American Revolution

Halifax, NC

A wealthy Halifax planter and one of Revolutionary North Carolina's most powerful politicians, Willie Jones led the state's Antifederalists and championed states' rights. He guided the movement that initially refused to ratify the U.S. Constitution until a Bill of Rights was secured. His estate, "The Grove," stood just west of this marker.

Littleton, NC

Willis Alston Jr. represented North Carolina in the U.S. House for more than two decades — from 1799 to 1815 and again from 1825 to 1831 — as a Jeffersonian Republican, and also served in the state House and Senate. A member of a prominent Roanoke Valley planter family, he was a fixture of early national politics. His grave lies several miles southeast of Littleton.

Tunkhannock, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1842 from Luzerne County, Wyoming County takes its name from an Indigenous word for extensive meadows, describing the broad Wyoming Valley. Tunkhannock, settled in 1790, became the county seat. Decades before the county existed, General Sullivan's army marched through this country in August 1779 during the Revolution's campaign against the Iroquois.

Blooming Grove Township, PA · est. 1951

The modern highway here traces an old Delaware Indian path that ran from Minisink Island on the river to the Wyoming Valley. Along it, in July 1778, terrified refugees fled the Massacre of Wyoming — a bloody Revolutionary War raid by Loyalist and allied Iroquois forces — pausing to camp beside a bubbling spring still visible in the woods nearby. The path carried both ancient travelers and the human wreckage of the frontier war.

Jefferson Hills, PA

In the years around the Revolution, the western edge of Pennsylvania was contested ground: Virginia insisted its charter reached across the Monongahela country and, in 1776, carved the disputed region into three counties. Yohogania was one of them, and this hilltop served as its seat of government and justice from 1777 to 1780—complete with a courthouse where Virginia magistrates held court over settlers who thought they lived in Pennsylvania. The overlapping claims were only untangled when the two states finally agreed to extend the Mason-Dixon Line westward, extinguishing Yohogania County and returning the ground to Pennsylvania.

Manchester Township, PA · est. 1947

Laid out in 1741 on William Penn's proprietary land, this was the first Pennsylvania town planted west of the Susquehanna River, an outpost of colonial settlement pushing toward the frontier. Its greatest hour came in the fall of 1777, when the Continental Congress fled British-occupied Philadelphia and made this county seat the temporary capital of a young nation at war. In the months that followed, the delegates here debated and adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first framework binding the thirteen states into a union.

York, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1741 by order of the Penn proprietors, this was the first Pennsylvania town laid out west of the Susquehanna, an anchor of colonial expansion into the interior. When British troops seized Philadelphia in 1777, the Continental Congress retreated here and governed the rebelling states from this county seat through the winter and spring of 1777–78. It was in this period that Congress produced the Articles of Confederation, the compact that first joined the states into a single confederacy.

York, PA · est. 1982

York County was Pennsylvania's fifth county when it was formed from Lancaster County in 1749, with its seat laid out eight years earlier. During the Revolution, the Continental Congress fled here and met in York from 1777 to 1778 while the British held Philadelphia. In that interval Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation and ratified the crucial treaties of alliance with France.

York, PA · est. 1949

From about 1750 to 1855, the county prison stood on this site, serving frontier York County through the colonial era and into the industrial age. During the early years of the Revolution, it held prominent British prisoners of war, making this jail a small front in a continental conflict far from any battlefield.

North York, PA · est. 1949

This old bell once hung in York's Provincial Courthouse, where the Continental Congress met during the Revolution. Tradition holds that it rang out to announce the signing of the Declaration of Independence and to summon the delegates to their sessions when the seat of government stood in York. It now rests in the vestibule of this church.

Paterson, NJ

In the autumn of 1780, this stretch of road carried George Washington and his Continental soldiers between the Dey Mansion at Preakness—which served as the general's headquarters that year—and Acquackanonk Landing on the Passaic River. The war in the North had settled into a tense, watchful phase after the fighting shifted southward, and northern New Jersey became a corridor of constant troop movement, its farm roads and river landings vital to keeping the army fed, supplied, and positioned. A quiet route today, York Road once echoed with the march of the army that would ultimately win American independence.

Yorktown, VA · est. 1957

A combined American and French force trapped the British army against the York River while the French fleet blocked escape by sea. The siege's end secured American independence.

York County, VA

At Yorktown, Virginia, the combined American and French forces under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau cornered British General Lord Cornwallis in the autumn of 1781, and his surrender effectively ended major fighting in the War of Independence. Decades later, Congress authorized a towering Monument to the Alliance and Victory, dedicated during the 1881 centennial of the siege. Its inscriptions, including this rallying line celebrating national unity, frame the battle as the moment a fragile alliance secured a lasting nation.