Saint Peter's Church: Lafayette's Retreat Begins Here

Saint Peter's Lutheran Church in Plymouth Meeting was founded in seventeen fifty-two by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the patriarch of American Lutheranism. He planted congregations across Pennsylvania, and this was one of his earliest.

But on the morning of May twentieth, seventeen seventy-eight, the church played a more dramatic role. From the steeple of the original building, the twenty-year-old Marquis de Lafayette gave orders for battle as British forces surrounded his two thousand two hundred Continental troops at nearby Barren Hill. When the situation became untenable, Lafayette organized a famous withdrawal through the old churchyard and down to Matson Ford on the Schuylkill, bringing nearly his whole force safely across. The steeple lookout had given him just enough warning. Muhlenberg's little church briefly became a command post in the struggle for American independence.