American Revolution

Hanover Township, PA · est. 1949

This marker distills the whole arc of Pennsylvania's founding into a few proud words. William Penn received his charter in 1681 and built a colony on Quaker ideals of religious tolerance and fair dealing, drawing settlers of many faiths to a "holy experiment" in self-government. A century later Philadelphia became the stage where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the U.S. Constitution was drafted, giving Pennsylvania a double claim as the cradle of the American republic.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012

Built about 1697 where a Lenape trail forded Pennypack Creek, this modest triple-arched stone span is reckoned the oldest roadway bridge in continuous use in the United States. It carried the King's Highway, one of colonial America's great overland routes, and in 1781 bore the tramp of American and French troops marching south with Rochambeau toward the decisive siege of Yorktown. Widened only once, in 1893, its upstream face looks much as it did when William Penn's colony was young.

Perkiomen Township, PA · est. 1946

This Montgomery County house served as George Washington's headquarters in the autumn of 1777, during the fraught campaign around Philadelphia in the Revolutionary War. Generations later it became the beloved home of Samuel W. Pennypacker, who served as governor of Pennsylvania in the early 1900s and died here in 1916. Few homes can claim to have sheltered both a founding general and a modern governor beneath one roof.

Littleton, NC

An "ordinary" was the colonial term for a tavern offering meals and lodging at a fixed rate, and this one was in operation by 1770 as a stagecoach stop on a well-traveled route. Through the Revolutionary era it served travelers along the road and took its name from the family of Thomas Person, a prominent Revolutionary patriot for whom Person County is named. It was later restored by the Littleton Woman's Club.

North York, PA · est. 1949

Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York merchant, put his name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and continued to serve in the Continental Congress until his death in June 1778, while Congress was meeting in York. He was buried here, hundreds of miles from home, a casualty of the demands of wartime public service. His grave lies about 300 feet west of this spot.

Liberty Township, PA · est. 1966

In July 1780, as the Revolution's violence spilled across the Pennsylvania frontier, Captain William Phillips and eleven men of his militia company were captured near this spot by a Native war party. Ten were killed and later buried by a search party, while Phillips and his son Elijah were taken prisoner and not freed until the British released them at war's end.

Phillipston, MA

This monument honors a living American Liberty Elm planted in tribute to Boston's original Liberty Tree. On August 14, 1765, colonists in Boston hung effigies of a stamp officer and a British official from a great elm near the Common, launching a wave of protest against Parliament's Stamp Act. That tree became the rallying point for the Sons of Liberty, and elms and poles like it sprang up across the colonies as living emblems of resistance to taxation without representation.

Lexington, KY

In the summer of 1775, long hunters ranging through the Kentucky wilderness made camp at a spring on this ground and, hearing that the first shots of the Revolution had been fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, borrowed that name for their bivouac. The camp they christened would grow into the city of Lexington, one of the earliest permanent settlements west of the Appalachians. This tablet was placed by the city's citizens in 1925, on the 150th anniversary of that naming, to mark where the story began.

Pittston, PA · est. 1947

Begun in 1772 by Connecticut proprietors settling the contested Wyoming Valley, Pittston Fort sheltered families on the west bank of the Susquehanna. Caught up in the British and Loyalist descent on the valley, it was forced to surrender on July 4, 1778, and partly destroyed—only to be rebuilt in 1780 and manned through the rest of the Revolutionary War.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 1955

The Plymouth Friends Meetinghouse has gathered worshippers since about 1708, making it one of the region's oldest continuously used houses of worship. During the hard winter march to Valley Forge, it sheltered Washington's soldiers as a hospital and campsite. Its Quaker congregation later made it a hub of the abolition movement, and an eastern wing added in 1780 replaced the original log school.

Potter Township, PA · est. 1947

As the Revolution reached the Pennsylvania frontier, settlers in the valleys faced raids that left them dangerously exposed. In 1777 General James Potter built this stockaded fort as a refuge, a fortified place where scattered farm families could gather for safety in times of alarm. Such improvised strongholds were the backbone of wartime survival far from the coastal battle lines.

New York, NY

When Dutch and English settlers laid out the town of Jamaica on western Long Island in 1660, they set aside this ground to bury their dead — making it one of the oldest cemeteries in what is now New York City. Among those interred here is Egbert Benson (1746–1833), a Revolutionary-era statesman who served as the first Attorney General of New York State and later sat in the Continental Congress and the U.S. House. The marker, placed by the State Education Department in 1936, ties a quiet colonial burying ground to the men who helped build the early republic.

York, PA · est. 1949

On this square once stood the York County courthouse, where the Continental Congress met from September 1777 to June 1778 after fleeing Philadelphia. Within its walls the young republic ratified the Articles of Confederation — its first framework of government — and celebrated the treaties of alliance with France that would prove decisive to the war's outcome.

City of Utica, NY

This monument commemorates Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman born in 1745 who crossed the Atlantic to fight for American independence and became known as the "Father of the American Cavalry." He fell leading a charge at the Siege of Savannah in 1779, giving his life for a country not his own. Long celebrated by Polish-American communities, Pulaski is honored in Utica as both a Revolutionary hero and a symbol of Polish heritage.

Palos Township, IL

This woodland preserve southwest of Chicago is dedicated to Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman who joined the American cause and became a hero of the Revolutionary War. Known as the 'Father of the American Cavalry,' Pulaski reorganized mounted troops for Washington's army and was mortally wounded at the Siege of Savannah in 1779. His name endures across the Chicago region, home to a large Polish-American community that claims him proudly.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1974

While the Polish cavalry officer Casimir Pulaski guarded this area in 1778, the Moravian women of Bethlehem stitched a crimson banner for his legion, which his horsemen carried until he fell at the Siege of Savannah in 1779. The gift became one of the Revolution's cherished legends, later immortalized in Longfellow's verse "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns." The story bound a foreign volunteer's sacrifice to the quiet devotion of a Pennsylvania religious community.

Oceanport, NJ

The Purple Heart traces its lineage to 1782, when George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit to recognize extraordinary valor among Continental Army soldiers — one of the earliest military honors of its kind in the world. After long falling into disuse, it was revived in 1932 and reshaped into the decoration awarded to service members wounded or killed in action. A memorial like this one gathers all of those recipients into a single act of remembrance.

Belpre, OH

In the 1790s, veterans of the Ohio Company of Associates carved the frontier town of Belpre out of the wilderness along the Ohio River, part of the first organized American settlement in the Northwest Territory. Among the books they carried west was the collection tied to Revolutionary War hero General Israel Putnam, gathered years earlier through a shareholders' library association back in Pomfret, Connecticut. Books were precious on the frontier, and these shared volumes helped seed one of the earliest libraries west of the Alleghenies, a lamp of learning in a raw new country.

Albemarle County, VA

Shadrach Battles was a free African American man from Albemarle County, Virginia, who served as a private in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. At a time when liberty was being declared for some but withheld from many, free and enslaved Black Virginians took up arms in the patriot cause. This marker honors his service among the often-overlooked Black soldiers of the Revolution.

Burlington, NC

In February 1781, a body of Loyalist militia marching to join Cornwallis's army was surprised and destroyed by Henry 'Light-Horse Harry' Lee's Legion on Colonel Michael Holt's land near here. The one-sided fight, sometimes called Pyle's Massacre, shattered Tory recruitment in the region on the eve of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

Boston, MA

In the crowded North Square of Boston's North End, silversmith and patriot Paul Revere kept his home in the years surrounding the American Revolution. It was from this dense colonial neighborhood that Revere set out on his famous night ride in April 1775 to warn that British regulars were on the march. His wife, Rachel Walker Revere, held the household together through the upheaval of war and occupation, and it is for her that this overlook is named.

Radnor Township, PA · est. 1947

Quakers — the Society of Friends — have gathered on this ground since 1686, only a few years after Pennsylvania's founding, making Radnor Meeting one of the oldest Friends communities in the region. The stone meetinghouse standing from about 1721 saw its quiet worship interrupted by war: during the brutal winter of 1777–78, when Washington's army lay at nearby Valley Forge, the building served as an officers' quarters and a hospital for the sick and wounded. It is a place where two strands of Pennsylvania's identity — Quaker pacifism and Revolutionary sacrifice — met under one roof.

National Park, NJ

On October 22, 1777, at Fort Mercer on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River, Colonel Christopher Greene and the First Rhode Island Continentals held their ground against a far larger force of Hessian troops trying to clear the river approach to British-held Philadelphia. A garrison of only a few hundred repelled the assault, inflicting heavy losses in one of the season's rare American successes.

Charleston, SC

During the American Revolution, Charleston was defended on its landward side by the Horn Work, a massive tabby-and-earthen fortification that anchored the American lines across the neck of the peninsula. In the spring of 1780 a British army under Sir Henry Clinton laid siege to the city, digging parallel trenches ever closer until the defenders were trapped. On May 12, 1780, the American garrison surrendered here, handing Britain one of the largest captures of Continental troops in the entire war. This surviving fragment of tabby is nearly all that remains of that once-imposing gateway defense.

Marlboro County, SC

During the American Revolution, a "cartel" was a formal agreement between opposing forces for the exchange of captured prisoners under agreed terms. In the Carolina backcountry, where the war became a brutal contest of raids and reprisals between Patriots and Loyalists, such arrangements offered a rare moment of negotiated order amid the chaos. This marker in Marlboro County recalls one of those understandings, a reminder that even a bitter civil conflict on the frontier followed certain rules of war.

Langhorne, PA · est. 1999

In the winter of 1776–77, the village then called Four Lanes End became a place of recovery and death for Continental soldiers. Wounded in the two Battles of Trenton and stricken by disease during that brutal winter, the men were treated in four hospital buildings here after Washington's forces passed through. Archaeological work in 1992 confirmed the burial ground, where written accounts say roughly 166 soldiers were laid to rest.

Hummelstown, PA · est. 2012

When British troops seized Philadelphia in 1777, Pennsylvania's revolutionary government fled westward and needed weapons for the fight. Near Hummelstown it set up its official state gun factory, working in secret from 1777 to 1779 to turn out muskets and rifles for the Continental Army. In an age when a single skilled gunsmith might finish only a few arms a month, the concentrated production here was a small but vital arsenal for a cause perpetually short of firepower.

Phoenixville, PA

This marker records the farthest inland point reached by British forces during their 1777 campaign to capture Philadelphia. In late September of that year, after the Battle of Brandywine, British and American armies maneuvered across Chester County — including the rain-drenched 'Battle of the Clouds' — before General Howe's troops pressed on toward the rebel capital and Washington's army withdrew.

Perkiomen Township, PA

In the autumn of 1777, George Washington's army fought a costly battle at Germantown just outside British-held Philadelphia. Among the wounded was Major Edward Sherburne of New Hampshire, an aide to General John Sullivan, who was struck down on October 4 and died the following evening. This grave marker remembers a young staff officer whose service ended far from home in the war's brutal Philadelphia campaign.

Cincinnati, OH

Placed in 1909 by the Cincinnati chapter of the Sons of the Revolution, this tablet honors Revolutionary War soldiers who, after winning independence, moved west to help settle the Ohio country and now lie buried in Hamilton County. The dates 1775 and 1783 mark the span of the war for independence. The memorial links the founding generation to the westward push that opened the trans-Appalachian frontier.

Greenville, KY

This marker records the names of Revolutionary War veterans who settled in Muhlenberg County after independence. Drawn from many states, these men traded wartime service for land and new lives on the Kentucky frontier, becoming founders of their communities. Their listed names preserve a roster of the county's earliest citizen-soldiers.

Bethlehem, PA

During the Revolutionary War, the Moravian town of Bethlehem served as a refuge and a major Continental Army hospital, and scores of soldiers who died of their wounds or of camp diseases were buried in its ground. Two centuries later, when those long-forgotten graves were disturbed or rediscovered, the remains were gathered and reinterred with honor, marked by this monument dedicated on May 25, 1996. The stone stands not for a battle but for the quiet toll of the war's sick and wounded far from any front line.

Frankfort, KY

This monument, presented by the Kentucky Society of the Sons of the Revolution, honors the many Revolutionary War veterans who went on to lead the new state of Kentucky. Governors such as Isaac Shelby, James Garrard, Christopher Greenup, Charles Scott, George Madison, and John Adair, along with early U.S. Senators from Kentucky, had all served in Continental or state forces during the fight for independence. Their military ranks are recorded alongside their offices.

Austin, TX

Born in Virginia in 1753, Robert Rankin served as an officer in the Continental Army's Virginia troops from 1776, in the same company as his kinsman John Marshall, the future Chief Justice. He fought at Brandywine, Germantown, and Stony Point and endured the Siege of Charleston. His sons carried the family's service into the War of 1812, one of them killed in the 1813 massacre at Fort Mims in Alabama, before several of them died in Texas.

Bensalem Township, PA · est. 2007

On September 2, 1781, French and American troops under Comte de Rochambeau and General George Washington camped along nearby Poquessing Creek as they marched south. Officers used the Red Lion Inn, once located here, as a headquarters. This encampment was one leg of the extraordinary overland march that carried the allied army to Yorktown, where the decisive victory of the Revolution was won.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

In the late summer of 1781, the combined French and Continental armies were racing south for the decisive campaign that would end the Revolutionary War. After a grand review before Congress in Philadelphia, the allied columns marched down the old King's Highway toward Wilmington, pausing to camp here at Chester on September 5. Within weeks these same troops would help trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1951

Rock Ford was the Georgian mansion of Edward Hand, an Irish-born Lancaster physician who rose to serve as Adjutant General of the Continental Army under George Washington. After the Revolution he settled into this home along the Conestoga, and in 1791 he welcomed President Washington himself as a guest. The mansion survives about half a mile to the southeast.

Nelson County, KY

In the dangerous years of the Revolution, frontier surveyor and soldier James Rogers marked out a thousand-acre claim here in 1775 and by 1780 had planted a fortified station on it. A veteran of Dunmore's War and the Revolution, Rogers was commissioned a militia colonel and justice of the peace by Virginia's governor Patrick Henry, and he signed the early petitions asking that Kentucky be separated from Virginia. Stations like his were the seeds of permanent settlement.

Medford, MA · est. 1930

This Georgian mansion was built in the 1730s by Isaac Royall, a merchant who grew wealthy in the Caribbean and arrived from Antigua bringing enslaved people to labor on his Medford estate — making it one of New England's starkest surviving sites of northern slavery. His loyalist son later endowed Harvard's first professorship of law, the seed of Harvard Law School. During the Siege of Boston the house served as headquarters for the Revolutionary general John Stark.

Haywood County, NC

In September 1776, as the Revolution raged, Gen. Griffith Rutherford led a militia expedition through Pigeon Gap and into the Cherokee heartland, part of a coordinated campaign that burned dozens of Native towns. The route his men cut became known as the Rutherford Trace. The campaign was retaliation for Cherokee raids on frontier settlements and aimed to break the nation's power in the southern mountains.

Harford County, MD

In the rolling farmland of Harford County stands a church whose roots reach back to the Jesuit missionaries who kept the Catholic faith alive in Maryland — a colony founded as a rare haven of religious tolerance in early America. Completed in 1792 by Father Sylvester Boarman, a Jesuit tending the nearby mission of St. Joseph at Priest's Ford, Saint Ignatius rose in the first years of the new republic, when Catholics were only beginning to worship freely and openly. It is remembered as the oldest Roman Catholic church in continuous use in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the founding see of American Catholicism. Its early pastors even ministered to the family of Charles Carroll, the Maryland statesman whose name is woven through the nation's founding.

Boston, MA

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) was one of Boston's most relentless agitators for independence, turning taverns and town meetings into engines of revolution. A master organizer behind the Sons of Liberty and the committees of correspondence that knit the colonies together, he helped stage the Boston Tea Party and pushed the cause toward open defiance of the Crown. He signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and later served as governor of Massachusetts, never losing his reputation as a champion of ordinary people.

Lexington, KY

Here lies Samuel Boone (1728–1816), eldest brother of the famed pioneer Daniel Boone. Born in Pennsylvania, he came to Kentucky from South Carolina in 1779 and settled at Boone's Station, joining the 1782 defense of Bryan's Station during a period of intense frontier warfare. That same year his son Thomas was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks, one of the last engagements of the Revolution in the West.

Edenton, NC

Samuel Johnston was among the most influential leaders of Revolutionary-era North Carolina, presiding over provincial congresses, serving as governor, and later representing the state in the U.S. Senate. His plantation home, "Hayes," and his grave lie about a mile to the southeast. Few figures did more to guide the colony through independence and into statehood.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1948

This memorial honors Samuel Meredith, a Revolutionary-era patriot and financier who became the first Treasurer of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1801 under the new federal government. Together with fellow signer George Clymer, Meredith held extensive lands in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, and he died at his estate, Belmont, in 1817. His life spanned the war for independence and the building of the nation's earliest financial institutions.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1949

Samuel Meredith was a Philadelphia merchant and Revolutionary patriot who served in the militia and helped finance the struggle for independence. In 1789 President Washington named him the first Treasurer of the United States, a post he held through the government's fragile founding decade. He retired to his estate, Belmont, in the quiet hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he died in 1817.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1992

During the Revolution, thousands of women followed the Continental Army as it marched, cooking, sewing, washing, and nursing the men who fought—labor without which the army could not have stayed in the field. Sarah Mary Benjamin was one of these camp followers, accompanying a New York unit from 1780 to 1783 and, by her own vivid later account, even standing sentinel duty at Kingsbridge and carrying food to soldiers under fire at Yorktown. Living past the age of 100, she settled in this Wayne County township after 1822, where her firsthand memories of the war made her a living link to the founding generation.

Union Township, PA · est. 1980

German immigrants began settling this part of Lebanon County as early as 1729, part of the great wave of Pennsylvania Dutch migration to William Penn's tolerant colony. In the wilderness they were served by traveling missionaries, among them John Caspar Stoever, Jr., a pioneering Lutheran pastor who ministered to scattered frontier congregations. A log church rose around 1756, replaced by the present building in 1872, and the congregation honors Peter Sattazahn, a Revolutionary War soldier buried here.

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.

East Bradford Township, PA · est. 1915

At Sconnelltown, the division under Lord Cornwallis paused on September 11, 1777, midway through the long looping march that carried the British around the American flank at Brandywine. The halt was one link in a day of hard, dusty marching that let Howe's wing arrive undetected behind Washington's line. The marker traces the route of that famous flanking column through the Chester County countryside.

Georgetown, KY

Formed from Woodford County in 1792, Scott County was the second created after Kentucky became a state. It honors General Charles Scott, a Virginia-born Revolutionary officer who saw action at Trenton, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point, settled in Kentucky in 1785, and later served as the state's fourth governor.

Norristown, PA · est. 1949

Selma was the home of Andrew Porter, a general of the Revolution, but it is best remembered as the birthplace of his remarkable sons. David R. Porter became governor of Pennsylvania from 1839 to 1845; James M. Porter served as U.S. Secretary of War in 1843; and George B. Porter was governor of Michigan Territory from 1831 to 1834. From one Montgomery County household came a striking concentration of public service in the early republic.

Plymouth, PA · est. 2003

As the Revolution began, the Continental Congress ordered a chain of frontier forts to shield settlers in the contested Wyoming Valley, and Shawnee Fort was one of them. It guarded Connecticut-backed Yankee settlers — both from British-allied raiders and from Pennsylvanians who claimed the same lands — and served as the garrison of Capt. Samuel Ransom's company, which fought under Washington. Burned after the bloody Battle of Wyoming in 1778 and rebuilt, it was finally swept away by a flood in 1784.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

Edward Shippen was one of colonial Lancaster's leading citizens, a lawyer and judge who chaired the local Committee of Observation as the Revolution approached. His home stood here for three decades in the mid-1700s, an era when Lancaster was among the largest inland towns in the colonies. He is remembered too as grandfather of Peggy Shippen, who married Benedict Arnold and became entangled in the most infamous treason of the war.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 2001

Born near this spot, Simon Girty became one of the American frontier's most divisive figures. Captured by Native forces in 1756 as a boy, he spent years among the Senecas, mastering their language and ways, and later served the American army as an interpreter before deserting in 1778. Thereafter he led British and allied Native war parties against frontier settlements and remained hostile to the United States through the War of 1812, dying in exile in Canada.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2017

Born near Harrisburg, Simon Girty was captured and adopted by the Seneca as a teenager in 1756, and he came to move fluidly between Native and colonial worlds. He worked as an interpreter at Fort Pitt before defecting to the British in 1778, after which he advised and accompanied Native war parties in raids on frontier settlements during the Revolution. Reviled by many American settlers, he remains a deeply contested figure and is buried in Canada.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1744 and first used as a Brothers' House, this Bethlehem building soon became home to the Moravian community's unmarried women, who lived and worked here practicing the arts and crafts assigned to the sisterhood. In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the sisters stitched the banner carried by Casimir Pulaski's cavalry legion—a piece of needlework later immortalized in American memory. The Single Sisters' choir was a distinctive feature of Moravian communal life, giving women a defined economic and spiritual role.

Cambridge, MA

In the opening year of the War for Independence, the town of Cambridge sat at the heart of the Siege of Boston, its colleges, homes, and commons pressed into service as barracks, hospitals, and command posts for the newly gathered American army. Elegant houses whose owners had fled were commandeered as officers' quarters and headquarters, making quiet residential streets the nerve centers of a revolution. A marker like this one fixes the spot where such a headquarters once stood, connecting an ordinary Cambridge address to the improvised military capital of 1775–76.

New York, NY

During the American Revolution, the rocky heights of northern Manhattan were fortified to help hold the Hudson against the British advance. Fort Tryon stood as an advanced outwork guarding the approaches to the larger Fort Washington, and when Hessian regiments stormed the hilltop, its outnumbered defenders put up a determined fight before the position was overwhelmed. Among them was Margaret Corbin, who took her fallen husband's place at the cannon and kept firing until she herself was gravely wounded.

New York, NY

This spot in what is now Prospect Park marks ground contested during the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the first major engagement after the Declaration of Independence. American troops held a redoubt with two cannon on the rise nearby, guarding a pass through the hills — the old "gate-way" road the early Dutch settlers had used. To slow the advancing British, patriots felled the great Dongan Oak that stood at the gap, blocking the road.