Mingo Creek Church, Cradle of the Whiskey Rebellion

The area around Mingo Creek in Washington County has been called the cradle of the Whiskey Rebellion. In the seventeen nineties, western Pennsylvania farmers who distilled grain into whiskey to sell across the mountains were furious at Alexander Hamilton's excise tax, which they saw as the new federal government crushing rural producers to benefit eastern merchants.

The Mingo Creek Society, formed here in the early seventeen nineties, used the log Presbyterian meetinghouse on these grounds as its nerve center. Members drilled with the local militia on these fields, organized protests, and coordinated resistance. When federal tax collectors came to enforce the law, the response was sometimes violent. President George Washington raised a thirteen-thousand-man army to suppress the uprising, and it collapsed without a pitched battle. The church still stands, and members of the society are said to lie in the churchyard, close to the ground where they once conspired against the young republic's first domestic test of federal authority.