Sullivan's March
Standing Stone Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Gen. John Sullivan's army camped on the nearby river lowlands Aug. 8-9, 1779 en route to attack the Six Nations Iroquois. Sixth camp between Wyoming and Fort Sullivan.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
As General John Sullivan's Continental army marched north against the Six Nations in August 1779, it made its sixth camp on the river lowlands near here on the nights of August 8-9. The stopping places along the Susquehanna traced the slow, deliberate advance of a major Revolutionary War expedition ordered by Washington. From Wyoming to Fort Sullivan, each riverside campsite marked another day's push into Iroquois country.
Why it matters
These campsites map the route of one of the Revolution's most consequential frontier campaigns against the Iroquois Confederacy.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the summer of 1779, the Revolutionary War had ground on for four years, and the fighting had spread well beyond the coastal cities into the frontier valleys of Pennsylvania and New York. The Susquehanna River country where you're standing was a borderland — a place where Continental authority thinned out and the power of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy still held sway over vast stretches of forest and fertile bottomland.
The previous year had been a brutal one on this frontier. Raids by British-allied Loyalists and Iroquois warriors had fallen hard on settlements like Wyoming and Cherry Valley, and the memory of those attacks hardened the resolve of the Continental command. George Washington wanted the threat to his army's northwestern flank removed, and he wanted it removed decisively.
The river lowlands near here were part of the natural highway that armies and travelers had always used in this region. Rivers were the roads of the eighteenth-century frontier, and a large force on the march clung to them for water, level ground, and a way to move heavy supplies. That is why an army passing through wild country left its trace precisely at spots like this one.
People & events
General John Sullivan led one wing of a large, carefully staged expedition ordered by Washington against the Six Nations. His column moved north and west along the Susquehanna, and on the nights of August 8th and 9th, 1779, it made camp on the river lowlands near this marker — the sixth encampment on the long road between Wyoming and Fort Sullivan.
Moving an army of thousands through this terrain was slow, deliberate work. Each day's advance ended with the raising of a camp, and each camp became a fixed point in the record of the march. The numbering of the camps — sixth here, between two named posts — tells you how methodically the expedition was conducted, one measured day's push at a time into Iroquois country.
The campaign that followed was aimed at the towns and croplands of the Confederacy. It was a hard, destructive undertaking, and the people whose homeland it entered — the nations of the Iroquois — experienced it as a catastrophe. A marker like this records the passage of the soldiers, but the fuller story belongs just as much to the communities who lived in the country the army was marching to reach.
Its place in the American story
The Sullivan Expedition was one of the largest offensive operations the Continental Army mounted against Native nations during the Revolution, and it marked a turning point in the war on the frontier. Its purpose was not to win a single battle but to break the ability of the Six Nations to threaten the northern settlements — a campaign of movement and destruction rather than of pitched fighting.
Its consequences reached far beyond the war itself. The expedition opened up knowledge of the fertile lands of the region to soldiers who would later return as settlers, and it deepened divisions within the Iroquois Confederacy that had already been strained by the choice of whether to side with the Crown or the colonists. The long American push into these valleys can be traced, in part, to this campaign.
Standing among these quiet river lowlands, it's worth remembering that a chain of ordinary campsites like this one adds up to something consequential. Together they map a deliberate national policy carried out on the ground, footstep by footstep, in the middle of a revolution.
If you visit
This is a landscape marker, so let the setting do the work. Look toward the river lowlands and picture the ground not as it is now but as an open, well-watered flat that could shelter a marching army for a night or two. The reasons a large column would stop here — level ground, water, a natural route — are still legible in the shape of the land.
The marker rewards a slow reading. It fixes a precise moment: two August nights in 1779, the sixth camp in a numbered sequence. That specificity is a gift to the imagination. If you like, trace in your mind the line between the named posts on either end and picture the days of marching that separated them.
If you're building a road trip around Revolutionary-era history, this stop pairs naturally with other sites along the Susquehanna that mark the same expedition. Each one is a single bead; strung together they let you follow an entire campaign across the countryside at the pace the soldiers themselves kept.
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
- · John Sullivan
Related events
- · Sullivan Expedition
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Lime Hill Battlefield - PLAQUE
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1928
On April 14, 1782, near this spot, Sergeant Thomas Baldwin's party tried to overtake a Native war band that had captured Mrs. Rosewell Franklin and her four children. After some four hours of fighting from hastily thrown-up breastworks, the rescuers freed three of the children, but Mrs. Franklin was killed. The skirmish was one of the last violent episodes of the Revolutionary frontier in the Wyoming country.
Joseph Elliot - PLAQUE
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1928
This marker honors Joseph Elliot, a Revolutionary War soldier of the embattled Wyoming Valley frontier. He fought at Trenton on the night of December 25, 1776, and by tradition was given a sword by George Washington for his bravery. He survived the Wyoming Massacre of 1778 — breaking free at the Bloody Rock and swimming the Susquehanna with a bullet in his shoulder — and later, at the 1782 Battle of Lime Hill, helped rescue captured children.
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.
Bradford County
Towanda, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1810 and first called Ontario County, this region was renamed in 1812 for William Bradford, the second U.S. Attorney General. Its seat, Towanda, was incorporated in 1828 along the Susquehanna. The county remembers Sullivan's March—the 1779 Revolutionary campaign against the Iroquois that passed through the valley—and native son David Wilmot, whose 1846 Proviso to bar slavery from new territories helped ignite the national crisis over slavery.