Berlin and the Whiskey Rebellion

This corner of Somerset County was a flashpoint in the Whiskey Rebellion of seventeen ninety-four, the first armed domestic challenge to the United States government. In June of that year, a riot broke out at the Berlin schoolhouse over the federal excise tax on whiskey. By September, local merchant Robert Philson had raised a liberty pole at his store on the square, openly urging neighbors to resist federal law.

When President Washington sent nearly thirteen thousand troops westward to suppress the revolt, Berlin became one of the staging grounds. Governor Thomas Mifflin established his headquarters right here, in the home of a local doctor named Christian Boerstler. The Whiskey Rebellion collapsed without major bloodshed, but it established a critical precedent: the new federal government had the will, and the force, to enforce its laws.