Lime Hill Battlefield - PLAQUE
Wyalusing Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
April 14, 1782, Sergeant Thomas Baldwin's Party in attempting to rescue Mrs. Rosewell Franklin and her four children who had been captured by Indians, met the enemy near this spot after four hours of fighting. Three of the children were rescued but Mrs. Franklin was killed. Sergeant Baldwin's breastworks were located seventy Rods northwest of this marker.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
On April 14, 1782, near this spot, Sergeant Thomas Baldwin's party tried to overtake a Native war band that had captured Mrs. Rosewell Franklin and her four children. After some four hours of fighting from hastily thrown-up breastworks, the rescuers freed three of the children, but Mrs. Franklin was killed. The skirmish was one of the last violent episodes of the Revolutionary frontier in the Wyoming country.
Why it matters
The Lime Hill fight is a stark reminder that the Revolution's frontier violence continued even as the wider war wound down, with settler families caught in the crossfire.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the spring of 1782, the Revolution's great campaigns were largely spent — but no one had told the Pennsylvania frontier. Along the upper Susquehanna, in the country around the Wyoming settlements, the war persisted as it always had here: in sudden raids, captives taken, and desperate pursuits through the woods. This marker records one of those pursuits, and it is a stark reminder that the fighting outlasted the headlines.
The valley was a landscape of vulnerable farmsteads scattered across rich river flats. Families lived with the knowledge that a war party could appear without warning, and that when it did, the militia and neighbors who answered would have only hours to act before the trail went cold. Speed and terrain decided everything.
Into that reality steps the event carved here: an April day in 1782, a captured family, and a party of men throwing up hasty breastworks to make a stand. It is the war reduced to its most elemental form — a fight to bring a mother and her children back.
People & events
The marker names Sergeant Thomas Baldwin, and it is his decision that gives the site its meaning. When Mrs. Rosewell Franklin and her four children were seized by a Native war band, Baldwin's party set out to overtake them. What followed, the inscription tells us, was no quick skirmish: the fighting lasted some four hours near this very spot.
The detail about breastworks — earthworks Baldwin's men raised about seventy rods to the northwest — tells you what kind of fight it was. This was not a chance encounter but a determined, dug-in effort, men holding ground and trading fire for hours in the hope of forcing the captives free.
The outcome the marker records is deliberately unsparing. Three of the four children were rescued. Mrs. Franklin was killed. The inscription does not soften it, and neither should we: the rescue was real and partial at once, a victory shadowed by loss. That honesty is what makes the marker powerful — it refuses to turn a hard day into a clean triumph.
Its place in the American story
The Lime Hill fight belongs to a chapter of the Revolution that the national memory tends to skip: the frontier war that dragged on even as the larger conflict wound toward its end. While the fate of nations was being settled in negotiations far away, families in this valley were still being caught in the war's violence.
That gap between the war's official arc and its lived reality is exactly what this marker preserves. It stands for every settler family swept up in a conflict whose front lines ran through their own dooryards, and for the neighbors and militiamen who chased after them with no promise of success.
Remembering Lime Hill corrects a comfortable simplification. American independence did not arrive as a single, tidy conclusion; on the frontier it came slowly and at cost, measured in fights like this one. The marker asks the traveler to hold both facts at once — that the Revolution was ending, and that here, it was still killing.
If you visit
Read this marker with an eye to distance and direction, because the inscription gives you both. The breastworks stood about seventy rods to the northwest — so turn that way and picture men working fast in the earth, then holding it for four long hours. Knowing where the line was drawn changes an ordinary field into a place where something happened.
This is a battlefield of a very particular kind: small, personal, and sorrowful. There is no monument to a grand victory here, and that is the point. Let the quiet of the surrounding farm country settle in, and let the marker's plain account of a partial rescue and a mother lost do its work.
Set in rural Wyalusing Township, the site suits a reflective stop rather than a crowd. If you are tracing the Revolutionary history of the upper Susquehanna, Lime Hill offers something the famous battlefields cannot: the war at the scale of a single family, and the unvarnished truth of what it cost them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Thomas Baldwin
- · Rosewell Franklin
Related events
- · Battle of Lime Hill
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Joseph Elliot - PLAQUE
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1928
This marker honors Joseph Elliot, a Revolutionary War soldier of the embattled Wyoming Valley frontier. He fought at Trenton on the night of December 25, 1776, and by tradition was given a sword by George Washington for his bravery. He survived the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 — breaking free at the Bloody Rock and swimming the Susquehanna with a bullet in his shoulder — and later, at the 1782 Battle of Lime Hill, helped rescue captured children.
Lime Hill
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947
On April 14, 1782, a small party led by Sergeant Thomas Baldwin came to this ground trying to free a woman and her children held captive by Native raiders — a common and wrenching feature of frontier war. The rescue turned into a four-hour fight. Three of the children were saved, but the mother was killed before they could reach her. The episode captures the intimate violence of the Revolution's final years along the Susquehanna.
Sullivan's March
Standing Stone Township, PA · est. 1947
As General John Sullivan's Continental army marched north against the Six Nations in August 1779, it made its sixth camp on the river lowlands near here on the nights of August 8-9. The stopping places along the Susquehanna traced the slow, deliberate advance of a major Revolutionary War expedition ordered by Washington. From Wyoming to Fort Sullivan, each riverside campsite marked another day's push into Iroquois country.
Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians, 1779 - Wyalusing (PLAQUE)
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1929
Wyalusing had been the site of Friedenshütten, a Moravian mission town where Christian Delaware Indians lived before being pushed westward in the early 1770s. A few years later, in August 1779, General Sullivan's army made its fifth encampment here on the march from Wyoming toward Teaoga. The marker stands near the monument to that vanished Moravian Indian community.