Fort Antes and the Big Runaway of 1778

The plateau above the West Branch Susquehanna River near what is now Jersey Shore was, in the seventeen seventies, the outermost edge of Pennsylvania's frontier settlement. Colonel John Henry Antes arrived around seventeen seventy-two, built a grist mill along the creek that would bear his name, and established what became the most substantial private holding in this stretch of north-central Pennsylvania. When the Revolutionary War brought violence to the Pennsylvania interior, Antes fortified his home with a stockade. His neighbors called it Fort Antes.

The threat came from a British-allied coalition of Loyalists and Iroquois warriors operating out of New York, who had already massacred settlers in the Wyoming Valley to the east in seventeen seventy-eight. By July of that same year, Colonel Samuel Hunter, commanding Fort Augusta to the south, concluded he could not defend the scattered forts of the West Branch valley and ordered a total evacuation. What followed became known in Pennsylvania history as the Big Runaway. Settlers abandoned their farms, their livestock, everything that could not be carried, and fled downstream. Fort Antes was abandoned, and attackers tried to burn it but failed.

The evacuation was not a defeat; it was a calculated withdrawal. The following summer, General John Sullivan led a massive retaliatory expedition north and west, destroying more than forty Iroquois and British-allied villages in New York and Pennsylvania in a scorched-earth campaign. The campaign ended organized raids on the Pennsylvania frontier, and settlers returned to the West Branch valley.

Fort Antes was one of only two structures in the valley to survive the events of seventeen seventy-eight, spared somehow when the attacking force moved through. After the war, Colonel Antes rebuilt and remained. The village that grew around his property retained his name. In eighteen sixty-one, when the post office arrived, it was officially registered as Antes Fort, a name that has persisted to the present day, the only monument to the man who built the most advanced structure on the Pennsylvania frontier two and a half centuries ago.