Pennsylvania

Connellsville, PA · est. 1918

Born in Virginia in 1732, William Crawford was a pioneer surveyor and friend of George Washington who built his cabin at Stewart's Crossing on the Youghiogheny in 1765. He first came west with Forbes's 1758 campaign, crossed the Delaware with Washington in 1777, and shared the victory at Trenton. Leading the Sandusky Expedition against Native towns in 1782, he was captured and burned at the stake in Ohio — one of the frontier war's most infamous deaths.

South Union Township, PA · est. 1946

Around 1764, on the old Catawba trail through the Pennsylvania backcountry, Thomas Gaddis raised a fortified house where settlers could take refuge during frontier raids. Such private strongholds were lifelines in a region where colonial and Native conflicts made isolated homesteads perilous. Gaddis himself later served as a colonel in the Pennsylvania Continental Line during the Revolution.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1966

William Crawford was a frontier soldier and surveyor who settled near the Youghiogheny River after 1766, serving as George Washington's western land agent at a time when Virginia and Pennsylvania families were pushing across the Appalachians. During the Revolution he took up arms on the frontier, leading a 1782 expedition against Native villages along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The campaign ended in disaster: Crawford was captured and put to death, a killing that became notorious in the bitter borderland warfare of the era.

Cumberland Valley Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1681 William Penn received a royal charter and founded Pennsylvania as a "holy experiment" — a Quaker commonwealth built on religious tolerance and fair dealing. Less than a century later, its chief city, Philadelphia, would host the two gatherings that gave the nation its founding words: the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution of the United States in 1787. This commemorative marker distills that arc from colonial founding to national birth.