Morrisville: Where Penn Landed and Washington Launched

Morrisville sits at a Delaware River crossing that has mattered to Pennsylvania since the beginning. A historical marker here commemorates the starting point of the survey of the first land purchased from the Lenape by William Penn in sixteen eighty-two, measured from a white oak at the falls of the Delaware. Penn's reconstructed country estate, Pennsbury Manor, stands just upriver.

Almost a century later, the same river crossing became the hinge point of the Revolution. From a house upriver at McConkey's Ferry, General Washington planned his December twenty-fifth, seventeen seventy-six crossing, leading about twenty-four hundred Continental soldiers across the ice-choked Delaware to attack Hessian forces at Trenton the following morning, a desperate gamble that held the Revolution together when it was closest to collapse.