329-5512.

Fort Zeller

Fort Zeller, 0.5 mile north of Newmanstown, Lebanon County, on the Fort Zeller Road. Pennsylvania's oldest surviving fort, built 1723 and rebuilt in 1745 by pioneers from the Schoharie Valley in New York, it was used for refuge during the Colonial Wars. The National Survey (1964) lists it in the "Sites Also Noted" category. Phone: (610) 589-4301.

Graeme Park

Graeme Park, Exit 26 off I-276 to Route 611 and then to County Line Road, Horsham, Montgomery County. The malthouse built in 1722 by Sir William Keith, provincial governor from 1717 until removed from office by the Penns in 1726 (after which it probably was his home for two years), survives as a distinguished example of the stone houses of the region and locality. Sir William's stepdaughter married Dr. Thomas Graeme, who acquired the property in 1739 and converted the plain industrial structure into a mansion with a fine Georgian interior with floor-to-ceiling paneling and an elegant dining-room fireplace. The property was given to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1958 and has been restored. The 44-acre site, including the Keith House, features a variety of bird life, and is operated by the PHMC. Phone: (215) 343-0965.

Greene Inn

Greene Inn, Buckingham, Bucks County. Known during the Revolution as Bogart's Tavern, this was headquarters for General Nathanael Greene in December 1776 before the famous crossing of the Delaware and the attack on Trenton. After this it was renamed the General Greene Inn. Curiously, it is included in the relatively select list of nine Pennsylvania "Sites Also Noted" by the National Survey in 1964, yet not marked by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. It has been the site of Edna's Antiques on Durham Road for almost seventy years, and has a yard packed full of old radiators and bathtubs, among other shopworn snippets.

Gulph, The

Gulph, The. Seematson's ford.

Hannastown Site

Hannastown Site, near Greensburg, Westmoreland County. When Westmoreland County was created in 1773, Hannastown was the county seat, the first one west of the mountains. It was on the Forbes Road (Raystown Path), about midway between Fort Ligonier and the site of Braddock's defeat on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Hannastown had the distinction of being burned in the last action of the Revolutionary War in Pennsylvania, a raid by the Seneca that took place on 13 July 1782 (a Saturday). A highway marker is just west of the site, on Pa. 819 north of Greensburg.

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, Berks County, 5 miles southeast of Birdsboro on Pa. 23 (via U.S. 422). An iron-making village founded in 1770 by Mark Bird and active until 1883, Hopewell Village was acquired by the federal government in 1935. Restoration of the historic structures started in 1950, and a self-guided tour includes twenty-five important ruins, terrain features, and restored structures. Hopewell furnished cannon and shot to the Continental forces during the Revolution, and Mark Bird served as a colonel of militia in 1776. The furnace owned many slaves and indentured servants during the Revolution, and also employed numerous free blacks, a few of whom attained positions as highly skilled workers in the early nineteenth century. More than fifty structures in Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site can be found on the National Register of Historic Places. The park's museum exhibits an estimated 300,000 artifacts and archival items related to the site's history. (See cornwall furnace.) The park is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone: (610) 582-8773.

Lancaster

Lancaster, Lancaster County Seat. English Quakers and Germans settled on this spot about 1717. Since this town on the Conestoga River was laid out in 1730, it is the oldest inland town in Pennsylvania, and the largest inland town at the time of the Revolution. The Continental Congress met here for one day, 27 September 1777, in its flight from Philadelphia to York; thus Lancaster is entitled to its claim of being the national capital for one day. (It was a serious contender for selection as the permanent site later, and was the state capital from 1799 to 1812.) The "Pennsylvania rifle" was probably developed in Lancaster. The Conestoga wagon, freight carrier of colonial days and ancestor of the prairie schooner, was produced from the mid-eighteenth century in the Conestoga Valley. The mansion of Edward Hand, a leader of Pennsylvania riflemen during the Revolution and eventually adjutant general of the Continental army (1781), is still standing on Conestoga Creek adjoining Williamson Park. (The "Rock Ford" marker is on South Duke Street extended, at the creek, about 0.5 mile northwest of the old house.)

A monument to George Ross, signer of the Declaration of Independence and jurist who practiced law in Lancaster after 1750, is on the site of his house at King and Lime Streets. Edward Shippen, grandfather of Benedict Arnold's wife and a participant in his treason, lived during the years 1751 to 1781 at a spot now occupied by the YWCA on East Orange Street. The old courthouse where Congress met was located (1739–1853) in the southwest portion of the present square.

British and German soldiers of Burgoyne's "Convention Army" were quartered in barracks located on what is now North Duke Street, opposite the Historical Society headquarters. These structures no longer exist, but the military stables used during the Revolution are standing near a highway marker here. At Orange and Shippen Streets is a Georgian house built before 1760 and once occupied by the first mayor of Lancaster. At 418 West King Street is a house built in 1730 that typifies the early architecture of the town. The Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County is a primary information source for these sites; it is housed in the Sehner-Ellicott—von Hess House (c. 1787), located on 123 North Prince Street. Phone: (717) 291-5861.

Lee (Harry) Memorial

Lee (Harry) Memorial, off Sugartown Road (Number 15112) near Newtown Road (Number 15116), about three-quarters of a mile southwest of U.S. 30 in Berwyn, Chester County. The man who would become famous as "Light Horse Harry" Lee (and whose son was to become considerably more famous as Robert E. Lee) was a twenty-one-year-old captain when his company of Virginia cavalry joined Washington's army in 1777. He had already impressed the commander in chief with his exceptional military qualities when an exploit occurred at the Spread Eagle Tavern on 20 January 1778 that launched Lee on his career as a major figure in the war. The Patriot army was suffering in winter quarters at Valley Forge, and the British army was living high on the hog in occupied Philadelphia. Captain Lee was operating around Philadelphia, attacking foraging parties and causing such general annoyance that the British sent out a force of two hundred light horse to surprise and eliminate him. Surprise him they did, evading his outposts by taking a circuitous route of 20 miles and catching him in an isolated position with only seven companions. But eliminate him they did not: Lee and his little force took refuge in the Spread Eagle Tavern, fought off the British efforts to force the doors, and even succeeded in keeping them from taking his horses from the nearby stable. Lee then routed the attackers by making them believe a Patriot relief force was in sight. (Valley Forge was only 5 miles north.)

The action took place at dawn on 20 January, and Washington's general orders for that same day commended Lee and his seven companions. A congressional resolution of 7 April, occasioned by the affair at the Spread Eagle Tavern, promoted Lee to major commandant and authorized him to raise the separate force that evolved into Lee's Legion (created 30 November 1780 by augmenting his three mounted companies with three infantry companies).

Liberty Hall

Liberty Hall, Quakertown, Bucks County. This picturesque little two-story stone house on Broad Street, built before 1772, was briefly the hiding place for the Liberty Bell in September 1777 when it was being moved from Philadelphia to Allentown for safekeeping.

Matson's Ford

Matson's Ford, West Conshohocken. The first mill in this area was built in 1747 (it operated until 1895), and during the Revolution it was an important source of flour. When Washington started his move to winter quarters at Valley Forge from around Whitemarsh, his leading elements ran into a foraging expedition around the Gulph (now Gulph Mills) on the Schuylkill River after crossing the river at Matson's Ford (now West Conshohocken). The Patriots withdrew across the river on 11 December 1777, and Cornwallis returned to Philadelphia the next night with two thousand head of livestock and other provisions foraged by his large force. On 13 December Washington resumed his move toward Valley Forge, camping on hills around the Gulph until 19 December. Several highway markers on Pa. 23 at Gulph Mills, just west of West Conshohocken, pertain to these events. Lafayette used Matson's Ford in his operations around Barren Hill.

McKonkey's Ferry

McKonkey's Ferry, on the Delaware River. At the time of Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware the ferry-houses and taverns on both sides could properly be called McKonkey's, since they were owned by father and son. But D. S. Freeman concludes from his laborious study of contemporary accounts that "McKonkey's Ferry" was applied to the Pennsylvania side and "Johnson's Ferry" to the New Jersey side. Hessian reports called the latter "John's Ferry" (George Washington, IV, p. 307, n. 17). See also washington crossing state park, below, and washington crossing under New Jersey.

Moland House (Washington's Headquarters)

Moland House (Washington's Headquarters), near Pa. 263 just north of Warminster, 1641 Old York Road, Warwick Township. On Old York Road (Pa. 263) at one of the main crossroads of Bucks County, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia and the same distance west of Trenton, Washington's tired army camped during the period 10 to 23 August 1777. It was a particularly trying time for Washington, who was coping with many administrative problems in connection with supplying his troops while trying to figure out where he should march them next. Much was made of the difficult administrative and strategic problems at this time (on the eve of the Battle of Brandywine), and this authority is plainly confused as to exactly where Washington's camp was located in terms of modern landmarks. The "Headquarters Farm," as the highway marker calls the Moland House (1713), is also said to be where "Lafayette joined the American Army." Actually, Lafayette had presented his credentials to an unenthusiastic Congress on 28 July, offering to serve at his own expense and start without official rank, after which Congress promptly commissioned him a major general without a command (31 July). The nineteen-year-old French nobleman's first meeting with Washington was in Philadelphia a few days later, and Washington was almost immediately won over by Lafayette's modest, tactful, and admiring manner (ibid., p. 450). At this time, around 5 August, Washington invited Lafayette to visit the American army then deployed in defensive positions around Philadelphia (ibid., p. 448). Lafayette technically "joined the American Army" when Congress commissioned him on 31 July. He undoubtedly visited Washington's army before it encamped around the Moland House, 10 to 23 August. The significance of the house's association with Lafayette is therefore unclear, but it is all the more interesting because of this minor historical mystery.

The Moland House was recently restored, and opened to the public in 2004. It is indicated by a highway historical marker. Some further information is available on the Moland House website, although it is a very difficult site from which to procure clear data. Website: www.moland.org.

Muhlenberg House and Graves

Muhlenberg House and Graves, Trappe, Montgomery County. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787) was the single most significant figure in the early history of the Lutheran Church in America, and his son John Peter Gabriel (1746–1807) was a distinguished general during the Revolution as well as a famous clergyman and politician. The house built before the Revolution by the father (who died here) and later owned by the son is still standing, a privately owned structure of three stories, built of stone covered with stucco and having much of its original woodwork. The address is 201 Main Street.

Both of these Muhlenbergs and their wives are buried directly behind the old Augustus Lutheran Church, which is adjacent to the new church and just north of Main Street. The church was founded by Henry Muhlenberg and the surviving structure built in 1743, making it the oldest unchanged Lutheran Church building in continuous use in the United States.

Trappe, first known as New Providence, is located off U.S. 422 (Pottstown Expressway), and is roughly midway between Limerick and Collegeville.

Nash (Francis) Grave

Nash (Francis) Grave, Towamencin Mennonite Meeting, near Kulpsville, Montgomery County. The death of Brigadier General Francis Nash (c. 1742–1777) of a wound received in the Battle of Germantown (see under philadelphia) was a serious loss to the Patriot cause. He was one of the most promising young generals of the Continental army, his military reputation dating from before the Revolution, when in his native North Carolina he led a company of militia in the Battle of the Alamance (see under north carolina). In addition, Francis Nash had risen to prominence as a merchant, attorney, and Whig politician. His brother Abner, who was about two years older, became governor of North Carolina in the spring of 1780 as his state became an active theater of military operations. Evidence of the fame of the brothers is the fact that Nashville, Tennessee, was named for them from its initial settlement in 1779.

General Nash was leading his North Carolina brigade into action at Germantown on 4 October 1777 when he was hit in the thigh by a cannonball. Three days later he died, far from his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and his body has never been moved from its original resting place. The grave has two markers, one erected in 1844 and the other in 1936. Three other officers, also mortally wounded at Germantown, lie beside Nash. The site is at the junction of the Sumneytown Pike and Forty Foot Road, near the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Paoli Massacre Site

Paoli Massacre Site, Malvern. On the night of 20 to 21 September 1777, about a week after the Battle of the Brandywine, General Charles Grey surprised and routed General Anthony Wayne's camp about 2 miles southwest of Paoli Tavern (in today's town of Paoli). This was Wayne's home ground (see wayne birthplace), and he had remained on the south side of the Schuylkill River to harass the British advance. The British learned of his plans and location, surprised his camp shortly after midnight, inflicted many casualties in a brief melee, and scattered Wayne's command before withdrawing with about seventy prisoners. Wayne saved his four cannon and was acquitted of court-martial charges of failing to heed "timely notice" of the attack. As was customary after suffering a humiliating military defeat, the Patriots raised the cry of "massacre." Inscriptions on monuments at the site reiterate the reference to "Patriots who … fell sacrificed to British barbarity."

Charles Grey (1729–1807), an experienced tactical commander, achieved at Paoli and later at Old Tappan, New Jersey, what might serve as textbook models of the surprise of detached camps. Acting on superior military intelligence of Wayne's location, Grey made a two-hour night march with several British regiments and achieved surprise. Finally, he solved the difficult problem of maintaining control in a night engagement by restricting his troops to use of the bayonet. This was orthodox doctrine in Grey's day, which saw the bayonet as deadlier than the inaccurate musket, but he became known after Paoli as "No-flint" Grey because he ordered that soldiers remove their flints if they could not draw the charges from muskets previously loaded. Historians have long discredited the patriotic American accusation that Grey's victory at Paoli was an atrocity, and today's visitors should not be deceived by the inscriptions on the monuments.

Near the battle site, in Malvern Memorial Park, is the mass grave of some fifty-three "mangled dead," protected by a low wall of stone. Some of this stone is from the foundation of a log cabin in which a few American officers were quartered at the time of the action. Nearby is a polished granite obelisk commemorating the "massacre." By walking behind this monument a visitor gets a panoramic view of the country to the south. Otherwise the land-marks of the famous skirmish are unidentified, and the ground where Wayne's rear guard was defeated is not part of the park. Privately owned, it is in the glen south of the obelisk mentioned above.

To reach Malvern Memorial Park in the town of Malvern, go 0.5 mile west from Warren Avenue on Monument Avenue The junction of these streets is 0.4 mile east of King Street (in Malvern) and 0.8 mile north of a traffic light on the Paoli Pike near the Malvern Preparatory School. Every year the Upper Main Line Memorial Association sponsors the Memorial Parade to honor those killed in the Paoli massacre.

Pennsbury Manor

Pennsbury Manor, on the Delaware River, northeast of Philadelphia, near Tullytown, 400 Pennsbury Memorial Road, in Bucks County. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, built a great manor house in the wilderness 25 miles up the Delaware from Philadelphia. He lived there less than two full years before returning to England in 1701, and the property quickly fell into ruin. A recreation of the estate was completed in 1939 on the foundations of the large manor house and outbuildings. Pennsbury Manor has the largest collection of seventeenth-century furniture in the state, and the reconstructed plantation portrays the world of Pennsylvania's founder almost a century before the American Revolution. The site is managed by the PHMC. Phone: (215) 946-0400.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia. The first European settlers on the site of Philadelphia were the Swedes, and their monument—"A jewel in its drab environs" of South Philadelphia—is the Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church National Historic Site (see below). The "City of Brotherly Love" was established in 1682 by William Penn as a Quaker colony. It was a "modern" city from the beginning, with an orderly street plan and with such innovations as garbage collection, street-cleaning services, firefighting and fire-insurance companies, a hospital, and street lighting long before such things were known even in Europe. As early as 1751 "law and order" was assured by a body of paid constables, who replaced the traditional night watchmen. There was a rapid growth in population in the decade preceding the Revolution; Philadelphia, with an estimated 38,000 people, was the third-largest city in the British Empire. (London, the largest, then had 750,000 people, the vast majority of them wallowing in squalor; Edinburgh had just over 40,000.)

In addition to having a much larger population than New York City (22,000), Boston (18,000), and Charleston (12,000), Philadelphia was the center of manufacturing in the American colonies. For these and other reasons Philadelphia was the logical place for the first seat of national government. The first Continental Congress met here in 1774. The Second Continental Congress and its successors sat in Philadelphia until the end of the Revolution, except for two periods totaling less than a year. (Congress fled to Baltimore in December 1776, when it looked as if the British were going to capture Philadelphia, and conducted its business as a sort of "rump parliament" of only twenty to twenty-five members until 4 March 1777. When the British occupied Philadelphia, 26 September 1777 to 18 June 1778, it had one meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then sat in York, Pennsylvania.)

The sites of greatest Revolutionary War interest are listed below in alphabetical order, but a visit to Philadelphia should start at Independence Hall, which is the heart of the remarkable Independence National Historical Park (see those headings below). Philadelphia "Historical Sites" information is available by phone at (215) 965-7676. The website www.gophila.com is also extremely helpful.

African Methodist Episcopal Church, 419 Richard Allen Avenue. In 1777 an itinerant Methodist preacher spoke to a group of slaves in a clearing in the woods near the Delaware River. One of those slaves was seventeen-year-old Richard Allen, who purchased his freedom three years later and became a Methodist. Refusing to attend a segregated church, Allen joined with several others to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first black church in the United States. Allen was responsible for buying the site for their church. Using his own money, Allen purchased this plot on the corner of Sixth and Lombard. "Mother Bethel," as it was known, opened in 1794, beginning a rich history of involvement in Philadelphia's African American community and participation in many issues of national importance. The current building, dating to 1890, is the fourth on this site. Tours are available by appointment; phone: (215) 925-0616. About the same time that Allen had had enough of segregation, Absalom Jones reached the same conclusion within the Episcopal Church, and organized St. Thomas Episcopal Church. The church moved several times in its history before settling at 401 North 52nd Street. Jones and Allen got together in 1787 to establish an African American Masonic Lodge named to honor Prince Hall, a black Revolutionary veteran who opened the first African American Lodge in Boston. The current Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania is at 4301 North Broad Street.

Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, 701 Arch Street. The first municipal museum in the country specifically devoted to the historical experience of black Americans, the museum focuses on the contributions of African Americans to the history of Philadelphia and its region, and includes an exhibit on blacks in the American Revolution. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 6. Phone: (215) 574-0380.

American Women's Heritage Society Museum, 2000 Belmont Mansion. This historic house, built in 1742, played host to Washington, Franklin, and Madison during the Revolution, among many others. Today it houses one of the very few museums devoted to the history of women. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; phone: (215) 878-8844.

Bartram (John) House and Botanical Gardens, 54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard. Phone: (215) 729-5281. A self-educated scientist and pioneer, American botanist John Bartram (1699–1777) built with his own hands the distinctive but remarkably unattractive stone house preserved here. Dating from 1731, the two-and-a-half-story structure has tall Ionic columns that probably were added some years later, when the house was remodeled. Bartram created America's first botanical gardens, which were enlarged by his son and rescued from a subsequent period of neglect. The house is furnished with pieces contemporary with Bartram's period of significant work.

Carpenters' Hall, on 320 Chestnut Street between Fourth and Orianna. Headquarters of the Pennsylvania Committee of Correspondence and seat of the First Continental Congress (1774–1775), this building was constructed in 1770 as a guildhall for the Carpenters' Company of Philadelphia. The basement was used as an ammunition magazine during the Revolution, and it housed the first Bank of the United States during the period 1791 to 1797. Carpenter's Hall is open free to the public. Phone: (215) 925-0167.

Chew House (Cliveden), on Germantown Avenue between Johnson and Cliveden Streets. A famous landmark in the Battle of Germantown, 4 October 1777, this fine Georgian mansion survives as an eighteenth-century island in the urban sprawl of today's world. Privately owned by six generations of the Chew family for 209 years (except for one eighteen-year interval, 1779–1797) and seldom opened to the public during that time, the house and about 6 acres were acquired in 1972 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Varieties of events from historical to musical are held on the site in addition to tours and educational programs. It is open to the public from noon to 4 p.m., Thursday through Sunday. Phone: (215) 848-1777.

When Washington found that General Howe had split his forces after taking Philadelphia on 26 September 1777, he decided to mass his entire army of eleven thousand regulars and militia in an attack on the nine thousand British estimated to be in and around Germantown.

As Washington finally evolved his complicated plan, General John Sullivan was to lead his division, Wayne's division, and Conway's brigade down the Shippack Road from Chestnut Hill across Mount Airy and through Germantown. General Alexander ("Lord Stirling") would follow with two brigades, those of Nash and Maxwell. Three miles to the left and operating initially on a parallel line with Sullivan and Alexander would be the powerful force of three divisions under General Nathanael Greene. Militia units were to advance on both flanks of the regulars, and all of Washington's army would converge to annihilate the British around Germantown, after which they would all march against Cornwallis in Philadelphia.

The Americans reached Chestnut Hill at dawn. At 6 a.m., just as the sun was rising over foggy fields in which visibility was sometimes as low as 30 yards, the Rebels made contact with British outposts near Mount Airy. They were already behind schedule, and Greene was not yet in position on the left, but Sullivan decided to press on. Deploying "Mad Anthony" Wayne's division in the fields on the left of the road to narrow the gap on that flank, Sullivan advanced through the buckwheat fields on the other side of the Shippack Road.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Musgrave had, meanwhile, led his regiment forward to reinforce the British front lines. Driven back by superior forces, he counter-attacked whenever the opportunity arose and conducted a brilliant delaying action. Heavy fog greatly assisted the Americans. Had the British been able to see as far as 100 yards and fire on the Americans as they crossed the numerous fences in their path, "Sullivan's attack would have ended in a slaughter" (Freeman, Washington, IV, pp. 513-514). On the other hand, this fog enabled Musgrave to withdraw part of his force (about 120 men) into the Chew House after fighting his delaying action over a stretch of about 2 miles.

Sullivan's wing (see above) swept on without realizing where their resolute opponents had gone, but the rest of Washington's center column quickly found out. General William Maxwell's division of Alexander's command, moving along the Shippack Road, was held up for half an hour by fire from the Chew House.

By the time this center column got moving again, bypassing the battered but still defended Chew House, the battle was turning into a fiasco. One of Greene's divisions (that of Adam Stephen; see stephen house, west virginia) from the left flank violated orders and marched toward the sound of the fighting around the Chew House. It collided with Wayne's division, which it mistook for the enemy, and shots were exchanged.

Many other things went wrong, and the result was a panic that wrecked Washington's plans just when he and most of his army thought they were about to win a great victory. The Battle of Germantown turned out to have a decisive effect on the outcome of the Revolution because it convinced the French that they should support the Americans openly with military assistance. The French and other European observers were even more impressed by the Germantown defeat than by the Saratoga victory because it showed that the Rebels were determined to keep up their fight for independence. Howe had made Washington look foolish in the Philadelphia campaign; yet Washington snapped back with a powerful and audacious counteroffensive. Whatever historians later decided about Washington's generalship at Germantown, he and his army thought they had almost won a great victory, and this was a great boost to their morale; they were eager to try again somewhere else.

Built in 1763 by Benjamin Chew on his country estate of Cliveden, the two-story house is of gray stone quarried near the site. Imported urns ornamenting the gabled roof and marble statuary on the lawn gave Cliveden its most striking and distinctive look, these features being rare for Philadelphia houses. An imposing entrance hall is of particular interest because of its bright natural lighting and the screen of four columns separating it from the stair hall. But one of the most remarkable things about Cliveden is that many original furnishings remain. One outstanding item is a sofa attributed to the workshop of Thomas Affleck and first owned by Governor Penn. Other rare items are American Sheraton and Hepplewhite furniture and Philadelphia Chippendale mirrors. The acquisition also includes paintings of Cliveden, the Chew family, and an extensive collection of documents relating to both. The house joins some fifty other historic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures in the Germantown Historic District.

Christ Church, on Second Street between Market and Filbert Streets. This church was founded in 1695 and the present building was erected during the period 1727 to 1754. One of the finest colonial churches in America, it was attended by some of the most famous of the Patriots. Buried there are John Penn (last proprietary governor), General John Forbes, General Charles Lee, James Wilson, and Robert Morris ("The Financier of the Revolution").

Christ Church Cemetery, Fifth and ArchStreets. About a quarter of a mile away from Christ Church, land was purchased here in 1719 as a burial ground. Graves include those of five signers of the Declaration of Independence: Franklin (and his wife), Francis Hopkinson (of New Jersey), Benjamin Rush, Joseph Hewes (of Edenton, North Carolina), and George Ross. After being closed for twenty-five years, the cemetery reopened to the public in 2003.

Deshler-Morris House, 5442 Germantown Avenue. Built in 1772 to 1773, this was Washington's home during the summers of 1793 and 1794. It is part of the Independence National Historical Park but located in Germantown, far from the main group of buildings. The house has been restored and refurnished, and it is open Friday to Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. from April through mid-December, and by appointment only during other months. Phone: (215) 596-1748.

Dilworth-Todd-Moylan House, 343 Walnut Street at Fourth Street. Built in 1776 by Jonathan Dilworth, this house was bought in 1791 by John Todd, Jr., the first husband of Dolly Payne Madison. Between 1796 and 1807 it was the home of Colonel Stephen Moylan, the jolly Irishman who was closely associated with Washington in many varied capacities during the Revolution.

Elfreth's Alley Historical District, north of Arch Street between Front and Second Streets. In a remarkably good state of preservation, the little dwellings of artisans and craftsmen along this narrow street present a scene virtually unchanged in two centuries. It is commonly referred to as "Our Nation's Oldest Residential Street." The Elfreth's Alley Association was established in 1934 to conserve the site; it is using income from the annual fete day to restore Number 126 (built 1741–1762) as a permanent headquarters and museum. Daily guided tours of the district are available. Phone: (215) 574-0560.

Fort Mifflin, on the Delaware River at the foot of Fort Mifflin Road in South Philadelphia, just east of Philadelphia International Airport. Construction of a river fort to bar the water approach to Philadelphia was started in 1772 by the famous Captain John Montresor, a British military engineer. It was completed in 1777 under the direction of Major General Thomas Mifflin, and protected one end of the line of water obstacles stretching across the river to Fort Mercer, New Jersey.

After the British captured Philadelphia on 26 September 1777 by overland operations that avoided the Delaware River forts, General Howe had to open his line of communications with the fleet, or his position in Philadelphia would have become untenable. While the fleet under his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, was battering its way through the defenses farther down the Delaware, General Howe showed unwonted vigor in opening his campaign against the forts from the land side.

Despite the efforts of Washington's troops to stop them, the British succeeded in getting siege artillery emplaced on Providence Island, a swampy region where the United States Naval Depot was later established. At short range the gunners were able to deliver a sustained fire against the land side of the American fort, which had not been properly built for this unexpected threat. The defenders had valiantly fought back against this bombardment and had also inflicted severe damage on warships that tried to force their way past, but British water batteries started closing in. On 10 November, exactly a month after the fire from Providence Island had begun, a floating battery with twenty-two large guns (24-pounders) had closed to within 40 yards of the fort. In succeeding days the Royal Navy moved so close with their ships that their marines were able to fire into the fort from the rigging. Most of the fort's guns had long since been silenced, and the surviving defenders were virtually defenseless.

Major Simeon Thayer, who had succeeded the wounded Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smith, evacuated his troops the night of 15 to 16 November to Fort Mercer after destroying what was left of his position. (See fort mercer, new jersey.)

Reconstruction of Fort Mifflin was started in the 1790s and modifications were made periodically until 1904. In the 1930s it was restored from the plans drawn by L'Enfant for the construction started in 1798 when war with France was expected. The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings notes that "Fort Mifflin preserves much of its character as an example of eighteenth-century military engineering, despite modifications over the years." (The stone wall on the river side is original.) It is of interest also as the scene of one of the bravest defensive fights ever put up by American troops.

Open to the public since 1969, Old Fort Mifflin is restored to its original appearance and features a wide array of historical programs and reenactments. Phone: (215) 685-4167.

Franklin Court, on Orianna Street between Chestnut and Market Streets. A 100-yard section of Orianna Street is one of the federal areas of Independence National Historical Park. Here is the site of the house in which Benjamin Franklin once lived and where he died. Today there is a peculiar "ghost structure" made of steel that outlines Franklin's house. There is an underground museum with historic displays, interactive exhibits, and a twenty-two-minute film, "The Real Ben Franklin." The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Nearby, one can also visit the United States Postal Service Museum at 316 Market Street, open Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the Franklin Print Shop at 320 Market Street (hours vary, (215) 965-2305).

Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church National Historic Site, in South Philadelphia on Delaware Avenue near Christian Street. The existing structure of red brick was dedicated in 1700, and the Swedish accent is preserved in the steep gable roof, square belfry, and small spire. Swedes started settling along the Delaware in 1631. One of their great contributions to what became the American way of life was the log cabin, which was unknown in England. Gloria Dei replaced a small log blockhouse that the church had used since its establishment around 1646. Phone: (215) 389-1513.

Among the church treasures to be seen today are a carved cherubim and baptismal font of 1643 brought over by the first settlers. Silver altar appointments, old Bibles, and other documents comprise a collection of great value and interest.

Betsy Ross married her second husband here in 1777, and Daniel Boone's sister Margaret is among the many people of historical interest buried in the churchyard. Gloria Dei separated from the mother church in 1789, and in 1845 became Episcopalian. It remains the center of an active parish.

Independence Hall, on Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets. This is the most important historical site in Philadelphia, if not in America. The city purchased it in 1818 from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, taking the first step in a long and sustained process of preservation. By a cooperative agreement between city and federal authorities, the Independence Hall group of buildings has been administered since 1951 as part of Independence National Historical Park (described below). Independence Hall is the heart of this park, and is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Construction of the building was begun in 1732, and it was originally the statehouse for the colony of Pennsylvania. Here the Second Continental Congress met during the Revolution, except for two periods totaling less than a year when it was not safe to remain in the city. In this building George Washington was chosen to head the Continental army. Washington delivered his acceptance speech here, and in 1787 he started performing his functions as president of the Federal Constitutional Convention. The Declaration of Independence was adopted here in 1776, and four days later, on 8 July, the Liberty Bell (see below) was rung after the Declaration was first read to the citizens of Philadelphia. The bell is displayed here today. The Constitution was signed in this historic building.

Independence National Historical Park, a large area between Chestnut and Walnut Streets and Second and Sixth Streets, in addition to many nearby detached areas and four sites some distance away. The information center is in the west wing of Independence Hall. Covered in alphabetical order in this article on Philadelphia are the sites of Revolutionary War interest within the park. Sites the author has omitted are: Philosophical Hall, Library Hall, the First and Second Banks of the United States, New Hall (a modern reconstruction which houses a museum of early Marine Corps history), the Philadelphia Exchange, and the Bishop White House and Pemberton House (a reconstructed house that features the Army-Navy Museum). Information about all of these places is readily available in tourist guides. Phone: (215) 965-2305.

Jefferson House, officially known as the Graff House, Seventh Street near Market Street. A marker indicates the site of a three-story brick house in which Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. He was then thirty-three years old. The house was rebuilt in 1883 and rebuilt years later by the National Park Service, which relied on old photographs for the construction. There is only one item known to be authentic to Jefferson's time in the house: a key to the desk. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 12 p.m. to 2 p.m; phone: (215) 597-8974.

Liberty Bell, in Independence Hall. Construction of the bell tower on Independence Hall was authorized in 1750 and completed in 1753. A bell was ordered from England in 1751 and delivered in 1752. It weighed about 2,000 pounds. The colonial council had prescribed that it should have cast around its crown the words from Leviticus: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof." This was intended as a fiftieth anniversary memorial to William Penn's Charter of Privileges (1701). The bell was not known by its current name until 1839, when it was associated with the anti-slavery movement.

The bell cracked while being tested in 1752 in Philadelphia, and was recast twice. Starting in 1753 the bell was rung on public occasions, one of which was the first reading of the Declaration of Independence to the citizens of Philadelphia in Independence Square on 8 July 1776. At least, tradition has it that the bell was rung on this occasion; if true, the scene would have been quite different from that visualized by a modern patriot because nobody paid much attention to the Declaration of Independence until many years later. It merely made a matter of record the course Congress had already set. Few of the men now immortalized as signers mentioned the document in their letters, and although nobody signed the document until 2 August, John Adams and Jefferson were so little impressed by this event that they both insisted many years later that they had signed on 4 July.

The bell was hidden for almost a year in Allentown during the British occupation of Philadelphia, after which it was rung again on public occasions. According to tradition, the bell was strained in tolling during the obsequies of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835. The final damage, which silenced it forever, occurred in 1846 when it was rung on Washington's birthday. The Liberty Bell Center Museum is open all year and is part of National Independence National Historical Park.

Mikveh Israel Cemetery, Spruce and Ninth Streets. Established in 1738, this is the city's oldest Jewish burial ground, and it is included in the Independence National Historical Park. Graves include those of Haym Salomon, a Patriot who spent much time in British prisons for subversive activities and performed valuable services as a financier of the Revolution, and of Nathan Levy, whose ship brought the Liberty Bell to America.

Mount Pleasant, in Fairmount Park, between East River Drive and the Columbia Avenue entrance. One of the most beautiful houses in America (one architectural historian, Thomas T. Waterman, calls it the finest colonial house in the North), Mount Pleasant was built during the period 1761 to 1762 by a Scottish sea captain. This probably accounts for the balustraded deck on the hipped roof. From the house's hilltop location there is a magnificent view of the Schuylkill.

The mansion was bought by Benedict Arnold in 1779, when he was military commander of Philadelphia. About this time, the thirty-eight-year-old hero married nineteen-year-old Peggy Shippen. There is no proof that the couple ever lived at Mount Pleasant, but Arnold did install there his devoted sister, Hannah, and his three sons by his first wife. The estate, which Arnold had settled on his wife for life, was confiscated when the hero turned traitor. Arnold secretly repurchased it through his father-in-law for less than the £5,000 ($25,000) he claimed from the British for his loss of the estate, but he subsequently resold it.

The house was leased for a brief period to Baron von Steuben. Eventually it came into the possession of General Jonathan Williams, a kinsman and long-time associate of Benjamin Franklin. The city of Philadelphia bought it in 1868 from the Williams family. Refurnished handsomely by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is administered by that institution. It closed for renovation for some time but reopened to the public in the fall of 2005. Phone: (215) 763-8100.

Ross (Betsy) House (c. 1740), 239 Arch Street. The legend of Betsy Ross's making the first Stars and Stripes is based on a story first made public in 1870 by her grandson. But there was a Betsy Ross (1752–1836) who rented the house from 1773 to 1786, and there is documentary evidence of her being paid in 1777 for "making ships' colours, etc." She eloped in 1773 with John Ross (the first of her three husbands), who opened an upholsterer's shop on the site of what is now 233 Arch Street. A little brick structure dating from about 1700 has been restored here and furnished with appropriate memorabilia to perpetuate a patriotic myth. The house/museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily from April through September. Phone: (215) 686-1252.

St. George's Church, 235 North Fourth Street. The oldest Methodist church now standing in America, this building has been in continuous use since 1769, except during the British occupation of Philadelphia. Phone: (215) 925-7788.

St. Joseph's Church, on Willings Alley between Third and Fourth Streets. Earlier structures of 1733 and 1757 have been replaced by this one, which was started in 1838. When it opened, St. Joseph's held the only legally allowed Catholic mass in the British Empire. Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau both worshiped here, as did a number of other prominent Catholics of the Revolutionary era. Mass has been celebrated here without interruption for more than two centuries. Tours are available by appointment; phone: (215) 923-1733. (See St. Mary's Church, below.)

St. Mary's Church, at 252 South Fourth Street between Locust and Spruce. The principal Catholic church in Philadelphia during the Revolution, it was established in 1763. Thomas Fitz-Simons and Commander John Barry ("Father of the American Navy") are buried here. Phone: (215) 923-7930.

Walnut Street Prison, marker on Sixth Street near Walnut Street. Extending between Walnut and Locust Streets, on the east edge of modern Washington Square, was a notorious prison that stood during the years 1775 to 1838. The Patriots used it as a jail for Loyalists, and during the British occupation of Philadelphia the infamous William Cunningham was in charge of American prisoners there who had been taken at Brandywine and Germantown. The death rate was high, and hundreds of prisoners of war were buried in the potter's field (established in 1704) where Washington Square was subsequently created. The prison was torn down in 1838.

Washington Square, bounded by Sixth, Seventh, Walnut, and Locust Streets, is a beautiful area to walk and view historic buildings. Once known as Congo Square for its use as a meeting place for the city's free blacks, the square was the burial site for hundreds of soldiers during the Revolution.

Pocono Indian Museum

Pocono Indian Museum, Bushkill. The Delaware, or Lenni Lenapee as they called themselves, were the subject of one of the greatest land frauds in American history, the so-called "Walking Purchase" of 1737. Already crushed by losing most of their land to the proprietors of Pennsylvania, the Delaware were nearly exterminated during the Revolution, with the survivors scattered to regions as far west as Oklahoma and north to Canada. The Pocono Museum, which sits on lands taken from the Delaware, displays artifacts from archaeological excavations as well as information on their history. Located south of town on U.S. 209, the museum is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Phone: (717) 588-9338.

Summerseat

Summerseat, Legion and Clymer Avnues, Morrisville, Bucks County. Thomas Barclay built this attractive two-story stone house in 1773. It was the home at later intervals of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, George Clymer and Robert Morris. During the period 8 to 14 December 1776 it was Washington's headquarters (just before his famous crossing of the Delaware). Restored in 1931, it became part of the Morrisville school system until 1976, when it was purchased by the Historic Morrisville Society, and it is now open to the public on a limited basis. For more information phone (215) 295-9287.

Swede's Ford

Swede's Ford, in modern Norristown on the Schuylkill River. On one of the main avenues of approach to Philadelphia, this crossing figured prominently in maneuvers after the Patriot defeat on the Brandywine (see brandywine battlefield). Washington used it in moving to Valley Forge and in sending the large detachment under Lafayette to Barren Hill.

Thomson Home

Thomson Home, officially known as Harriton House, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County. Charles Thomson came to America from Ireland as an orphan at the age of ten and became a schoolmaster before prospering as a merchant and then becoming active in politics. He is best remembered as the "perpetual secretary" of the Continental Congress, holding this office for almost fifteen years (until 1789). His second marriage was in 1774, to the daughter of the second owner of the estate of Harriton, near Philadelphia, and here he lived until his death in 1824, making "scholarly and felicitous" translations of the Septuagint and the New Testament. The house dates from 1704 and is in the National Survey inventory (1964) under the heading "Sites Also Noted." The house became a museum in 1970. It is located at 500 Harriton Road, west of Bryn Mawr on Montgomery Road to Roberts Road, and then onto Harriton. The house is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Phone: (610) 525-0201.

Thompson's Island Skirmish (Brodhead Expedition)

Thompson's Island Skirmish (Brodhead Expedition), Allegheny River, Warren County. The only Revolutionary War engagement in northwestern Pennsylvania occurred here on 15 August 1779. Colonel Daniel Brodhead had left Fort Pitt four days earlier with six hundred troops for a punitive expedition up the Allegheny. (It had been supposed to link up with the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition in New York for an attack on Fort Niagara, but failed to make contact.) Leaving the river at the mouth of Mahoning Creek (around modern Templeton) and moving "through a country almost impassable by reason of stupendous heights and frightful declivities," as described by a participant, the expedition came back to the Allegheny about 15 miles above today's Franklin (then Venango).

From there the going was worse. What shows on modern highway maps as a route recommended for its scenic beauty (U.S. 62) was for the Brodhead Expedition "a continued narrow defile, allowing us only the breadth of an Indian path to march upon" (Commager and Morris, The Sprit of Seventy Six, pp. 1023-1024). In the only attempt to bar Brodhead's advance, some thirty to forty Indian warriors landed from canoes at a point opposite Thompson's Island.

The commander of the Patriot advance guard, Lieutenant Jonathan Hardin, attacked before the Indians could get organized. Leaving five dead, and abandoning their canoes, the Indians "fled with the utmost horror and precipitation," some into the woods and others swimming the river (presumably to Thompson's Island). Hardin's only casualties—he had fourteen white soldiers and eight Delawares—were three men slightly wounded.

Brodhead, meeting no further resistance, went on to burn ten towns of the Mingo, Munsey, and Seneca Indians (165 houses) and destroy an estimated 500 acres of corn. Coming back, the expedition found "a creek about 10 miles above Venango, remarkable for an oily liquid which oozes from the sides and bottom of the channel and the adjacent springs, much resembling British oil, and if applied to a woolen cloth, burns instantly" (ibid.). This was, of course, Oil Creek, where the earliest explorers had found the Indians skimming surface oil (used medicinally) and where the petroleum industry was centered during the years 1859 to 1865.

The site of the Thompson's Island Skirmish is marked on U.S. 62, 9 miles southwest of Warren. The latter city is on the site of Conewango, a Seneca village of historical importance on the Iroquois frontier.

Valley Forge National Historical Park

Valley Forge National Historical Park, Port Kennedy, off Valley Forge interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The site of the famous winter quarters of 1777 to 1778 is preserved in a park of 3,466 acres. Although veterans of Washington's miserable little army would have trouble today in recognizing the area that one of them, General Kalb, said was probably selected on the advice of a speculator, a traitor, or a council of ignoramuses, Valley Forge has been transformed into an impressive shrine of American patriotism.

Even when stripped of the myths that have been invented since the Revolution—such as Washington's kneeling to pray in the snow—Valley Forge deserves to be immortalized. It was here that the losers of earlier campaigns were transformed into the winners of Monmouth and Yorktown. Although it was a mild winter (the next one, at Morristown [see morristown national historical park under New Jersey], made Valley Forge look like a picnic), an estimated three thousand of the ten thousand troops died there or in various hospitals to which they were removed. Their suffering was caused by administrative incompetence, graft, and war profiteering, however, and the real triumphs of the winter at Valley Forge were the military reforms that Washington was able to bring about. Congress was finally ready to listen to his recommendations on military matters, so Washington was able to strengthen the officer corps, to get more recruits for the Continental infantry, to improve the quality of the cavalry, and to correct weaknesses of army administration. After the miserable failure of Thomas Mifflin as quartermaster general, the supply mess was straightened out by Nathanael Greene, who was prevailed on by Washington to leave his duties as a field commander for this purpose. General Steuben became famous at Valley Forge for his colorful and highly effective performance as the Prussian drillmaster who gave American officers and men the professional training they so sorely needed.

Although Valley Forge had many shortcomings as a campsite—"no village, no plain, and little valley," writes D. S. Freeman in his biography of Washington—it was almost ideal from a tactical and strategic viewpoint. It provided good defensive terrain, it had a good supply of wood for building and for burning, it had good drainage, and water was abundant. Less than 20 miles from Philadelphia, where the British army was living high, it was between that place and the temporary seat of the Continental Congress at York.

Today's visitor will see reconstructed huts, impressive memorials, extensive remains of forts, earthworks, and campsites, the house that served as Washington's headquarters, which now serves as one of the park's museums, and the expected military reenactments. The Mount Joy observatory tower provides a view of the campsite and the surrounding countryside. It stands at the site of Washington's marquee, the field tent he used until he moved into the house of the Quaker preacher Isaac Potts, mentioned above. The tent is preserved in the museum. A visitor will also see the parade ground where Steuben took the troops' minds off their problems of "no pay, no clothes, no provisions, no rum," and where they celebrated with a feu de joie the news of the French alliance. Guided tours are available, and visitors can roam the vast grounds while basking in the natural scenery and the site's rich history. The park is open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Phone: (610) 783-1077; website: http://www.nps.gov/vafo/home.htm.

Warren Tavern

Warren Tavern. Seebattle of the clouds.

Washington Crossing State Park and New Hope

Washington Crossing State Park and New Hope, Delaware River, Bucks County. A highway bridge across the Delaware connects the state parks of Pennsylvania (478 acres) and New Jersey (372 acres) in what the National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings has called "an outstanding preservation of a key site in the winning of American independence." Operated by the PHMC, this site contains thirteen historic buildings, some of which are noted in this listing. The park is open Tuesday through Saturday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5:00 p.m. For further information, call the park at (215) 493-4076.

On the Pennsylvania side the park has two separate sections on the river about 4 miles apart, one at the community of Washington Crossing (Pa. 32) and the other at Bowman's Hill (north of Pa. 32). In New Hope Borough (a little farther north on Pa. 32) are the Coryell and Vansant Houses (see below).

Washington's crossing of the Delaware on the night of 25 to 26 December 1776 to surprise and defeat the Hessian garrison in Trenton is one of the most dramatic events of the American Revolution. There is, however, the danger that the drama of the crossing may obscure Washington's real achievement here in getting this offensive effort out of a ragged and demoralized little band of troops that had taken one beating after another. When there was every reason to assume that the American Revolution had failed militarily, a few individual leaders succeeded in saving it. Washington's personal contribution is evident: knowing that the British could resume their offensive toward Philadelphia when the Delaware froze hard enough to support their crossing, and faced with expiring enlistments that would reduce his army to about 1,400 men on 31 December, Washington decided to make one final military effort. Less well known are the contributions of Thomas Paine and General Thomas Mifflin in whipping up the support Washington needed. The first number of The Crisis was published by Paine on 19 December in the Pennsylvania Journal, with the opening lines "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country." Mifflin undertook a whirlwind tour of Pennsylvania to rally the militia, accomplishing what historian John C. Miller in his Triumph of Freedom has called "probably one of the most important missions of the war."

And on the technical side, too often ignored in attempting to appreciate military operations, the role of Colonel John Glover's men and the Durham boats deserve special mention. (For this see the article on Durham Village.)

Of the three separate sites on the Pennsylvania side, the southernmost is around the present community of Washington Crossing. At the landing area is the Old Ferry Inn (1774), on the north side of Pa. 532 near the bridge. A handsome park memorial building here has an important library, but its main attraction is an excellent copy of the painting by the German artist Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware. The less said about the artistic and historical qualities of this famous work the better, but it is only fair to acknowledge that "it constitutes an inspiring interpretation of the event in spirit if not in factual detail" (Colonials and Patriots, p. 122). (The original, once on loan here, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) The Washington Crossing Monument (1916) overlooks the ferry site.

About 4 miles north on Pa. 32 is another section of the park, where the Patriot troops camped during the period 12 to 25 December 1776. On Bowman's Hill, in a 100-acre wildflower preserve, is a fieldstone memorial observation tower where the Patriots had a lookout. Northwest about 2.5 miles away is the Thompson-Neely House, used before the crossing as headquarters of officers including General William Alexander, Captain William Washington, and Lieutenant James Monroe (one of the few wounded at Trenton, where he distinguished himself, and a future president of the United States). The older section of this handsome, two-story stone house was built in 1702; it is furnished and open to the public. The old gristmill owned by Robert Thompson in 1776 is near the house. Just to the south (0.1 mile) is a 17-acre tract of primitive land maintained as a wildlife preserve with restrictions on visiting. Also in this Bowman's Hill section of the park is a memorial flagstaff over the unmarked gravestones of soldiers who died during the encampment.

In the Borough of New Hope, a short distance north, are two historic houses associated with the crossing. (Neither is open to the public.) The home of John Coryell, 105 South Main Street, built around 1750, marks the northern end of the Patriot defensive position along the Delaware in December 1776. Coryell's Ferry was the name of the village during the period 1765 to 1790. (See the separate section on coryell's ferry.) Near the Town Hall (1790), 0.1 mile away, is the Vansant House on the northwest corner of Mechanic Street. Probably the oldest house in the village, it was built about 1743. The attic walls still show grapeshot from British batteries that fired across the river in 1776. See washington crossing, new jersey.

Wayne Birthplace

Wayne Birthplace, near Paoli. "Waynesboro," the house where Anthony Wayne was born in 1745 and where he followed his father's trade as a tanner until the start of the Revolution, has remained standing and in the Wayne family. The beautiful house has been carefully restored and is visible from Waynesboro Road, opposite the General Wayne Golf Course (Wayne's Borough Country Club). The fence surrounding the private home has a marker. To reach the site, go a short distance east from Paoli on U.S. 30 to Pa. 252 (Leopard Road), turn right (south), drive about 0.8 mile, and turn right on Waynesboro Road. The house is on the right, near a branch of Crum Creek that runs through the golf course. A few miles away is the Wayne Grave.

Wayne Grave

Wayne Grave, St. David's (Radnor) Churchyard, near Wayne (see below). Buried first at Fort Presque Isle (site is in Erie at Sixth and Ash Streets), General "Mad Anthony" Wayne was reinterred near his birthplace in 1809. Old St. David's dates from 1715, and the church structure has been well preserved in its ancient and picturesque churchyard. Wayne's grave is about 50 feet north of the small stone structure.

To reach the site, from U.S. 30 (Lancaster Pike) go south from the Devon Horse Show grounds on Dorset Road for 0.5 mile, continue on Sugartown Road for 0.7 mile around two right-angle curves, and continue 0.6 mile south on Valley Forge Road to the entrance on the right. (New St. David's may be seen on the left, 0.2 mile north.)

The official designation of the church is St. David's Radnor, and published literature available on the site gives its location variously as Devon and Wayne, Pennsylvania. Other authorities place it in Radnor. The explanation of this mystery is simply that the church property is split by three township lines.

Weiser Home and Grave

Weiser Home and Grave, 28 Weiser Road, near Womelsdorf, Berks County. Phone: (610) 589-2934. Conrad Weiser, born in Germany in 1696, came to New York with his family in 1710 and spent the winter of 1712 to 1713 with the Iroquois, becoming a student of Indian culture. Moving to Pennsylvania, he prospered as a farmer and tanner, raised fourteen children, and became a famous trader and treaty maker with the Indians. The site of his trading post, operated from about 1750 to 1760, is marked in Reading in Penn Square between Fifth and Sixth Streets. The property where he built a home in 1729, and where he spent the rest of his life, is preserved as a state park in memory of this enlightened keeper of the peace on the colonial frontier. The park is managed by the PHMC. Another good source of local information is the Historical Society of Berks County. Phone: (610) 375-4375.

White Horse Tavern

White Horse Tavern. Seebattle of the clouds.

Whitemarsh

Whitemarsh, on the Wissahickon Creek, Montgomery County. Before going to Valley Forge for winter quarters in the latter part of December 1777, Washington's army was camped in this area. Although it is now covered by urban development, place-names and some buildings have survived since the Revolution, and much of the terrain is preserved in three separated sections of the 493-acre Fort Washington State Park, other parks, and many country clubs. In Whitemarsh is the George Emlen House, which was Washington's headquarters, and the Hope Lodge State Historic Site, a restored Georgian mansion where General Nathanael Greene was quartered.

When the British were in Philadelphia, General Howe made a night march with most of his army, hoping to catch the Patriots while in a vulnerable situation at Whitemarsh. After pushing in the American outposts, Howe found that Washington's position was too strong, so in mid-afternoon of 7 December he started withdrawing to Philadelphia.

Hope Lodge, 553 South Bethlehem Turnpike in Fort Washington, is a two-story brick mansion with an imposing exterior and a fine interior of molded wainscotings, large fireplaces, and a spacious central hallway. It was built around 1750 and bought not long before the British occupation of Philadelphia by William West, a Philadelphia merchant of the Patriot persuasion whose business sense suggested that this was a good time to acquire property in the suburbs. His nephew and namesake lived in the house as a paroled prisoner, but there is evidence that he did espionage work for the American army. (William West the senior was later involved with General Benedict Arnold in profiteering in Philadelphia.)

In 1784 the mansion was a wedding gift from Henry Hope to his cousin James Watmough, who then gave it its present name. (The Hope Diamond was so called after being acquired by this same international family in 1830.) Hope Lodge was saved from destruction in 1922, restored and refurnished by private owners at that time, and given to the state in 1957. It is maintained by the PHMC and open for tours on Wednesday through Sunday. Forming a crescent around Hope Lodge in Fort Washington State Park are the hills fortified by Washington's army in November to December 1777, since known as Camp Hill, Fort Hill, and Militia Hill. To find Hope Lodge take Exit 339 off the Pennsylvania Turnpike and follow the road past the Holiday Inn. Take a left onto Bethlehem Pike. Hope Lodge will be on the left. Phone: (215) 646-1595.

Wyoming Valley

Wyoming Valley. A 25-mile stretch of the Susquehanna River below the mouth of the Lackawanna River (including modern Wilkes-Barre) was known in colonial times as the Wyoming Valley. (At least a dozen other places were called Wyoming by 1865, when this name was first proposed for the state of Wyoming.) Claimed by Connecticut as well as by Pennsylvania, the valley was the scene of bloody clashes known as the Pennamite Wars. By 1775 the Connecticut element was leading in these intramural contests, but the settlers then started forming new teams for the larger contest, the American Revolution. Loyalists who had come in from the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys were pitted against Whigs (or "Patriots").

In July 1778 the famous Wyoming Valley Massacre occurred. The fifty-three-year-old John Butler led four hundred Loyalists in a remarkable, 200-mile march through the wilderness from Fort Niagara and was joined en route by some five hundred Senecas and Cayugas. The Patriots had been warned of the invasion but were still caught by surprise. In the Battle of Wyoming, 3 July 1778, the raiders wiped out an ineptly led force of three hundred local militia and sixty "regulars." (The latter qualified as such only because Congress had authorized their formation after the best military manpower of the valley had been drained into the Continental army.)

Only sixty Patriots escaped the decisive battle on the afternoon of 3 July. About fourteen captives died that night on "the Bloody Rock" (see below). The raiders ravaged the Wyoming Valley settlements, Loyalists settling old scores and Indians claiming the rewards of victory. More than one thousand houses and other structures were destroyed; more than one thousand head of livestock were carried off. Some two dozen noncombatants were murdered, but perhaps the worst loss of life resulted because panic-stricken fugitives fled without proper provisions over wilderness trails. John Butler reported with "sincerest satisfaction" that his Loyalists and Indians killed no noncombatants.

The major sites figuring in accounts of the massacre are indicated by highway markers. The flat area of pine woods and underbrush where the battle took place is intersected by a wide highway (U.S. 11) in the present town of Wyoming. Here, easily found half a mile south of the traffic light at Eighth Street in the center of Wyoming, is a small park with a 63-foot-high granite monument erected in the 1840s near the scene of the action and "over the bones of the slain." Listed on it are the names of about 45 survivors and 166 slain. Remains of the latter were not collected and buried here in a mass grave until 22 October 1778.

"The Bloody Rock" is about a mile northeast, preserved under a crude grill in a small plot of grass under two large trees between Seventh and Eighth Streets. (From the traffic light mentioned above, go southeast on Eighth Street toward the river for 0.6 mile, then about 100 yards left on Susquehanna Avenue.) Here some fourteen captives were supposedly executed the night of the battle by an Indian woman identified by tradition as "Queen Esther."

Other landmarks, of interest only because their location is marked, are given below in alphabetical order.

Forty Fort, where the town of that name now stands, on U.S. 11, 2 miles below Wyoming. A large cemetery at the principal intersection (Wyoming Avenue, or U.S. 11, and River Street) is about where the first forty settlers from Connecticut built their blockhouse after arriving in 1770. The colony grew, and the Patriots strengthened Forty Fort when they became alarmed about the growing Loyalist activity 2 miles north (now Wyoming) where the fortified house of the Wintermoots was located. It was their base before the Battle of Wyoming, and the place where survivors took refuge with the assembled noncombatants. They all surrendered the next morning with the written stipulation that their lives and property would be protected, fleeing the valley in terror once Butler let them go. The present cemetery, badly damaged in the 1972 flood, has only a few Revolutionary War graves, but one is that of John Jenkins (see Fort Jenkins, below). On River Street and Fort Street rests a huge rock that marks where the fort once stood. A bronze plaque was erected there by the Wyoming Valley DAR Chapter in 1900.

Fort Jenkins, just north of the I-80 bridge, near where U.S. 11 and Pa. 92 now join in West Pittston, about 3 miles above today's Wyoming. It was the home of the Whig John Jenkins, erected in 1776, and almost immediately fortified because the home of the Loyalist Wintermoots was being made into a stronghold. Jenkins's and a smaller "fort" called Exeter were captured and burned by Butler's forces when they first entered the valley on 30 June 1778. The next day the Patriot column advancing from Forty Fort clashed here with Indians who had just killed some men working in a field. Meanwhile, the raiders established themselves around Wintermoot's (see below). Among the three or four Revolutionary graves in the present Forty Fort Cemetery is that of a John Jenkins, most probably the man identified with Fort Jenkins. The highway marker implies that this fort was near the present bridge and the junction of the highways mentioned above, about 3 miles from modern Wyoming. However, after visiting the area in 1848, Benson Lossing put the site 1.5 miles from the battle monument.

Wilkes-Barre Fort (Fort Wyoming), where the public square of today's Wilkes-Barre is located, about 8 miles by road, then and now, from the site of Fort Jenkins. It was first built in 1771 by Pennsylvanians, seized by Connecticut settlers, and rebuilt the year of Butler's raid by enclosing the courthouse. The place was surrendered along with others of the valley the day after the battle. The settlement's twenty-three houses were burned, but enough of the fort survived for it to be the rallying point for the few settlers who did not abandon the valley, and it was the headquarters for the relief column that arrived a month after the Battle of Wyoming. In 1779 the slow-starting punitive expedition under General John Sullivan was at Fort Wyoming for five weeks. In 1784 the fort was destroyed after the postwar garrison was withdrawn.

Wintermoot's Fort, a few hundred yards above "the Bloody Rock," according to Lossing's sketch (op. cit., p. 353). This was where Butler made camp when he entered the valley. Here also he anchored his left flank and stationed himself with his Rangers, while the Indians on the right flank performed the envelopment that led to the Patriot rout on the afternoon of 3 July. (Johnson's Royal Greens were in the center.) The Wintermoots were Loyalists from Minisink Ford, New York who purchased land around the head of the valley before the Revolution, fortified their farm more strongly than the Indian threat appeared to justify, and soon became prominently identified with the Loyalist element in the region.

York

York and vicinity, York County. Pennsylvania's first two counties were Chester (1682) and Lancaster (1728), after which York County was established in 1748 to comprise the territory west of the broad and then bridgeless Susquehanna River, but York Town had been surveyed and founded in 1741.

When the Continental Congress took refuge in York Town, where they held sessions in the courthouse from 30 September 1777 (with five members present) to 24 June 1778, the town had about 300 houses and 1,800 people.

The historic sites of York have been well identified and most of them have been marked so that a visitor can find them on a walking tour, particularly if starting at the York County Heritage Trust, 250 East Market Street (phone: (717) 848-1587), and the excellent regional museum (see below). The Trust offers guided tours as well as guidebooks to help visitors guide themselves through York's well-preserved historical treasures.

The York County Convention and Visitors Bureau has a very informative website, www.yorkpa.org, and also can be contacted by phone at (717) 849-2217. The historical and architectural gems are the Golden Plough Tavern and the General Gates House, adjoining restorations on West Market Street (U.S. 30E) at Pershing Avenue, two blocks west of the surviving public square.

The Golden Plough Tavern, part of what the York County Trust calls the "Colonial Complex," is believed to date from 1741, when Martin Eichelberger, a native of the Black Forest, secured the lot here. This Germanic half-timber house, using brick in the walls of the second story and large gable end, was an architectural oddity when it was built in colonial Pennsylvania (although the style was standard in the Black Forest), and it is one of the few known to exist in America.

The General Gates House—also located in the Colonial Complex at 157 West Market Street—so called because it was his quarters during the first four months of 1778 when he was in York as president of the newly established Board of War, is a simple, two-story stone structure built in 1751. Much is made locally of the story that here Lafayette destroyed the "Conway Cabal" by proposing a toast to Washington after noting that Gates's other guests had pointedly omitted toasting their commander in chief. Washington's reputation had reached its lowest ebb at this time, after a long series of defeats ending with the British occupation of Philadelphia (26 September 1777). Horatio Gates had at about the same time become famous as the victor of Saratoga, and there naturally was considerable talk about giving him the supreme command. It also is of historical record that Lafayette was one of Washington's staunchest supporters, and it should not be forgotten that Lafayette represented French military aid to the colonists. (The historian Van Tyne points out in his War of Independence [Boston, 1929] that 90 percent of the supplies that made the Saratoga victory possible were sent, secretly of course, by France.) But it has never been proved that there was a cabal to oust Washington, much less that Lafayette scuttled it with a French toast.

York can claim to be the first capital of the United States because until the Congress sitting at York adopted the Articles of Confederation (15 November 1777) they had been acting as representatives of the "United Colonies." The printers Hall and Sellers were ordered to York, and from presses set up in a home whose site is marked at Market and Beaver Streets they printed not only the journals of Congress and other publications but also millions of dollars of paper currency. The phrase "not worth a Continental [dollar]" was not coined until the currency collapsed completely in July 1781, but in January 1778, when Hall and Sellers were getting into production, the value of paper money in relation to specie was down 75 percent; a year later it was 90 percent below face value.

Although at least sixty-four delegates attended sessions of Congress at York, not more than half were there at any one time. Yet this rump Congress did some important business, including commissioning a man with false credentials from Benjamin Franklin in Paris (who said he was "a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia's service," neglecting to point out that this rank equated with brigadier general in the American army). But this deception gave the American cause the invaluable services of a professional military trainer, the Baron von Steuben, whose work at Valley Forge has been well publicized but whose greatest gift was in the more technical business of organizing proper staff procedures and logistical support.

York was the base at one time for the legions of Pulaski and Armand, and was a major center for prisoners of war. Important munitions works were in and around York, including one later called Codorus Furnace that operated until 1850 and has been partially restored. Erected in 1765, and owned for a few years by James Smith, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, it is 2.5 miles northeast of Starview, near the junction of Codorus Creek with the Susquehanna. Other famous forges or furnaces of York County were Mary Ann Furnace, started in 1762 by George Ross, another signer, and Spring Forge, dating from 1755. The latter was a few miles southwest of York near the present Spring Grove; the former was 4 miles southeast of Hanover.

Modern York is a busy town with heavy traffic, but it preserves the original layout of parallel streets. The surviving center square (Market and George Streets) is the site of the old courthouse (completed 1756, torn down in 1841), a model of which is in the museum. Here also is the original courthouse door and its weathervane in the form of a Pulaski dragoon foolishly nicknamed "the Little General." It was made by a local coppersmith in whose family home the famous Polish volunteer stayed when in York.

Penn Common is about five blocks southwest. Then on the outskirts of York Town, this was where Pulaski's Legion camped during March and April 1779. Anthony Wayne's Pennsylvania Line bivouacked here before starting south on 26 May 1781 to join Lafayette in Virginia. Most of the latter troops had recently been involved in the mutiny of 1 to 10 January. Wayne had been prominently involved in settling this affair, showing a tolerant attitude toward their well-justified demands. But when his troops again started muttering about mutiny, dissatisfied this time about being paid in Continental currency at face value, Wayne had four leaders shot on the commons. He then marched the rest of his command past the corpses, which ended that threat to military discipline. Barracks for prisoners of war were erected on Penn Common in the early years of the war. Starting in the spring of 1781, a large prison camp was built on a hill 4 miles east of York. Prisoners included those from Saratoga and Yorktown.