Phillips' Rangers: Ambush of 1780

On July sixteenth, seventeen eighty, Captain William Phillips and eleven men of his Pennsylvania militia company were ambushed near this spot by a raiding party during the Revolutionary War's brutal frontier phase. Ten of the twelve men were killed on the ground. A search party later found and buried them here.

Captain Phillips and his son Elijah survived only because they were taken prisoner rather than killed. They were held by the British and not freed until the end of the Revolution, years later. This remote corner of central Pennsylvania was contested territory throughout the war, far from the famous battles of the coast but no less deadly.

Raids on frontier settlements by allied Native and British forces cost Pennsylvania hundreds of lives, part of a wider campaign to break the colonial backcountry.