American Revolution

Leitchfield, KY

When Kentucky carved Grayson County from Hardin and Ohio counties in 1810, lawmakers honored Col. William Grayson (1740–90), a Virginia lawyer who served as aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolution and later sat on the Board of War, in the Continental Congress, and in the very first U.S. Senate. The marker also recalls that Washington himself once held 5,000 acres within the county's bounds. Grayson helped ratify the new Federal Constitution at Virginia's 1788 convention before his brief Senate tenure ended with his death in 1790.

Greensburg, KY

Created in 1792 as the last of seven counties formed by Kentucky's first legislature, Green County was named for General Nathanael Greene of the Revolutionary War. Greene fought at Trenton, Brandywine, and Monmouth before Washington sent him south, where his Carolina campaign helped drive the British from Charleston in 1782.

Town of Bedford, NY

During the Revolutionary War, the high ground of Guard Hill offered a sweeping view over the surrounding Westchester countryside — the kind of vantage point that decided the fate of armies. It was important enough to be labeled "a commanding height" on the survey maps drawn by Robert Erskine, the Scottish-born engineer who served as Surveyor-General to the Continental Army and mapped the terrain George Washington's forces fought over. Throughout the war years, American observation patrols climbed to this summit to watch for enemy movement across a region that sat perilously between the British stronghold in New York City and the Patriot lines to the north.

Greensboro, NC

On March 15, 1781, American forces under Nathanael Greene met Lord Cornwallis's British army here in one of the Revolution's hardest-fought battles. Cornwallis held the field but lost roughly a quarter of his men—a victory so costly it pushed him toward Virginia and, ultimately, surrender at Yorktown. The ground is now preserved as a national military park.

York, PA · est. 1949

On this site stood the first printing press west of the Susquehanna River, operated by the firm of Hall and Sellers. When the Continental Congress fled to York from September 1777 to June 1778, this press turned out government publications and Continental currency for the struggling revolutionary cause. It was during Congress's stay here that the Articles of Confederation were adopted, making York briefly the seat of the young nation.

Middletown Township, NJ

During the American Revolution the Royal Navy patrolled the waters off New Jersey and New York, and it was here that young Lieutenant Hamilton Douglas Halyburton, a son of the Earl of Morton, met his end alongside Lieutenant James Champion and twelve sailors of H.M.S. Assistance. According to long tradition, the party perished in bitter winter cold near Sandy Hook, and their remains were buried on this spot. The memorial keeps the location of that wartime grave.

Crafton, PA · est. 1946

During the Revolutionary War, the frontier post of Fort Pitt guarded the vital forks of the Ohio, and disease was a constant threat to its garrison. In 1777 General Edward Hand ordered an isolation hospital built on this site to treat and quarantine sick and wounded troops, its log structure ringed by protective blockhouses. The precaution reflected the era's hard-won understanding that contagion could cripple an army as surely as any enemy.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

Just east of here stood Hannastown, established in 1773 as the seat of Westmoreland County and the first county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its citizens gathered in 1775 to adopt a bold declaration backing the Revolutionary cause, an early frontier voice for independence. In 1782, near the end of the war, a raiding party burned the town, and it never fully recovered.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Two miles north stood one of the region's pioneer Presbyterian congregations, founded in 1736 under its first pastor, Richard Sankey. Its graveyard became the resting place of the valley's earliest settlers alongside men who fought in the frontier wars and the Revolution that followed. A country churchyard like this is a layered record of the community that grew up around it.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1946

On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up what the marker calls the earliest resolves for independence in Pennsylvania. Written more than two years before the Declaration, their bold pledge to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles" captured the defiant mood spreading through the colonial countryside. Such local resolves gave voice to ordinary communities determined to resist British authority.

Harford County, MD

This marker recalls the late summer of 1782, when the French army of the Comte de Rochambeau made camp here at Harford Town, then called Bush, on its long march north after the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown. Noted as the twenty-second camp of that homeward journey, the site is one link in a chain of encampments that traced the allied army's route across the young nation. The French troops were returning after helping seal the Revolution's outcome the previous autumn.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1990

Chartered by the Commonwealth and opened in 1845, the Harrisburg Cemetery is the oldest and largest burial ground in Pennsylvania's capital, spreading across 35 acres of carefully composed late-Victorian landscape. Its ornate statuary and its caretaker's house — designed by A.J. Downing, the era's foremost American landscape gardener — reflect the rural-cemetery movement's ideal of the graveyard as a serene, park-like place. More than 30,000 people rest here, among them Revolutionary War soldiers, Pennsylvania governors, and figures of local, state, and national note.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1947

This early Georgian house went up in 1704, when the Welsh Quaker settlements of the Philadelphia countryside were barely a generation old, and later took its name from owner Richard Harrison. Its most consequential resident arrived in 1774: Charles Thomson, who would serve as Secretary of the Continental Congress through the entire Revolution, keeping the young nation's official records. He lived out his long retirement here until 1824, a founding-era figure quietly farming outside Philadelphia.

Orange County, NC

Hart's Mill was a working grist mill, but its real fame lies in the events that swirled around it. In 1766 it hosted a key gathering of the Regulators, backcountry farmers protesting corrupt colonial officials, and in 1781 a skirmish there gave a boost to the Patriot cause during the Revolution. The mill sat at the crossroads of two of North Carolina's great uprisings.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Haym Salomon arrived in America around 1772, an immigrant who threw himself into the Revolutionary cause and was twice imprisoned by the British. From Philadelphia he worked as a broker and money-lender, extending enormous credit to help keep the struggling war effort and the young government solvent. Active in the city's Jewish community, he was never repaid and died in debt.

New Castle, KY

Henry County, formed in 1798, carries the name of Patrick Henry, the Virginia orator whose cry of "liberty or death" helped ignite the American Revolution. A fixture of the House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he served as Virginia's first post-colonial governor and later opposed ratifying the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added—rights the nation soon adopted. He declined a string of high federal offices to remain in Virginia.

Reading, PA · est. 1949

When General Burgoyne's British army surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, thousands of captured German auxiliary troops — most of them Hessians hired by the Crown — became prisoners of war held far from the fighting. Some were marched to Reading, where from 1781 to 1783 they lived in a camp of huts on the hillside just north of this spot. Many of these soldiers, once enemies, would remain in Pennsylvania after the war and settle among its German-speaking communities.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

From about 1792 until his death in 1832, this Reading site was the home of Joseph Hiester, whose life spanned the founding era. He fought as a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, sat as a delegate to Pennsylvania's Provincial Convention in 1776, served fourteen years in Congress, and capped his career as governor of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1823.

Hillsborough, NC

In the summer of 1788, delegates gathered in Hillsborough to weigh whether North Carolina should ratify the proposed United States Constitution. From July 21 to August 4 they debated fiercely and ultimately voted to withhold ratification until a bill of rights was added to protect individual liberties. The state stood apart until those guarantees were secured.

Spring Valley Township, OH

During the Revolutionary War's western frontier, the Ohio Country was a violently contested borderland, and George Rogers Clark led Kentucky militia north across the Little Miami on punitive expeditions in 1780 and 1782 against the Shawnee towns. Guiding the columns were two of the frontier's most storied woodsmen, Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, whose knowledge of the trails and river fords made such deep strikes possible. The men who camped here two miles above Caesar's Creek were part of a war being fought far from the coastal battlefields most Americans remember, in the forests and canebrakes west of the Appalachians.

Sugar Land, TX

Alexander Hodge rode with Francis Marion's South Carolina brigade in the Revolution before bringing his family to Texas in 1825 as one of Stephen F. Austin's celebrated "Old Three Hundred" colonists. His 1828 land grant, Hodge's Bend, set aside the ground for this cemetery, which opened with the 1831 burial of his wife Ruth and received Hodge himself in 1836. Around seventy-five graves of his descendants and neighboring pioneers followed, the last in 1942.

Cambridge, MA

Built in 1763 by the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Hollis Hall has sheltered Harvard students for more than two centuries and honors the Hollis family of London, whose generosity sustained the college for generations. In 1775-76 the building traded scholars for soldiers, serving as barracks for colonial troops during the siege of Boston.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1975

Founded in 1730, this Lancaster congregation stood at the heart of a bustling colonial town where the Pennsylvania frontier met the settled east. Its early building even hosted a 1762 Indian treaty council, a reminder that diplomacy with Native nations often unfolded in the plainest of civic spaces. The stone church dedicated in 1766 still guards the graves of two Pennsylvania statesmen of the Revolutionary era, Thomas Wharton and Governor Thomas Mifflin.

Tuscaloosa, AL

This monument gathers the names of Revolutionary War soldiers and patriots who, after independence was won, migrated south and west into the Alabama frontier and settled in Tuscaloosa County. Their arrival was part of the great postwar movement of veterans and their families into the old Southwest, where land grants and opportunity drew a generation that had fought for the new nation. Tuscaloosa itself would go on to serve as Alabama's early state capital, built by exactly this pioneering stock.

York County, SC

This monument marks the spot where, on October 7, 1930, President Herbert Hoover stood before a crowd of some 75,000 people to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Kings Mountain. That 1780 clash was a turning point of the Revolution in the South, when Patriot backwoodsmen decisively defeated a Loyalist force on the ridge nearby. A century and a half later, the sesquicentennial drew a sitting president and one of the largest gatherings the region had ever seen.

Madisonville, KY

Hopkins County, created in 1806, honors Samuel Hopkins, a Virginia officer who served on Washington's staff through the Revolution before coming west in 1797 as an agent of the Transylvania Company. He organized and led the first court in the sprawling original Henderson County, sat in both houses of Kentucky's legislature, and commanded American forces on the Western frontier during the War of 1812. He capped his career with two terms in Congress.

Portsmouth, NH

This horse chestnut was set into Portsmouth soil in 1776 by William Whipple, a New Hampshire merchant and militia general who had just returned from Philadelphia, where he added his name to the Declaration of Independence. Planting a tree was a fitting act for a moment of new beginnings: the young nation and the sapling would grow up together. Whipple's home still anchors this corner of Portsmouth's colonial seaport, and the tree's long shadow ties an everyday street to one of the boldest decisions in American history.

Upper Merion Township, PA

The Horse-Shoe Trail was blazed in 1935 as a bridle-and-hiking path linking the hallowed ground of Valley Forge — where Washington's Continental Army endured the brutal winter of 1777–78 — to the Appalachian Trail on Stony Mountain, winding 121 miles through the rolling farmland and wooded ridges of southeastern Pennsylvania. This granite marker, set in 1972 by the Horse-Shoe Trail Club, honors Henry M. Woolman, one of the volunteers whose vision knit together a footpath still walked today. Trails like this one grew out of the early-twentieth-century outdoor movement, when clubs of enthusiasts carved recreational corridors across the American landscape.

Halifax, NC

Hutchins Gordon Burton served North Carolina as a congressman, state attorney general, and governor from 1824 to 1827. His home stood roughly 400 yards west of this marker. Burton's career unfolded in the Jacksonian era, as the young state matured its political institutions.

York County, SC

On October 7, 1780, the wooded ridge of Kings Mountain saw one of the Revolution's decisive Southern battles, where a force of frontier militia — the famed 'Overmountain Men' — surrounded and overwhelmed a Loyalist command in barely an hour. This memorial remembers that African Americans stood among those Patriots, naming Esias Bowman, John Broddy, and Andrew Ferguson alongside the others who fought. Their presence is a reminder that Black Americans, both free and enslaved, shared in the fighting and the risk of the War for Independence, even as the liberty they helped win was long denied to many of them.

Kittanning, PA

John Armstrong was a Scots-Irish frontier soldier who first won fame leading the 1756 raid on the Delaware town of Kittanning during the French and Indian War. When the Revolution came, he rose to brigadier general in the Continental Army and later major general of the Pennsylvania Militia, commanding militia at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777. He lived to see independence secured, dying in 1795.

New York, NY

Inclenberg was the country estate of the Murray family, prosperous Quaker merchants whose 18th-century farm gave its name to today's Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan. In an age when this part of the island was open farmland, the estate was a landmark of colonial and Revolutionary-era New York. This tablet marks the geographic center of that vanished farm, now buried beneath the modern city grid.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1948

Originally the Pennsylvania State House, this brick Georgian building hosted the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. The Liberty Bell once hung in its tower.

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.

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.

Acton, MA

This farm was the home of Captain Isaac Davis, a young gunsmith who commanded the Acton minutemen when the alarm of April 19, 1775 called them to Concord. Davis famously volunteered his well-drilled company to lead the advance on the North Bridge, telling his superiors he had no fear taking the front. He was among the first Americans killed in the opening battle of the Revolution, and this monument, erected in 1895 by Charles Wheeler, marks the place he left that morning.

Camden County, NC

Isaac Gregory served in the provincial congress of 1775 and rose to brigadier general of the militia during the Revolution, later helping shape North Carolina's future at the state conventions of 1788-1789 that weighed the new federal Constitution. His home stood about four miles to the southeast. His was a life given to both the fight for independence and the founding of a government.

Concord Township, PA · est. 2001

In 1729 Thomas Willcox built a paper mill on the West Branch of Chester Creek, launching an enterprise that would help supply the young nation's presses. Ivy Mills became a major source of paper for Benjamin Franklin's print shop, and by 1776 it was producing the stock on which the currency of the colonies and the Continental Congress was printed. Willcox's descendants ran the mill until 1866, and an early Catholic mission took root on the same property.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1991

Jacob Stroud (1735-1806) was a militia colonel and Revolutionary patriot who fortified his home on this frontier as Fort Penn during the dangerous years of the war. He served in Pennsylvania's 1776 constitutional convention and later in the state legislature, then in 1799 founded the town that bears his name, laying out its streets with his son Daniel. His life spans the transformation of this Pocono country from exposed frontier to settled community.

Edenton, NC

James Iredell rose from colonial official to become one of the intellectual architects of the new nation's legal order. He served as North Carolina's attorney general during the Revolution and championed ratification of the Constitution, and in 1790 President Washington named him to the first U.S. Supreme Court, where he sat until his death in 1799. His Edenton home still stands nearby.

Somerville, MA

On April 19, 1775, the day the American Revolution began, the fighting did not stay in Lexington and Concord — it ran the length of the British column's long, bloody retreat toward Boston, through what was then part of Charlestown and is today Somerville. James Miller, sixty-five years old, was among the local men who turned out to harry the redcoats as they passed, and on this hillside he was shot down by British regulars. The words remembered on his monument, "I am too old to run," preserve the defiance of an aging New Englander who chose to stand his ground.

York, PA · est. 1949

James Smith, who lies buried in this churchyard, was one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence. A York lawyer of Irish birth, he raised a company of Associators—citizen-soldiers—early in the Revolution and served in the Continental Congress. He was also an ironmaster, part of the frontier industry that helped arm the American cause.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

James Wilson rose from a Carlisle law office to become one of the most consequential legal minds of the founding generation. As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress he signed the Declaration of Independence, and at the Constitutional Convention he was among the principal architects of the framework that still governs the nation. He later served on the first U.S. Supreme Court.

Charlotte, NC

In the autumn of 1780, the Revolution's southern campaign swept into the North Carolina backcountry, and for a few tense weeks Lord Cornwallis's British army occupied Charlotte — a town so fiercely rebellious he reportedly branded it a "hornet's nest." This marker honors Jane Parks McDowell, who according to local memory rode ten hard miles to carry word to the American camp as the British pulled out of the town. Her ride belongs to that anxious moment when Patriot militia shadowed every British move through the Carolina Piedmont.

Beaumont, TX

Jean Baptiste 'Jonas' Chaison was born in Nova Scotia to French parents and, after his family's imprisonment during the French and Indian War, fled to France before returning to North America. He joined the American cause in 1775 and, by the marker's account, served through the Revolution — at Brandywine and Germantown, wounded at Eutaw Springs, and present at Yorktown under Lafayette. He later settled as a farmer, moved to Beaumont around 1840, and lived, the marker says, to well past a hundred; the Daughters of the American Revolution marked his grave in 1944.

West Pittston, PA · est. 1947

Raised in 1776 by Connecticut settlers who claimed the Wyoming Valley under Yankee title, John Jenkins' stockaded home was one of the small frontier forts guarding families along the Susquehanna. On July 1, 1778, as a British and Loyalist force under Major John Butler swept down the valley, the fort surrendered and was put to the torch—days before the bloody Battle of Wyoming that scattered the settlement.

Exeter, NH

Standing in Exeter since about 1730, this handsome frame house is remembered as the home of Jeremiah Smith, one of early New Hampshire's most accomplished public men. A veteran of the Revolutionary War who reportedly marched to the Battle of Bennington, Smith went on to serve in Congress, sit as chief justice of the state's highest court, and win election as governor in the young republic's early years. His career spanned the generation that turned a cluster of former colonies into a working state government, with Exeter — a onetime Revolutionary-era capital of New Hampshire — as his home ground.

Harding Township, NJ

During the brutal winter of 1779–1780, the Continental Army made its main encampment at Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, New Jersey, enduring cold and disease worse than Valley Forge. This monument marks the resting place of more than 100 Continental soldiers who died in service and were buried nearby, raised by the people of Morristown as a tribute to their sacrifice for American liberty. The quiet cemetery stands as a reminder that the Revolution was won as much in freezing camps as on the battlefield.

Raleigh, NC

Standing since before 1770, the Joel Lane House was the home of a wealthy planter and legislator whose plantation covered much of what is now Raleigh. Political leaders gathered here in the turbulent Revolutionary and early statehood years, and it was on Lane's land that commissioners decided in 1792 to plant North Carolina's new permanent capital. The city of Raleigh grew from that choice.

Swepsonville, NC

John Butler lived through two of North Carolina's defining struggles. As Orange County sheriff during the War of the Regulation in 1770–1771, he stood at the center of the backcountry's clash with colonial authority, and he later served as a brigadier general of the state militia through the Revolution. His career spanned the passage from colonial grievance to armed independence.

Chadds Ford Township, PA · est. 1915

During the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777, Colonel Thomas Proctor's American artillery took up positions in redoubts near this house, the home of ferryman John Chad. The guns helped anchor Washington's defense along the Brandywine before the army was forced to give ground. The dwelling still marks where Continental cannon stood against the advancing British.

Raleigh, NC

Born free around 1762, John Chavis served in the Revolutionary War, studied for the ministry, and became one of the most respected teachers in North Carolina. In his Raleigh-area school he taught both free Black children and the sons of prominent white families, several of whom rose to high office. Tightening laws after 1831 eventually barred him from preaching and teaching to Black audiences.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2001

John Dickinson earned the nickname "Penman of the Revolution" for his influential writings of 1765–74 opposing British taxation, yet he remains one of the founding era's most fascinating contrarians. In the Continental Congress he sought reconciliation and declined to sign the Declaration of Independence, then promptly took up arms as a colonel to serve the patriot cause anyway. He later presided over Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council and, as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, became a firm champion of the new federal Constitution.

Boston, MA

John Glover was a fisherman and merchant from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who raised a regiment of hardy mariners at the outbreak of the Revolution. His seafaring soldiers proved indispensable to George Washington: they rowed the beaten Continental Army to safety across the East River after the Battle of Long Island in 1776, and later that year manned the boats that ferried the troops across the ice-choked Delaware for the surprise attack on Trenton. This bronze figure stands on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall, honoring the seaman-soldier decades after his death.

Hopewell, NJ

John Hart was a New Jersey farmer and public servant who put his name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, casting his lot with a rebellion that the British crown considered treason. A longtime resident of the Hopewell area, he served in the colonial assembly and later as speaker of New Jersey's revolutionary legislature. When British and Hessian troops swept through the region during the dark winter of 1776, Hart reportedly had to flee his farm and hide out until Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton turned the tide.

Hertford, NC

John Harvey was a towering figure on North Carolina's road to independence, serving five times as speaker of the colonial assembly and presiding as moderator over the provincial congresses of 1774-1775 that defied royal authority. His leadership helped move the colony toward open revolution before his death in 1775. He lived about eleven miles to the south.

Washington, DC

This was the home, from 1804 to 1841, of John Lutz, who had served as a sergeant in General Washington's Guard during the desperate winter at Valley Forge in 1777–78. The elite Commander-in-Chief's Guard protected Washington's person and headquarters through the Revolution's hardest trials. That a veteran of that ordeal lived out his later years here ties this ground directly to the fight for independence.

Moore County, NC

John Macrae emigrated from the Scottish Highlands in 1774, part of a large wave of Gaelic-speaking Scots who settled North Carolina's Cape Fear region. A poet in his native tongue, he remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolution; his home stood a few miles south of this spot.

Ridley Park, PA · est. 1967

Here stood the birthplace of John Morton (1724–1777), a Delaware County farmer and surveyor who rose to serve in the Continental Congress. When Pennsylvania's delegation was split over independence, Morton's vote—joining those of Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson—swung the colony behind the break with Britain. He went on to sign the Declaration of Independence, casting a decisive ballot at a hinge point of American history.