York, Pennsylvania, The Wartime Capital

York, Pennsylvania calls itself the first capital of the United States, and for nine months, from September seventeen seventy-seven to June seventeen seventy-eight, it was exactly that, though not by choice.

The story begins with military disaster. In September of seventeen seventy-seven, the Continental Army was routed by the British at the Battle of Brandywine. Philadelphia fell. The Continental Congress fled west, stopping first in Lancaster before deciding that crossing the Susquehanna River would put them safely out of reach, British troops would have to ford the wide river without a bridge, giving Congress precious time to escape if needed. They settled in York, a market town laid out in seventeen forty-one as the first settlement west of the Susquehanna.

In the court house on what is now Continental Square, the Second Continental Congress worked through the most precarious winter of the war. In that building, on November fifteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, they adopted the Articles of Confederation, the document that formally united the thirteen states under a single national name. For the first time, the phrase United States of America had an official legal weight.

York was also the site of two other pivotal acts. Congress proclaimed the first national day of Thanksgiving here, on December eighteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, as Washington's army settled into Valley Forge. And in May of seventeen seventy-eight, Congress formally ratified the Treaty of Alliance with France, the agreement that brought French troops, ships, and treasure into the war and made American independence achievable.

The Congress left York in June of seventeen seventy-eight shortly after British forces withdrew from Philadelphia, a retreat that led to the Battle of Monmouth. York returned to being a county seat and market town. But the nine months it spent as the seat of an emerging nation produced three of the most consequential acts in American founding history, all within these blocks.