Fort Jenkins
South Centre Township, Columbia County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
A stockaded house used as a settler's refuge was situated here on the bank overlooking the river, 1778-80, when it was destroyed by the Indians. The land was later owned by James Wilson, an author of the Constitution.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
During the Revolution the Susquehanna frontier was a war zone, and settlers here fortified a house on the riverbank as a refuge between 1778 and 1780 until raiders destroyed it. The violence along this valley was part of the wider frontier warfare that pitted settlers against British-allied Native nations far from the war's famous battlefields. In a later, more peaceful chapter, the ground passed to James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration and a framer of the Constitution.
Why it matters
Fortified refuges like Fort Jenkins reveal the brutal frontier side of the Revolution, where the fight for independence meant survival against raids far from Philadelphia's halls.
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Related people
- · James Wilson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Wheeler
Scott Township, PA · est. 1948
In 1778 the frontier scout Moses Van Campen raised a stockade fort along Fishing Creek to shield local families from the raids that swept this valley during the Revolution. Attacked at least once, it served as one of the refuges that let settlement cling to the Susquehanna country through years of border warfare. Van Campen became a legendary figure in the region, remembered for his exploits as a scout and Indian fighter.
Fort McClure
Bloomsburg, PA · est. 1948
After frontier raids destroyed nearby Fort Jenkins in 1780, the noted borderland fighter Moses Van Campen stockaded the McClure house early in 1781 to shelter settlers along the north bank of the Susquehanna. The improvised fort stood in what is now Bloomsburg, part of a chain of refuges thrown up as the Revolution's frontier war ground on. Such places were less military garrisons than desperate havens for families caught between armies and raiding parties.
Sugarloaf Massacre
Sugarloaf Township, PA · est. 1947
In the autumn of 1780 a party of Native warriors and Loyalist Tories, turned back from an attempt on Fort Augusta, fell upon a detachment of Northumberland County militia near here. The surprise attack on September 11 left the small company overwhelmed, one of many such bloody clashes that made the Pennsylvania frontier a war zone long after the fighting had shifted elsewhere.
Sugarloaf Massacre - PLAQUE
Conyngham, PA · est. 1933
In September 1780, as the Revolutionary War flared along the Pennsylvania frontier, a detachment of Northampton County militia paused to rest at a spring near Sugarloaf Mountain. They were ambushed by a party of Native warriors and Loyalists led by the Seneca chief Roland Montour, and more than a dozen men were killed. The marker preserves the names of the fallen, a roster of ordinary frontier soldiers caught in the war's brutal borderland fighting.