13. Valley Forge

Sunday & Monday, July 21st & 22nd - After we left Gettysburg, we drove through the Pennsylvania Dutch area towards Valley Forge.  It was Sunday morning and all of the Amish were probably in church as we only saw one horse and buggy on the road.  If you did any bike riding around this area you would have to be careful as the bike lanes in this area are used by the horse and buggies and the lanes are liberally decorated with horse droppings.  The local highway crews must have a fairly vigorous street sweeper program otherwise these roads could get pretty ripe.

Valley Forge was not a battlefield, it was a winter encampment.  Back in the Revolutionary War, the armies usually didn't fight during the winter as moving around was very difficult with the snow and rain so instead they spent the winter in a fixed camp.  Valley Forge was the 3rd of 7 winter encampments during the war.  In September of 1777, the British had occupied Philadelphia so Gen. Washington wanted a location fairly close to Philadelphia so could keep British raiding and foraging parties away from central Pennsylvania.  They selected a high plateau just to the east of the town of Valley Forge as it was protected by the Schuylkill River on the north side and had steep slopes on the other 3 sides and was far enough from Philadelphia that the British could not surprise them.  Gen. Washington and his men rode in on December 19, 1777 and remained in this camp until June 19, 1777.

Up to this point in the war the Continental Army consisted of state militias and other volunteer units that had signed up for one year and were largely trained and supplied by their local communities.  When they rode in they were a rag tag bunch of soldiers who were poorly equipped, poorly trained and fairly demoralized. During the time at Valley Forge, Gen. Washington managed to convince the Continental Congress to take over responsibility for maintaining the army and to provide their supplies and equipment.  Enlistments were also changed to 3 years so you could have a guy long enough to get trained and be useful.  When the army left in June, they were a disciplined, well organized and equipped force with very high moral and confidence in their capabilities.  Valley Forge is generally thought of as the birthplace of the American Army.

We arrived in Valley Forge before lunch and went direct to the visitor's center.  We spent about an hour in the museum and then went to see an introductory movie and go on a short ranger hike.  Still pretty hot so the ranger rearranged his tour so we could spend most of the time in the shade.  The first surprise we received was that we had always pictured the soldiers living in tents and suffering from the cold.  By and large not true, when the army arrived here, the first thing Gen Washington had them do was organize into 12 man squads and build huts to a common design.  Within a month almost all of the men were in huts.  Here are 4 photos that show a hut, the interior of a hut, how they were organized in rows and a cook oven where each unit baked their bread and cooked their meals.  Each man in the army was promised a loaf a bread every day.  When you were in camp like this you got fresh bread other wise you got what was call "hard tack" which are basically unsalted, stale, thick crackers.

Along the bluffs the men build small earthen forts called redoubts.  Not much to look at today but apparently pretty effective in their day.  Here is what one looks like today.

These are all recreations as this land had been farm land before the army showed up and was converted back to farmland as soon as they left and all of the wood put to other uses.  There were something in the order of 2,000 of these huts built and they denuded the countryside for mile around to provide the construction material.  Groups of huts were organized by which Corps, Division or Brigade the units belonged to and there were monuments all along the road showing where individual units were located.  Here is an example of such a marker.

These huts and the redoubts were built all around the periphery of this plateau.  In the center was an area called the Grand Parade where the troops trained and marched.  Here is a photo of that area.

On Monday we drove around the park.  There were a lot of monuments to the various units and generals so I will only show a sample.  Then main monument is the National Memorial Arch and here is a photo if it.

This inscription inside the arch lists the General Officers who commanded the various units that were in this encampment.

This next monument is the Massachusetts State Memorial.

These pair of columns straddling the road are the Pennsylvania State Memorial.

This next monument is to Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne who because of his habit of leading his troops from the front earned the nickname Mad Anthony Wayne.  When Pat and I were first married we lived in Dayton, OH, and there was a Mad Anthony Wayne Blvd in town.

While the soldiers and field officers lived in these huts, the general officers and their staff either rented or borrowed homes in the area.  This photo is of the Maurice Stephens House which was used by Brig. Gen. Varnum and his staff during the encampment.

Gen. Washington also rented a house and the following photos show the exterior, one of the downstairs rooms, Gen Washington's bedroom, one of his staff member's bedroom and the kitchen.

While driving around the park we also came across an area known as the artillery park.  Since this encampment was an enclosed rectangular area, if you set up your cannons on one side and an attack came from the other side you had a long way to go.  So the solution was the concentrate the artillery in one central area and this was it.

We also came across this monument to the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment.

During the time of this encampment, the officer who was primarily responsible for training this rag tag group and making and army out of them was Baron Friedrich Willhelm von Steuben who was a one time member of the prestigious Prussian General Staff but at this point in his life was out of work. He arrived in Valley Forge bearing a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin in Paris and quickly demonstrated that he knew his business.  Main problem was that he spoke almost no English.  So he wrote out the pages for the army field manual in French and Gen. Washington's staff officers translated them into English.  The same on the drill field, von Steuben would bellow out his orders in either German or French and a staff officer would then translate.  As for the cuss words, that wasn't a problem as the troops could easily tell when von Steuben was cussing them out even if it was in German.  Here is a photo of the monument to von Steuben.

The last major stop on our tour around the encampment was the Washington Memorial Chapel which is an Episcopal church that was built in early 1900s which was built as a tribute to George Washington and the American Patriots of the Revolution.  Here is an exterior photo of the chapel.

The tower to the right is a carillon with 58 bells, one for each state plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Virgin Islands, Midway, Wake Island plus the national birthday bell.  The size of each bell was determined by the population of each state and territory in 1920.  While we were visiting the chapel the carillon was being played and it does sound nice.

The church was built in a Gothic Revival style and the interior is very ornate with large stained glass windows.  Here is a shot of the interior.

The large window over the altar is known as the Martha Washington Window and was a gift of the Colonial Dames of Pennsylvania.  Here is a photo ot it.

The cross over the altar was a gift of the family of Abraham Lincoln.  Here is a photo.

The other windows on the side walls and over the entrance are dedicated to Gen. Washington and his staff.
The small inset panels show events from their lives.  The next 2 photos show 2 of these panels.

The primary colors of these windows was red and blue as those are patriotic colors.  To either side of the alter are the choir stalls that stand 19-1/2 feet high.  Each stall commemorates a brigade and the soldiers on the top show the different uniforms of the brigades.  Here is a photo of one section of that area.

Across the street from  the chapel is a monument put up by the Daughters of the Revolution and dedicated to the "Soldiers of Washington's Army Who Slept in Valley Forge".

Valley Forge was not a battle field and so there were not any combat deaths.  The winter of 1777-1778 was relatively mild, so cold and starvation were not serious problems.  The true scourges of the army were diseases and there were a large number of men lost to diseases such as influenza, typhus, typhoid, dysentery and in particular to small pox. To combat the death toll due to small pox, Gen. Washington used an early form of a "vaccination".  He would find an individual that had a mild case of small pox and then take a small blood sample from him.. He would then use that sample to infect other men.  Pretty crude but apparently worked as the death rate for men who got small pox on their own was 40%, for those who were vaccinated it was 4%.  Even so, the American Army lost about 2,000 men during this encampment of which about 2/3 were due to disease.

This was the last day of our vacation and tomorrow we head home.