Camp Security
Springettsbury Township, York County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
A prison camp built in 1781 to detain British troops surrendered by Gen. Burgoyne at Saratoga, N.Y. and their families. Prisoners captured at Yorktown, Va arrived later. It was guarded by York County militia and Continental troops until operations ceased at the end of the American Revolution in 1783. The camp consisted of log huts and a large stockade. Archaeological evidence confirmed its location less than a mile to the south.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
As the Revolution wound toward victory, the American army needed somewhere to hold the enemies it had captured, and in 1781 York County became that place. Camp Security, a stockade ringed by log huts, detained British soldiers surrendered by General Burgoyne at Saratoga, later joined by prisoners taken at Yorktown, along with their families. Guarded by local militia and Continental troops, it operated until the war's end in 1783; archaeologists later confirmed its location just south of here.
Why it matters
A rare surviving trace of Revolutionary War prisoner-of-war camps, Camp Security illuminates the little-remembered logistics of captivity that accompanied the fight for independence.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1781 the American Revolution had been grinding on for six years, and the war had shifted decisively toward the interior of Pennsylvania — not as a battlefield, but as a place to keep the fight's growing human overflow. York County sat safely behind the lines, far from the coast where British ships could raid or rescue, and its rolling farmland could feed and house large numbers of people. That combination of security and distance is exactly why an army fighting for its life would choose this quiet corner of the countryside.
The young United States was still improvising almost everything, including what to do with the enemies it captured. There was no established system of military prisons, no precedent for holding thousands of soldiers over multiple years. Camps like this one were built quickly, out of local timber and local labor, to solve an urgent and unglamorous problem.
Springettsbury Township in these years was a landscape of farms and small settlements, the kind of place where a stockade and a cluster of log huts would have loomed large against the fields. The war that most people picture as muskets and cannon was, out here, a matter of fences, guards, rations, and the slow passage of time.
People & events
The prisoners held here trace back to one of the turning points of the entire Revolution: the surrender of a British army under General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York. That American victory in the autumn of 1777 stunned the world and helped bring France openly into the war. But victory created a practical burden — thousands of captured troops who had to be housed, fed, and guarded somewhere for years to come.
Eventually a portion of that human obligation made its way to this camp, built in 1781. Later, prisoners taken at the Siege of Yorktown in Virginia — the campaign that effectively ended major fighting — were brought here as well. Strikingly, the camp held not only soldiers but their families, a reminder that eighteenth-century armies often traveled with wives and children who shared the soldiers' fate.
Guarding them fell to the York County militia and Continental troops, ordinary Pennsylvanians pulled into the tedious, essential work of custody. The camp itself was a large stockade ringed by log huts — a small wartime community that operated until the war formally ended in 1783, then vanished so completely that its exact location had to be rediscovered by archaeologists digging in the ground less than a mile from this spot.
Its place in the American story
We remember the Revolution through its dramatic set pieces — Saratoga, Yorktown, the surrenders that made independence possible. Camp Security tells the part of that story that came after the cheering: what a fragile new nation actually did with victory once it held enemy armies in its hands.
How a country treats the people it captures says a great deal about it. A struggling republic, short on money and supplies, still had to feed and shelter thousands of prisoners and their families over years. The camp is a rare surviving trace of that quiet moral and logistical test — the machinery of captivity that ran in the background of the fight for liberty.
That the site had to be confirmed by archaeology makes it more valuable, not less. Camps like this were rarely preserved and easily forgotten, so physical evidence pulled from the soil is often the only witness left. This ground connects the abstractions of independence to the concrete reality of stockade walls and log huts.
If you visit
Come here as much for what you can imagine as for what you can see. The marker stands near ground where archaeologists confirmed the camp's footprint, and the real story lies just to the south — so let your eye travel across the surrounding landscape and picture a stockade and rows of log huts set against the open country.
This is a place that rewards a slow, thoughtful pause rather than a quick photo. Stand for a moment and consider the people who spent years here in limbo, prisoners and their families alike, waiting out a war whose outcome they could not know. It is a very different feeling from a battlefield.
If you're building a Revolutionary War road trip through Pennsylvania, Camp Security makes a meaningful, offbeat stop — the hidden back-of-house of a war usually told through its front-line drama. Give it a few unhurried minutes, and the empty fields start to feel crowded with the past.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · General John Burgoyne
Related events
- · Battle of Saratoga
- · Siege of Yorktown
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
James Smith
York, PA · est. 1949
James Smith, who lies buried in this churchyard, was one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence. A York lawyer of Irish birth, he raised a company of Associators—citizen-soldiers—early in the Revolution and served in the Continental Congress. He was also an ironmaster, part of the frontier industry that helped arm the American cause.
York
Manchester Township, PA · est. 1947
Laid out in 1741 on William Penn's proprietary land, this was the first Pennsylvania town planted west of the Susquehanna River, an outpost of colonial settlement pushing toward the frontier. Its greatest hour came in the fall of 1777, when the Continental Congress fled British-occupied Philadelphia and made this county seat the temporary capital of a young nation at war. In the months that followed, the delegates here debated and adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first framework binding the thirteen states into a union.
York County Prison
York, PA · est. 1949
From about 1750 to 1855, the county prison stood on this site, serving frontier York County through the colonial era and into the industrial age. During the early years of the Revolution, it held prominent British prisoners of war, making this jail a small front in a continental conflict far from any battlefield.
Articles of Confederation
York, PA · est. 2001
In 1777, with the Revolution's outcome still uncertain and Philadelphia in British hands, the Continental Congress met in the York County Courthouse. There, on November 15, they adopted the Articles of Confederation — the young nation's first written constitution, binding the thirteen states into a single government. The Articles carried the United States through the war and the difficult 1780s until the present Constitution replaced them in 1789.