Thompson's Rifle Battalion: The First March to Boston
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
In June of seventeen seventy-five, the Second Continental Congress authorized the first troops of the Continental Army: ten companies of riflemen, drawn from the frontier counties of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, where men who could hit a target at two hundred yards were not uncommon. Captain George Nagel enlisted his company right here in Berks County, then marched them to Reading to join the other companies under Colonel William Thompson. What followed was a remarkable feat: the full battalion covered hundreds of miles on foot to reach Cambridge, Massachusetts, where George Washington had just assumed command of the Continental Army besieging the British in Boston.
They arrived quickly. These frontier riflemen, many of them German-speaking Pennsylvanians, were among the first soldiers to answer the call, and their long march helped establish the fledgling army at a moment when its survival was far from certain.
