French Azilum: Nobles in the Pennsylvania Wilderness
Pennsylvania
In the fall of seventeen ninety-three, a small group of French aristocrats arrived at a horseshoe bend in the Susquehanna River in what is now Bradford County, Pennsylvania. They were refugees from the French Revolution, their world in Paris destroyed by the Terror. The settlement they built, French Azilum, was backed by Philadelphia financiers Robert Morris and John Nicholson.
Three hundred acres were laid out with a market square and grid streets. The grandest house, called La Grande Maison, was rumored, without proof, to be intended for Marie Antoinette herself, who never escaped France alive. With Napoleon in power, most residents returned to France, and the settlement was over by eighteen oh three.
Families named LaPorte, Homet, and d'Autremont stayed behind in Pennsylvania. A house museum on the site now preserves the story.
