Wilkes-Barre Fort
Swoyersville, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Completed 1778, enclosing the courthouse of the Connecticut county of Westmoreland. Surrendered with Forty Fort to the British in 1778.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Finished in 1778, this fort enclosed the courthouse of Westmoreland—the county Connecticut had carved out of the disputed Wyoming Valley. It stood only briefly: with the valley overrun by British and Loyalist forces that same summer, it surrendered alongside nearby Forty Fort, another casualty of the campaign that broke the Yankee settlement.
Why it matters
The fort embodies the strange chapter when Connecticut governed a slice of Pennsylvania, and its swift fall in 1778 sealed the valley's wartime collapse.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1770s the Wyoming Valley along the Susquehanna was one of the most bitterly contested pieces of ground in the colonies — and the quarrel was not only with Britain. Two colonies, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, both claimed it, each pointing to its own royal charter, and settlers loyal to each had been coming to blows for years before the Revolution gave them a common enemy.
Connecticut's claim rested on its old sea-to-sea charter, and New England families had pushed west to plant farms in the valley. To govern this far-flung outpost, Connecticut organized the region as the town and county of Westmoreland — a slice of New England law and institutions set down in the middle of what the map would later call Pennsylvania.
When the war came, these Connecticut settlers threw in with the Patriot cause. But their valley was exposed, reachable by raiders coming down the Susquehanna from the north, and by 1778 it sat squarely in the path of the frontier war.
People & events
This fort was completed in 1778 to protect the seat of that Connecticut county — its courthouse, the working heart of Westmoreland's government. A fort built around a courthouse tells you a great deal: these were people trying to be both a functioning civil community and an armed outpost at the same time.
They had little time to be either. The summer of 1778 brought a devastating campaign into the Wyoming Valley, as British-allied forces and Loyalists swept down upon the settlements. In the face of that onslaught the valley's defenses collapsed, and the fort shared the fate of nearby Forty Fort, surrendering rather than be stormed.
The marker's plain phrasing — completed one year, surrendered the same year — carries the whole tragedy in miniature. A community raised its stronghold and saw it fall within months. What had been the proud center of a new county became another post handed over to the enemy.
Its place in the American story
The story here opens a window onto something most accounts of the Revolution leave out: the young American states did not always agree on where they ended and their neighbors began. The spectacle of Connecticut governing a county deep inside Pennsylvania shows how tangled colonial charters were, and how much nation-building still lay ahead even among allies fighting the same war.
The fort's swift fall also belongs to the larger catastrophe that struck the Wyoming Valley in 1778, one of the hardest blows the frontier suffered during the Revolution. The loss of these posts drove settlers out and left the valley open, a disaster that echoed well beyond its hills and helped shape the campaigns that followed.
Taken together, the two threads — a border dispute between sister colonies and a brutal frontier defeat — capture how messy and multi-sided the Revolution really was. Independence was being fought for here, but so was the basic question of who these communities even belonged to.
If you visit
Don't come looking for ramparts. Like many Revolutionary-era posts in this region, the fort itself is long gone, and the marker stands to fix in place a story the ground no longer shows. What you are really visiting is a location and an idea.
Read the inscription and let the strangeness of it land: you are standing where a New England county once kept its courthouse, far from New England. That fact alone reframes the tidy modern map around you and is worth a moment's reflection before you move on.
This marker pairs naturally with a wider tour of the Wyoming Valley's Revolutionary sites, where nearby markers remember the forts, the surrender, and the terrible summer of 1778. Follow the Susquehanna and you follow the same route the danger took, which makes the region's string of markers read almost like chapters in a single, hard year.
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 events
- · Battle of Wyoming
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Forty Fort
Forty Fort, PA · est. 1947
Forty Fort took its name from the forty Connecticut pioneers who came to the Wyoming Valley in 1769 and began the stockade the next year. It is remembered above all for the aftermath of July 3, 1778, when its surrender to a British, Loyalist, and Native force under Major John Butler was followed by the Wyoming Massacre, one of the war's bloodiest frontier episodes. The killing of settlers and prisoners shocked the young nation and hardened resolve against the Iroquois allies of the Crown.
Denison House
Forty Fort, PA · est. 1972
Built in 1790 in the Wyoming Valley, this house was home to Colonel Nathan Denison, who had served as a Revolutionary War officer during a turbulent era of frontier warfare and land disputes in northeastern Pennsylvania. After independence, Denison became a Luzerne County judge, helping build the civic institutions of the young republic. The home stands as a tangible link between a soldier's wartime service and his later role in ordering a new nation's local government.
Battle of Wyoming
Wyoming, PA · est. 1952
On July 3, 1778, the Revolution reached the Susquehanna frontier in one of its bloodiest backcountry episodes. A small force of about 300 patriots under Colonel Zebulon Butler marched out to meet a much larger column of British, Loyalists, and allied Iroquois led by Major John Butler. The patriots were routed, many captives were killed, and terrified survivors fled to the refuge of Forty Fort.
The Bloody Rock
Wyoming, PA · est. 1962
On the night of July 3, 1778, the day after the Battle of Wyoming, this rock became the scene of one of the Revolution's grim atrocities. Fourteen or more captured American soldiers were killed here, according to tradition by a woman remembered as "Queen Esther," though her identity has never been certain. The battle and its aftermath spread terror through the Susquehanna frontier and hardened the war on the Pennsylvania borderlands.