Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
On May 31, 1779, George Washington wrote a letter to his field commander containing a single, chilling instruction: the target territory was to be, in his own words, 'not merely overrun, but destroyed.' Three weeks later, nearly four thousand Continental soldiers marched north out of Easton, Pennsylvania, to carry out that order.
The Sullivan Expedition was a Continental Army campaign against Britain's Iroquois allies, launched from Easton on June 18, 1779, under the command of Major General John Sullivan. For six weeks that spring, Easton functioned as one of the largest military staging grounds anywhere in Revolutionary Pennsylvania.
The campaign was a direct response to devastating raids the previous year, including the Wyoming Valley massacre near modern Wilkes-Barre and the Cherry Valley massacre in New York, both carried out by Loyalist rangers and Iroquois warriors allied with Britain. In the winter of 1778 to 1779, Washington resolved on a punitive expedition deep into Iroquois territory, choosing Easton, at the meeting point of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers, as his staging ground.
Sullivan himself arrived to take command on May 7, with troops continuing to assemble around him for weeks afterward. Sullivan arrived in Easton to find a serious problem: no usable road existed north through the Pocono Mountains. Washington ordered five hundred men, drawn from the 2nd New York and 5th New Jersey Regiments, to cut one from scratch, starting near present-day Tannersville. Sullivan himself described the terrain in a letter to Washington as so thickly wooded with laurel that a man could not get through it except on his hands and knees. The road, climbing from under 900 feet in elevation to nearly 1,900 feet at its highest point, was finished on June 15, just three days before the army needed it.
The road-building crews left behind more than a road. On the ridge that became known as Hungry Hill, a falling tree killed one of the soldiers during construction; his comrades buried him where he fell, and the name has outlasted every other trace of the encampment that surrounded his grave.
On June 18, Sullivan's army broke camp at Easton: nearly four thousand troops, roughly 800 head of cattle, and long trains of baggage wagons, artillery, and pack horses, all bound for an encampment in the Wyoming Valley fifty-eight miles to the north, which the army reached five days later.
Over the following months, Sullivan's forces carried out Washington's orders with methodical precision. Troops destroyed at least forty Iroquois towns, along with their orchards, cornfields, and stored winter provisions, across the Finger Lakes region of western New York. The campaign's only significant pitched battle came at Newtown on August 29, where Sullivan's forces routed a combined Iroquois and Loyalist defense. Thousands of displaced Haudenosaunee refugees fled to British-held Fort Niagara that winter, where many died of exposure and starvation before spring arrived.
The expedition did not end the war on the frontier, but it permanently broke the Iroquois Confederacy's economic and military capacity in the region, and it opened the door to American settlement of western New York after the war ended. For Easton, the campaign marked the town's single largest contribution to the entire Revolutionary War: not a battle fought on its own soil, but six weeks spent feeding, housing, and equipping an army of thousands bound for the wilderness beyond.
The road Sullivan's soldiers carved through the Poconos, later known as Sullivan's Trail, became the basis for several modern roads through Monroe County, Pennsylvania, including sections still driven today. A Pennsylvania historical marker commemorating the expedition's departure stands in Easton, near the site of the original army encampment.
Information for this episode was sourced from George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, May 31, 1779, and John Sullivan to George Washington, May 31, 1779, both via Founders Online, National Archives; the Monroe County Historical Association’s ‘Hungry Hill on the Sullivan Road’; the Historical Association of Tobyhanna Township; ExplorePAHistory.com’s Sullivan Campaign marker entry.
