Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians, 1779 - Wyalusing (PLAQUE)
Wyalusing Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
10 1/2 miles from Vanderlip's farm. Fifth encampment of Sullivan's Army on the march from Wyoming to Teaoga, August 6-7, 1779, was on site just west of this road marked by the Moravian Indian town monument.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It layers two chapters of frontier history — a Moravian mission to Native converts and the Revolutionary campaign that followed — onto a single bend of the Susquehanna.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The bend of the Susquehanna the marker stands on carries two very different chapters of frontier history layered one atop the other, and it rewards you to hold both in mind at once. Long before the Revolution reached this valley, it was mission country.
In the years before the 1770s, this was the site of a Moravian mission town, a community where Christian Delaware Indians lived under the guidance of Moravian missionaries. The Moravians were a Protestant church known for carrying their faith into Native communities, and their mission towns were islands of a particular kind of frontier life — farming, worship, and shared living between Native converts and European missionaries. That community was pushed westward in the early 1770s, and the town itself passed into memory.
Then came the war. A few years after the mission people had gone, in the summer of 1779, this same ground along the river became a waypoint for a marching army — a reminder of how quickly a frontier place could change from a settlement of faith to a stop on a military road.
People & events
The inscription is precise, almost like a soldier's logbook, and that precision is its own kind of storytelling. It gives you a distance — ten and a half miles from a named farm — and it gives you the exact nights the army stopped here: the sixth and seventh of August 1779. This was the fifth encampment of General Sullivan's army on its march from the Wyoming Valley toward Teaoga.
An army on the march measured its progress in encampments, one hard day's distance to the next, and each stop meant tents, fires, foraging, and the enormous labor of moving men and supplies through rough country. To read that this was the "fifth encampment" is to feel the grinding rhythm of that advance up the river valley.
And the marker does something quietly moving: it plants the army's stop right beside the monument to the vanished Moravian Indian town. Two communities separated by only a handful of years share the same ground — the mission families who had lived and worshipped here, and the soldiers who camped a night on their way to war. The inscription lets you stand at the meeting point of both.
Its place in the American story
This single bend of the river holds a truth about early America that a textbook can flatten: the frontier was not one story but many, overlapping and often colliding. Here a mission to Native converts and a Revolutionary military campaign occupy the same few acres.
The Moravian mission towns were part of a broader effort to weave Christian faith into Native life on the colonial frontier, and their eventual displacement reflects the relentless pressure that pushed Native and mission communities steadily westward. That pressure did not pause for the Revolution — it was tangled up in it.
Sullivan's march, meanwhile, was a national undertaking, ordered from the top of the Continental command, aimed at the power of the Six Nations. To find its route running directly past the memory of a Moravian Indian town is to see, in miniature, how the founding of the United States was interwoven with the upheaval of Native peoples. The local monument and the campaign marker together tell a bigger American story than either could alone.
If you visit
Look for two markers, not one — the campaign plaque and, nearby, the monument to the Moravian Indian town it references. Reading them side by side is the whole point of the stop, because each one supplies what the other leaves out. Give yourself a few minutes to let the two chapters settle over the same ground.
The setting is river country, just off the road, and the landscape still does some of the explaining. This was a place people passed through — mission families, and later an army — because the valley was the natural route. Picture a column of tired soldiers making camp for a night or two before the next day's march.
If you are tracing the 1779 campaign as a driving route, this is one of the ordered stops between the Wyoming Valley and Teaoga, and visiting them in sequence turns a scatter of plaques into a march you can follow. But even as a single stop, Wyalusing gives you something rare: a quiet spot where two very different frontier stories meet on the same riverbank.
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
- · General John Sullivan
Related events
- · Sullivan Expedition
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sullivan's March
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947
In the summer of 1779, at the height of the Revolution, General John Sullivan led a Continental army up the Susquehanna Valley, camping near here on August 5-7 as it pushed north. The expedition, ordered by George Washington, aimed to break the power of the Iroquois nations allied with the British and to end the devastating raids along the frontier. Over the campaign Sullivan's troops burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns and their harvests.
Indian Hill
Tuscarora Township, PA · est. 1947
The hill southeast of this marker saw sharp frontier fighting on September 29, 1778, when Colonel Thomas Hartley's soldiers from Fort Muncy clashed with Native warriors here. Two days earlier Hartley's raid had burned Queen Esther's town near present-day Athens, part of the brutal back-and-forth of Revolutionary warfare along the Susquehanna. These running fights pitted Pennsylvania militia against the Iroquois and their British allies in a contest for the northern borderlands.
Indian Hill Battlefield - PLAQUE
Tuscarora Township, PA · est. 1928
During the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania's northern frontier was ravaged by raids from British-allied Native war parties. In September 1778 Colonel Thomas Hartley led an expedition up the Susquehanna, burning Tioga and Queen Esther's Town before fighting a sharp engagement near this spot on September 29. His campaign broke the momentum of raids in the region and cleared the way for the massive Sullivan Expedition the following year.
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.