Philly Day Trip: Valley Forge

On our last day in Philadelphia, we packed everything up and drove all of five minutes down the very road our hotel was on to visit Valley Forge National Park, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777-1778.  I was really excited to see the park - the eighth graders had watched a DVD on it during this past school year, and I've read a few books set in that time period.  I thought it would be a lot of fun to see it all first-hand.

The park is basically a valley (hence the name) surrounded by what folks back east like to call "mountains" but the lot of us Westerners call "hills".  Two ridges connect behind the valley, with a river on the other corner, and the troops built up fortifications around the remaining side (which has a great view of Philadelphia).  The Park Service has a road that runs all around the edge of this valley, with a bit of a joiner road between right down the middle, and you can drive your car through the ten to twelve miles or so and stop at all the exhibit points.

Part of the Valley... with a cannon and dirt fortification from an old watch point.

So how did we decide to tour the park?

Mine's the one up front!

By bike!  We pulled up to the park and saw that you could rent bicycles, so we decided that would be the best way to see as much of the land as we could.  While Valley Forge is, contrary to what one would expect from a valley, definitely not flat, it was an amazing way to see the whole park.  I really got a great feel from the land and the way the terrain spread out.  In a car, I don't think I would have realized the sheer expansive domain of the place - but on a bike, every half mile or so I'd pass a sign that would commemorate which company camped in that particular location of the valley, and I'd realize just how large that winter encampment must have been.  In a car, it takes barely a half hour to go around the park and you don't really understand what it must have been like before cars - on bikes, we spent four or five hours just to traverse the valley, and it definitely gave us a better feel for the terrain and what it must have been like to be a soldier trudging around on foot (or even an officer on a horse!).

Standing by a reconstructed cabin.

We stopped everywhere we could, in part because we were all so curious about everything and in part because I, at least, hadn't been on a bike in a few years!  The reconstructed cabins were small, but not as bad as I'd expected - they'd be crowded with six soldiers in them, but not unbearably so, and they looked like they wouldn't been too bad to weather a winter inside.

Valley Forge today is very grassy, with just bits and pieces of woodlands scattered throughout it.  Apparently it wasn't that way when the Army arrived - within the first few weeks, anything that could be used for building or firewood was torn down and put to use, and the valley was apparently a mud pit for months afterwards.  It's incredible to think that parts of it still haven't recovered after more than two hundred years.

See those nice clouds?  They neglected to rain on us, drat them.

It was of course a very hot day - somewhere in the eighties, with the humidity about as high.  We all were hoping for the threatened rain, but it held off and we simply suffered in the heat.  We stopped at a huge archway erected in honor of the soldiers from that winter, which had all of the generals listed on it - it was fun to later look at my pictures and match the generals to the people I'd read about in my books!

We also stopped at the Washington Chapel, a church inside the valley itself.  It had some beautiful stained glass artwork (which of course photographed horribly) and had a different window dedicated to each of the states.  More importantly, it was holding a flea market outside and we were able to buy water, hot dogs, and ice cream - we hadn't planned on biking through the park (and thus through lunchtime) and we were by then famished!

Still, the highlight of the whole tour definitely had to be visiting Washington's headquarters at the far end of Valley Forge.  We passed what had once been the muster grounds, where the Army learned drills from the Prussians, and went another three or four miles into the valley, where we found the house George Washington rented out during the winter.  Keep in mind, rented - that's important, when part of what the patriots were fighting for was the right not to have to billet soldiers in their personal homes!  (Remember the Third Amendment, anyone?)

They were actually excavating in the backyard, archaeological grids and all...

It was a gorgeous three-story brick house about 200 feet away from the creek, with a barn to the right of it.  The whole downstairs was converted into central command, except for that little part jutting out to the left of the house - that's actually the detached kitchen, connected by a covered passageway, so the oven and hearth wouldn't overheat the house in the summer!  All the rooms were restored and furnished with antiques that would have been used back then, and it was an absolute blast to walk through the house and see how things would have looked (social historian that I am, I loved it).

By then, we were tired, hungry, thirsty, and had spent far more time than we'd planned exploring the park.  So we headed back to the Visitor's Center to return our bikes!

Not before multitasking and photographing while biking...

It was an absolutely perfect way to visit Valley Forge.  Despite my aching legs, it really gave me a better sense of the land and what it might have looked like back in 1777 - and of course, the park itself is simply gorgeous, regardless of the historical events surrounding it!  We saw more than a dozen deer as we were going through, and being just away enough from the main road and the cars, we weren't too troubled by huge crowds of people at any point (bugs, on the other hand...).

Coworker D and one of the rare shady spots on the path!

Still, we were famished, so we weren't too sad to leave Valley Forge.  We returned our bikes, hitched up the trailer, and headed out on the open road for an afternoon drive to Harrisburg, PA... where we'd skip forward in time from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War!

You can tell I'm a history person when I keep track of where I've been by what happened there long before I ever arrived...

-Beth