Margaret Cochran Corbin
Greene Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Heroine of the Revolution; born Nov. 12, 1751, near Rocky Spring, 1 1/2 miles to NW. Accompanied her husband to war. Manned a cannon, Fort Washington, N.Y., Nov. 16, 1776, when he was killed. She was wounded, pensioned, and assigned to Invalid Regt. Died Jan. 16, 1800; buried at West Point, N.Y.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Born on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1751, Margaret Cochran Corbin followed her husband into the Continental Army and was beside him at the defense of Fort Washington in November 1776. When he was killed at his cannon, she took his place and kept firing until she too was gravely wounded. Congress later granted her a soldier's pension and a place in the Invalid Regiment, and she was buried with honor at West Point.
Why it matters
Corbin was among the first women to receive a military pension from the young United States, a rare official recognition that women shared the sacrifices of the Revolution.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Margaret Cochran was born in 1751 on the Pennsylvania frontier, near Rocky Spring, in a backcountry world where danger and hardship were part of ordinary life. Frontier families lived close to the edge, and the women among them were anything but sheltered — they shared the labor, the risks, and the losses.
By the 1770s that frontier world was swept into a much larger drama. The thirteen colonies broke with Britain and went to war for their independence, and the fighting drew in far more than uniformed soldiers. Whole families were pulled into the Revolution's orbit.
Among them were the women who followed the Continental Army — cooking, washing, nursing, and keeping camp. Their work was essential and largely unsung, and it placed them, at times, squarely in the path of battle.
People & events
Margaret Cochran Corbin followed her husband into that war, as many army wives did. In November 1776 she was with him at the defense of Fort Washington, on the northern end of Manhattan, when American forces there came under heavy attack.
When her husband, serving at a cannon, was killed in the fighting, she did not fall back. She took his place at the gun and kept it firing until she herself was gravely wounded. It is a moment of raw courage the marker records plainly, and it needs no embroidery.
Her wounds left lasting damage, but her service was not forgotten. She was granted a pension and assigned to the Invalid Regiment — a unit for soldiers no longer fit for the field — and she lived on until 1800. She was buried at West Point, the storied military post on the Hudson, a fitting resting place for someone who had stood to a cannon under fire.
Its place in the American story
Corbin's story matters because of the recognition that followed it. In the young United States, she received a military pension — official acknowledgment, rare for a woman, that she had shared a soldier's sacrifice. That act quietly widened the idea of who counted as a defender of the new nation.
Her life also stands for the countless women whose contributions to the Revolution went unrecorded. For every name we remember, many more cooked, nursed, carried water, and sometimes bled, without a marker to tell us so. Corbin's stone speaks, in a sense, for all of them.
And her courage under fire at Fort Washington belongs to the founding story of the country — a reminder that independence was won not only by generals and statesmen but by ordinary people, including a frontier woman who refused to leave her husband's gun silent.
If you visit
This marker honors a hometown daughter, set near where her life began on the Franklin County frontier — about a mile and a half northwest of here, toward Rocky Spring, lay her birthplace. Come to it as you would to a memorial: a place to pause and remember a person, not to tour a battlefield.
The setting is quiet, rural Pennsylvania, and that quiet suits the story. The woman remembered here was born into a landscape much like the one around you, then carried its toughness into the middle of a war.
If your travels take you toward the Hudson Valley, you can connect this spot to her resting place at West Point, closing the arc of a remarkable life. But even standing here alone, take a moment with the marker. It asks you to hold in mind a young woman who, in a desperate hour, chose to stand and fight.
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
- · Margaret Cochran Corbin
Related events
- · Battle of Fort Washington
Themes & tags
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