Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians, 1779 - Teaoga (PLAQUE)

Athens, PA · est. 1947

On August 18, 1779, General John Sullivan raised a fort on the high ground between the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers, commanding both waterways at once. With a supporting camp on the flats below, the post became the launching point for Sullivan's expedition into central New York — a scorched-earth campaign that broke the military power of the Tory and Iroquois alliance allied with Britain. The fort's brief life belied its role in one of the Revolution's most consequential frontier operations.

Athens, PA · est. 1947

Where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna, this river junction has funneled travelers for as long as people have moved through the region — long enough that Native peoples knew it as Teaoga, and later generations as Tioga Point. Connecticut settlers laid out a village here in 1786, but a decade earlier the same ground had served as a staging area for General Sullivan's 1779 Revolutionary campaign against the Iroquois towns of central New York. Its position made it, for centuries, the natural gateway between the New York interior and Pennsylvania.

Athens Township, PA · est. 1928

Where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna stood Teaoga, a Iroquois watch post guarding the southern approach to the confederacy's territory, and nearby the Delaware settlement remembered as Queen Esther's Town. The broad river flats were rich grazing land, but in September 1778 — amid the frontier warfare of the Revolution — Colonel Thomas Hartley's expedition swept up the valley and burned both towns. These raids were part of the escalating cycle of retaliation between Continental forces and Britain's Iroquois allies on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Sheshequin Township, PA · est. 1929

In August 1779 General John Sullivan marched his Continental army up the Susquehanna Valley on a campaign to break the power of the Iroquois Confederacy, which had raided frontier settlements as Britain's allies. On the night of August 10 the army made its seventh and final encampment before reaching Teaoga on these river lowlands at Sheshecunnunck. The march was one leg of a systematic expedition that would destroy dozens of Iroquois towns and cornfields.