Antes Fort — The Big Runaway of seventeen seventy-eight

Half a mile southwest of this spot, on a high bluff above the West Branch of the Susquehanna, stood Antes Fort, a stockade raised by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Antes in the summer of seventeen seventy-seven. It became a rallying point for settlers up and down the valley during the Revolutionary War, when British-allied Iroquois and Loyalist rangers pushed deep into Pennsylvania.

In July seventeen seventy-eight, raiding parties destroyed the fort and triggered what Pennsylvania settlers called the Big Runaway, when the entire West Branch valley was abandoned by white colonists fleeing east in a single panicked exodus. Several men and women memorialized on the original plaque were killed in raids at Antes Fort and nearby Fort Horn. The valley was not resettled until the following year, and the trauma of seventeen seventy-eight shaped Pennsylvania's frontier memory for a generation.