General Tasker H. Bliss
Lewisburg, Union County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during the first World War and military counselor to President Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference, was born in this house on December 31, 1853.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Tasker Howard Bliss, born in this Lewisburg house in 1853, rose to become Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during the First World War, helping steer the enormous task of raising and shipping an American army to Europe. When the guns fell silent, he served as a military counselor to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles. A scholar-soldier, he moved from the classroom to the highest councils of a nation at war and then at the peace table.
Why it matters
His career links a small Pennsylvania town to the pivotal moment when the United States emerged as a world military power and helped shape the postwar order.
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Related people
- ¡ Tasker H. Bliss
- ¡ Woodrow Wilson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Union County
Lewisburg, PA ¡ est. 1982
Established in 1813 from Northumberland County, Union County took its name as a tribute to the Federal Union at a time when the young nation's cohesion was still being tested. Its seat shifted from Mifflinburg to New Berlin and finally, in 1855, to Lewisburg. That town became home to Bucknell University, founded in the 1840s.
Lewisburg Cross-Cut Canal
Lewisburg, PA ¡ est. 1955
When Pennsylvania built its sprawling state canal system in the 1820s and 1830s to link its rivers and markets, short connecting cuts often did the crucial work of tying a town into the network. Completed in 1833, this five-eighths-mile cross-cut with three lift locks and a slackwater dam let canal boats cross the Susquehanna and reach Lewisburg, turning the town into a busy shipping point. In the canal era, such a modest ditch could mean the difference between a sleepy village and a thriving trade center.
Ludwig Derr
Lewisburg, PA ¡ est. 1954
Ludwig Derr laid out Lewisburg in 1785, in the first years of the new republic, choosing a spot along the Susquehanna's West Branch where a trading post and a grist and saw mill could anchor a settlement. His log house still survives, folded into the walls of a later structure on this site. Derr died the same year he founded the town, but the community he planned took root and grew.
Underground Railroad
Lewisburg, PA ¡ est. 1954
This old stable served as a station on the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses that helped enslaved people escape north toward freedom in the decades before the Civil War. Here freedom seekers were hidden, fed, and helped on their way to the next station in a chain that stretched, hand to hand, toward Canada. Aiding fugitives was dangerous and illegal work, carried out quietly by people who risked prosecution to defy slavery.