Athens, Pennsylvania — Tioga Point and the Sullivan Campaign

The confluence of the Chemung River and the Susquehanna, at what is now the borough of Athens, was one of the most strategically important river junctions in colonial North America. Native peoples called it Tioga Point. In August of seventeen seventy-nine, General John Sullivan arrived here with a force of several thousand Continental Army soldiers and built Fort Sullivan, the staging base for the punitive expedition Washington had ordered against the Iroquois and their British allies after years of frontier raids.

James Clinton marched a second column down from the Mohawk Valley to rendezvous at this spot. The combined army then moved north and west, destroying more than forty Native villages in a scorched-earth campaign that badly damaged Iroquois power on the Pennsylvania and New York frontier. The Tioga Point Museum in Athens today preserves artifacts from the Sullivan Expedition and from the millennia of Indigenous occupation that preceded it.