Hanover Church
East Hanover Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
About two miles north is the site of this pioneer Presbyterian church founded in 1736. First pastor was Richard Sankey. In the graveyard are buried many first settlers and veterans of frontier wars and the American Revolution.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Two miles north stood one of the region's pioneer Presbyterian congregations, founded in 1736 under its first pastor, Richard Sankey. Its graveyard became the resting place of the valley's earliest settlers alongside men who fought in the frontier wars and the Revolution that followed. A country churchyard like this is a layered record of the community that grew up around it.
Why it matters
Frontier churches anchored the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Pennsylvania backcountry, binding together the pioneers and soldiers whose lives spanned the wars that forged the nation.
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Related people
- · Richard Sankey
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sattazahn Lutheran Church
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German immigrants began settling this part of Lebanon County as early as 1729, part of the great wave of Pennsylvania Dutch migration to William Penn's tolerant colony. In the wilderness they were served by traveling missionaries, among them John Caspar Stoever, Jr., a pioneering Lutheran pastor who ministered to scattered frontier congregations. A log church rose around 1756, replaced by the present building in 1872, and the congregation honors Peter Sattazahn, a Revolutionary War soldier buried here.
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On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up what the marker calls the earliest resolves for independence in Pennsylvania. Written more than two years before the Declaration, their bold pledge to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles" captured the defiant mood spreading through the colonial countryside. Such local resolves gave voice to ordinary communities determined to resist British authority.
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