Thompson's Rifle Battalion: Capt. John Lowdon's Company
Sunbury, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Recruited from nearby points in June 1775, Lowdon's Company was a part of the first battalion in the colonies authorized by Congress. Among those who entered Continental service in this company was Timothy Murphy, whose many feats of marksmanship were to make him a hero of the Revolution.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In June 1775, as war with Britain began, men recruited around Sunbury joined Captain John Lowdon's Company—part of Thompson's Rifle Battalion, the first battalion Congress authorized in all the colonies. Among its riflemen was Timothy Murphy, whose extraordinary marksmanship would later make him a legend of the Revolution.
Why it matters
This company stood at the very founding of the Continental Army, and the frontier marksmen it sent to war helped forge the reputation of the American rifleman.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the summer of 1775, the thirteen colonies were lurching from protest into open war. Blood had already been spilled at Lexington and Concord that April, and the ragged force gathering around Boston was still more a collection of local militias than an army. The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, faced an urgent problem: how to turn scattered colonial companies into something that could stand against the British regulars.
Out on the Pennsylvania frontier, along the West Branch of the Susquehanna near what is now Sunbury, that question had a very practical answer. This was hard country, recently wrested into farms and settlements, and the men who lived here had grown up with the long rifle as a tool of daily survival. They hunted with it, defended their homesteads with it, and knew its reach far better than any parade-ground musketman did.
When Congress called for riflemen, it was reaching directly into this frontier world—asking the backcountry to send not just bodies, but a particular and prized skill. The company recruited around Sunbury in June 1775 belonged to that first national levy, formed at the very moment the idea of an American army was being invented.
People & events
The company took its name and character from its captain, John Lowdon, who gathered his recruits from the settlements nearby and marched them into a brand-new kind of service. They became part of Thompson's Rifle Battalion, distinguished as one of the very first units the Continental Congress authorized for all the colonies together—not a Pennsylvania force, but an American one.
Among the men who stepped forward here was Timothy Murphy, then a young frontiersman whose name would later be spoken with something like awe. His reputation rested on marksmanship: the ability, with the frontier long rifle, to hit targets at distances that seemed almost unnatural to soldiers trained on smoothbore muskets. Over the course of the Revolution his feats with the rifle would make him one of its enduring folk heroes.
It is worth pausing on how ordinary the beginning was. Murphy entered the war as one recruit among many in a single frontier company, mustered at a moment when no one could know how long or how brutal the fight would be. The legend came later; what happened here was simply a young man signing on.
Its place in the American story
This modest company sits at the literal founding of the United States Army. The battalion it joined was among the first authorized by Congress on behalf of all the colonies, a small but real step from thirteen separate rebellions toward a single national cause. When we talk about the origins of the Continental Army, places like this—not the famous battlefields—are where the story actually starts.
The frontier riflemen also changed how Americans imagined themselves at war. Where European armies relied on massed ranks firing in unison, these backwoodsmen brought individual, aimed, long-range fire and a self-reliant fighting style rooted in wilderness life. The reputation of the American rifleman—patient, deadly, and independent—was built by companies exactly like this one, and it became part of the young nation's sense of who it was.
That a single Sunbury company could send a future legend of the Revolution into service is a reminder that the war was won by countless local contributions, each of which mattered.
If you visit
Stand here and let the landscape do the work. This is the West Branch Susquehanna country, and the river valley that shaped these settlers is still the dominant feature of the scene. Picture it in June 1775: farms newly carved from the woods, and men leaving them to walk toward a war whose outcome no one could guess.
The marker rewards a slow read. It names both an ordinary captain and an extraordinary recruit, and the pairing is the point—the Revolution ran on companies of neighbors led by local men, and only a few of them became famous. Give a thought to all the names not on the sign.
If you're building a road trip, this makes a natural first stop on a Revolutionary-era loop through central Pennsylvania. It's a place to reset your sense of scale: not a grand monument, but the quiet spot where the American army, and one of its legends, began.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Timothy Murphy
- · John Lowdon
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians - Fort Augusta - PLAQUE
Sunbury, PA · est. 1929
Fort Augusta, guarding the forks of the Susquehanna at Sunbury, was first chosen as a rendezvous for the Sullivan campaign. From here Lt. Col. Adam Hubley's regiment — the one unit quartered at the fort — marched to join the offensive against the Six Nations in 1779. The old fort thus became one of several launching points feeding troops into the larger expedition.
Lee Massacre
Union Township, PA · est. 1947
On August 16, 1782, Major John Lee and his family were killed near this place in a raid by an Indian war party, with only his son Robert surviving. The attack came during the violent final years of the Revolutionary War on the Pennsylvania frontier, when British-allied raids terrorized isolated valley settlements. Such tragedies were a grim feature of life on the contested edge of the new nation.
Captain John Brady - PLAQUE
West Chillisquaque Township, PA · est. 1928
John Brady settled this stretch of the Susquehanna frontier in 1769, working as a surveyor before the constant danger of raids drove him to the fortified Muncy Manor that took his name. A veteran soldier, he fought in the French and Indian War, led a company in Pontiac's War, and raised a company for the Continental Line in the Revolution, taking a serious wound at the Battle of Germantown. Home on sick leave in April 1779, he was killed in an ambush near Fort Brady, one of countless casualties of the unrelenting frontier war.
Schoch Blockhouse
Middlecreek Township, PA · est. 1947
As the Revolutionary War reached the Pennsylvania backcountry, settlers along the Susquehanna's West Branch valley faced raids that made an isolated homestead perilous. Around 1770 a fortified refuge rose on Matthias Schoch's tract beside a reliable spring, a place where scattered farming families could gather behind timber walls when danger threatened. Such blockhouses served the frontier through 1783, until the fighting finally ebbed and the surrounding country grew safe enough to abandon them.