Shawnee Fort and the Battle of Wyoming
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
During the Revolutionary War, a series of forts protected American colonists in the Wyoming Valley from attack. Shawnee Fort was one of them, associated with a company under Captain Samuel Ransom. The valley was contested not only by British forces but by competing claims between Connecticut settlers and Pennsylvania claimants.
In seventeen seventy-eight, in the aftermath of the Battle of Wyoming, the fort is said to have been burned. Rebuilt afterward, it was reportedly destroyed by a flood in seventeen eighty-four. What stood near here was both a military post and a symbol of how tangled the Revolutionary frontier really was.
