Parked at Home 2025: Valley Forge National Historical Park

On Thursday, April 3 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the fourth Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of the Parked at Home series of virtual talks hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The fourth installment to this year’s series was Valley Forge National Historical Park featuring park ranger Sarah Reynolds.

BLRV park ranger Allison Horrocks gave an introduction by describing the political climate of Providence and the rest of Rhode Island leading up to the American Revolution. She noted that “some of the foremost people who decried British tyranny… held other people in bondage” as the slave trade was active in Rhode Island. While state banned the importation of enslaved people in 1774, enslaved people were part of the building crew for University Hall at what is now known as Brown University.

During the war, members of the wealthy elite avoided enlisting in the army by sending enslaved people in their place, although enslaved people were not guaranteed citizenship for serving. One of these men was Christopher Jenks who lived on Benefit Street in in Providence. He forcibly enlisted Prince Jenks, whose military records reveal that he was twenty years old, stood five feet and six inches tall (like me!), and had been born in Guinea, a small coastal country in western Africa. Jenks served as a drummer for six-and-a-half years and camped at Valley Forge. A phrase Horrocks asked the audience to remember was e pluribus unum, a Latin phrase appearing on the penny that means “out of many, one”. Valley Forge was a place where the army regiments united into a cohesive military force, and the former colonies united into a country.

Reynolds noted that Valley Forge is “more romanticized and mythologized than almost any other moment in the American Revolution”. Before the encampment, Great Britain had moved its troops to Boston in 1768, causing Bostonians to grow even angrier. In July 1776, the Continental Congress declared the country’s independence from Philadelphia, which was the capital at the time. New York City was soon captured by the British and held throughout the war until 1783. The crossing of the Delaware took place that winter, along with the Battle of Trenton in 1776 and Battle of Princeton in 1777. The Philadelphia campaign resulted in many losses for American troops, and the city was captured, forcing the Continental Congress to flee to nearby York, PA. The ability to regroup during the winter encampment would determine if the Americans could continue to fight. As for the concept of a “gentlemen’s agreement” that caused ceasefire during the winter, that is a myth. (I blame the Victorians.) Additionally, Reynolds noted that encampments were different from battlefield. Other encampments in the National Park Service include Longfellow House WAshington’s Headquarters in Cambridge, MA (which I visited in 2023) and Morristown in New Jersey.

Populations in the young United States were much smaller than today. Reynolds showed population statistics for the three largest cities in 1777. Philadelphia had 43,000 people, New York City had 25,000, and Boston had 16,000. She joked that the entire population of Philadelphia (plus Boston) could have fit in the modern Philadelphia Eagles Stadium. When Valley Forge was constructed, it became the fourth largest city in the country overnight, housing between 12,000 and 15,000 soldiers.

The original houses were brush huts until George Washington gave General Orders with instructions on how to construct huts. Reynolds noted, “If you’ve ever worked on a group project with several other people… half of them are sick… half of them have zero experience building anything… you give them one dull ax… how well does it go?” To compound the problem, the soldiers tour up thousands of trees and were covered in mud and freezing rain. Supplies wagons could not deliver food and new clothing to troops, forcing the men to subsist on about five hundred calories per day. About 2,000 people died from diseases, including dysentery, typhoid, and influenza. Fortunately, solders were routinely inoculated against smallpox.

Many famous people from the revolutionary period were at Valley Forge, including Marquis de Lafayette, Major General Nathaniel Greene, Alexander Hamilton, General Henry Knox, and Baron von Steuben. Other staff at Washington’s headquarters include six to eight aides de camp and ten to fifteen servants and enslaved people. William Lee was the personal slave of George Washington, while his wife Margaret Thomas was a free laundress. Hannah Longpoint Archer Till was “hired out” as a cook, as was her husband Isaac. She already had a young child, Sarah, when coming to headquarters and gave birth to her second child, Isaac, while at headquarters. In addition to everyday headquarters residents, Martha Washington sometimes came to visit.

Last mentioned during the talk on the Battles of Saratoga, Colonel Timothy Bigelow was at Valley Forge. He was on the muster roll “without comment”, likely meaning he did his job as he was supposed to. The camp included people not on the muster roll, including African Americans, local American Indians, and women. Some of these people were classed as camp followers, families of soldiers who did the laundry, nursed the sick, gathered wood, and fetched water. Washington referred to them as “a clog upon every movement” despite their help. Members of the Oneida, Tuscarora, Mohican, and Stockbridge-Munsee nations (the last of which I learned about during my trip to Mission House of Stockbridge, MA in 2023) assisted as scouts, creating diversions, and saving the Marquis de Lafayette plus 2,000 American soldiers from the British at the Battle of the Barren Hill in 1778.

While most regiments were integrated, the First Rhode Island was a segregated unit comprising of 197 Black men who received beautiful while uniforms with a blue anchor. Brigadier General James Varnum proposed that enslaved people be freed if they agreed to join the Continental Army, while General Rochambeau declared the unit to be “most neatly dress, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers”. A shortlist of other Black soldiers at Valley Forge included Martin Black of North Carolina; William Condo, who rescued his enslaver after the man was shot; Nero Hawley, who was forcibly enlisted in place of his enslaver, Reverend James Beebee, but did attain his freedom and receive a military pension; Agrippa Hull, who became friends with Thaddeus Kosciuszko and was invited to Poland by him but instead became a major landholder in Stockbridge; and Prince Simbo, whose elaborately carved gunpowder horn is now in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

After Valley Forge, the Franco-American Alliance in 1778 allowed France to openly supply weapons, clothing, and money to America. Britain abandoned Philadelphia but held on to New York City, and the war lasted another five years. The training given by von Steuben and written down in his Blue Book allowed America to outlast Britain. Many years after the war in 1893, Valley Forge became a state park. Then, as part of the bicentennial on July 4, 1976, President Gerald Ford came to Valley Forge and signed the National Historical Park into being. In 1990, African American women who belonged to the Delta Sigma Theta sorority proposed the building of Patriots of African Descent Monument, which they erected in 1993.

As for learning more about Valley Forge, the park film Determined to Persevere: The Valley Forge Encampment is available online. Reynolds was such an engaging speaker that I could hardly believe the hour was up at the end of the talk. I enjoyed learning about new perspectives on the American Revolution and hope to visit Valley Forge and take the trolley tour in the future.