Pennsylvania
Great Bend Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Founded 1681 by William Penn as a Quaker Commonwealth. Birthplace of THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE and THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1681 William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a Quaker commonwealth devoted to religious liberty and representative government. Within a century that spirit helped make the colony the setting for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. This boundary marker carries that legacy to travelers entering the state.
Why it matters
The colony Penn founded on liberty of conscience became a cradle of the American founding documents.
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Related people
- · William Penn
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Dennis Farm
Brooklyn Township, PA · est. 2015
In 1793, Prince Perkins, a free African American veteran of the Revolutionary War, came from Connecticut to settle this land in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and his descendants have held it for more than two centuries. His granddaughter Angeline Perkins Dennis and her husband Henry expanded the farm, sustaining a rare, lasting Black landholding in an integrated rural community. The property offers a window into free African American settlement and the strong antislavery currents that ran through this corner of Pennsylvania.
Samuel Meredith
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1949
Samuel Meredith was a Philadelphia merchant and Revolutionary patriot who served in the militia and helped finance the struggle for independence. In 1789 President Washington named him the first Treasurer of the United States, a post he held through the government's fragile founding decade. He retired to his estate, Belmont, in the quiet hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he died in 1817.
Sarah Mary Benjamin
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1992
During the Revolution, thousands of women followed the Continental Army as it marched, cooking, sewing, washing, and nursing the men who fought—labor without which the army could not have stayed in the field. Sarah Mary Benjamin was one of these camp followers, accompanying a New York unit from 1780 to 1783 and, by her own vivid later account, even standing sentinel duty at Kingsbridge and carrying food to soldiers under fire at Yorktown. Living past the age of 100, she settled in this Wayne County township after 1822, where her firsthand memories of the war made her a living link to the founding generation.
Samuel Meredith
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1948
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