The Black Boys Rebellion — First Armed Resistance to British Rule

Nearly a decade before the shot heard round the world at Lexington, one of the earliest armed challenges to British authority in the colonies broke out right near this spot. It was seventeen sixty-five, and the trouble started at the Widow Barr's farmhouse a short distance west of here.

A group of frontier settlers, furious that British officers were resuming trade with Native tribes after years of brutal conflict along the Pennsylvania frontier, decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling themselves the Black Boys, and led by a backwoodsman named James Smith, they began attacking British supply trains headed to western forts, determined to prevent weapons and goods from reaching their enemies.

British troops from Fort Loudon marched out to stop them. They skirmished here, wounding colonist James Brown. The confrontation escalated into a months-long standoff. No grand revolution followed immediately, but historians now credit the Black Boys with something remarkable. Ten years before Lexington, Pennsylvania frontier settlers with muskets and grievances fired some of the earliest shots of colonial resistance to British military authority.