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Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol
More than four million people a year visit Valley Forge, one of America's most celebrated historic sites. Here, amid the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania, visitors can pass through the house which served as Washington's Headquarters during the famous winter encampment of 1777–1778. Others picnic and jog in the huge park, complete with monuments, recreated log huts, and modern visitor center, all built to pay tribute to the Valley Forge story. In this lively book, Lorett Treese shows how Valley Forge evolved into the tourist mecca that it is today. In the process, she uses Valley Forge as a means for understanding how Americans view their own past. Treese explores the origins of popular images associated with Valley Forge, such as George Washington kneeling in the snow to seek divine assistance. She places Valley Forge in the context of the historic preservation movement as the site became Pennsylvania's first state park in 1893. She studies its "Era of Monuments" and the movement to "restore" Valley Forge in the spirit of Rockefeller's enormously popular colonial Williamsburg. Treese describes a Valley Forge fraught with controversy over the appropriate appearance and use of a place so revered. One such controversy, the "hot dog war," a brief but intense battle over concession stands, was spawned by Americans' changing perceptions of how a national park was to be used. The volatile Vietnam era prompted the state park commission to establish its "Subcommittee on Sex, Hippies, and Whiskey Swillers" to investigate park regulation infractions. Even today, people differ over exactly what happened at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777–1778. The modern visitor sees the remains of over a century of commemoration, competition, and contention. The result, Treese shows, is a historic site that may reveal more about succeeding history than about Washington's army. This book will give its readers a new way to look at Valley Forge―and all historic sites.
286 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1995
21 people want to read
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December 6, 2023
Valley Forge, today, can be easily overlooked. In this modern age of commercialism, there are plenty of people on the Pennsylvania Turnpike who would look at Exit 326, the Valley Forge exit, and would think not of the site of the Continental Army’s winter encampment of 1777-78, but rather of being close to the nearby exit for King of Prussia Mall, the country’s second largest. And yet Valley Forge still has much to teach us.
Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol is not a conventional history of Valley Forge and the winter encampment there; for that sort of history, one would do better to look to a book like Wayne Bodle’s The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002). Treese’s purpose, rather, is to engage in a process of memory studies, looking for areas of change and continuity in how Valley Forge has been remembered, and how various keepers of the memory of Valley Forge have formally inscribed their versions of the area’s history upon the landscape, both before and after Valley Forge became a national park.
Treese, an archivist at Bryn Mawr College, brings her research expertise to the task of examining how Valley Forge became such a central site of American patriotic and national mythology. As Treese tells it, an ad-hoc volunteer group, the Valley Forge Centennial & Memorial Association, eventually gave way to a state park commission whose members were appointed by Pennsylvania’s governor. Monuments erected at the site reflected the changing sensibilities of changing times.
For instance, a modest 1901 obelisk known as the “Waterman Monument” had its beginnings in a simple headstone that “bore the initials ‘JW’ and the date ‘1778’” (p. 48). It was eventually determined that the headstone had to be that of one John Waterman, a civilian in the quartermaster/commissary forces of Rhode Island. An organization called the “National Society, Daughters of the Revolution of 1776” wanted to honor the site of the Waterman grave with a memorial obelisk. “Even today,” as Treese dryly puts it, this obelisk “is popularly but incorrectly called the ‘Waterman Monument,’ and few are certain exactly what it is dedicated to” (p. 51). Meanwhile, the original gravestone of John Waterman went missing for a time! The park commission learned that the zealous ladies of the daughters’ association “had removed it and planned to donate it to a museum” (p. 51). Today, the Waterman gravestone is National Park Service property, and no one quite seems to know where it originally belonged.
Other monuments erected at Valley Forge were not so understated as the “Waterman Monument.” Consider, for instance, the massive National Memorial Arch (1917) that was based on the Arch of Titus in Rome and reflected its builders’ wishes to commemorate the suffering of the American soldiers at Valley Forge with some sense of grandeur – even though one Philadelphia newspaper pointed out that “Roman arches had always been part of the urban setting of Rome”, and suggested that “a triumphal arch seemed ridiculous in a lonely rural landscape” (p. 73).
Sometimes, Treese seems to argue, the placement of a memorial structure on the park grounds said more about its builder than it did about Valley Forge and its defenders. For example, the construction of Washington Memorial Chapel on the park grounds reflected the determination of a Norristown rector, the Rev. Dr. W. Herbert Burk, to portray George Washington as a devoutly religious man who knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray for his suffering troops; as Treese puts it, Burk took unto himself “the lifetime job of defending Washington’s religious nature against those who questioned whether Washington had been the ideal churchman” (p. 82). While many scholars of the Revolution would describe Washington’s private religious beliefs as inclining to deism of the sort that also attracted Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, clearly a deist George Washington was not the sort of Washington that the Rev. Dr. Burk wanted to present to the world.
Still later, in the 1930’s, replica huts meant to make the visitor feel as if he or she were present at the actual Continental Army winter encampment reflected the vogue of the time for “authentic” historical recreations, as “visitors to historic sites expected more accuracy and authenticity in what they saw, and restoration was being hailed more than erection of monuments” (p. 107). Some of these efforts at restoration did not go so well; an old building that had been described, on the basis of dubious evidence, as having been the headquarters of Major General Friedrich von Steuben underwent a series of “restorations” and was presented to the public as “Von Steuben’s Quarters.” Treese says of this building, long known as the “Mansion House,” that “Today the building is considered an unfortunate restoration” (p. 151).
Treese then takes us forward into the 1970’s, the time when the makers of the science-fiction film Silent Running (1971) gave an endangered spaceship carrying Earth’s last vegetation the name Valley Forge (and filmed their movie aboard the Korean War-era aircraft carrier U.S.S. Valley Forge, though that’s another story). This was a time when “Valley Forge was following the lead of many other institutions by adopting the ‘Williamsburg Formula,’ which utilized costumed guides stationed in historic structures to act as interpreters and to demonstrate arts and crafts and other activities” (p. 202). Before and after the National Park Service took over administrative responsibilities for Valley Forge in 1976, the site faced a siege of a different sort; as the Philadelphia metropolitan area continued to grow, suburban development, interstate highway traffic, and crime issues began to be of concern to the park’s directors.
In more recent years, the emphasis has been on trying to make sure that the park presents the history of Valley Forge as accurately as possible – a process that has involved making some changes, and moving some park artifacts, in a way that has not always been popular with all of the park’s various constituencies. Interpreting history has always been a tricky task, a theme that Treese conveys well.
Valley Forge was originally published in 1995, but I would encourage you to seek out the 2003 second printing, which captures particularly well the way in which history is always with us. In a preface to the 2003 edition, Treese tells how, “On September 11, 2001, I was driving to Valley Forge to be interviewed by the producers of a History Channel program when I heard about the terrorist attacks on my car radio.” Despite the closing that day of all national monuments, including Valley Forge, Treese and the History Channel interviewers “were permitted to remain in the shadow of the National Memorial Arch with a ranger posted reassuringly nearby.” Treese’s reflections on her 9/11 experience of Valley Forge are particularly moving: “On that day I realized as never before that regardless of who is interpreting the Valley Forge experience or what means they use, the Valley Forge message of endurance, perseverance, courage, and faith will never become irrelevant to the American people” (xiii).
Published as part of Penn State University’s Keystone Books series of works “intended to serve the citizens of Pennsylvania by educating them and others, in an entertaining way, about aspects of the history, culture, society, and environment of the state”, Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge does a very fine job of showing Americans hard at work in the ongoing task of interpreting the American experience. When I taught this book at Penn State, for a U.S. Studies class, a number of my students talked and wrote about how the book had encouraged them to think and feel differently about something they had always taken for granted. I took their testimony as evidence of the power and relevance of Treese’s book.
Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol is not a conventional history of Valley Forge and the winter encampment there; for that sort of history, one would do better to look to a book like Wayne Bodle’s The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002). Treese’s purpose, rather, is to engage in a process of memory studies, looking for areas of change and continuity in how Valley Forge has been remembered, and how various keepers of the memory of Valley Forge have formally inscribed their versions of the area’s history upon the landscape, both before and after Valley Forge became a national park.
Treese, an archivist at Bryn Mawr College, brings her research expertise to the task of examining how Valley Forge became such a central site of American patriotic and national mythology. As Treese tells it, an ad-hoc volunteer group, the Valley Forge Centennial & Memorial Association, eventually gave way to a state park commission whose members were appointed by Pennsylvania’s governor. Monuments erected at the site reflected the changing sensibilities of changing times.
For instance, a modest 1901 obelisk known as the “Waterman Monument” had its beginnings in a simple headstone that “bore the initials ‘JW’ and the date ‘1778’” (p. 48). It was eventually determined that the headstone had to be that of one John Waterman, a civilian in the quartermaster/commissary forces of Rhode Island. An organization called the “National Society, Daughters of the Revolution of 1776” wanted to honor the site of the Waterman grave with a memorial obelisk. “Even today,” as Treese dryly puts it, this obelisk “is popularly but incorrectly called the ‘Waterman Monument,’ and few are certain exactly what it is dedicated to” (p. 51). Meanwhile, the original gravestone of John Waterman went missing for a time! The park commission learned that the zealous ladies of the daughters’ association “had removed it and planned to donate it to a museum” (p. 51). Today, the Waterman gravestone is National Park Service property, and no one quite seems to know where it originally belonged.
Other monuments erected at Valley Forge were not so understated as the “Waterman Monument.” Consider, for instance, the massive National Memorial Arch (1917) that was based on the Arch of Titus in Rome and reflected its builders’ wishes to commemorate the suffering of the American soldiers at Valley Forge with some sense of grandeur – even though one Philadelphia newspaper pointed out that “Roman arches had always been part of the urban setting of Rome”, and suggested that “a triumphal arch seemed ridiculous in a lonely rural landscape” (p. 73).
Sometimes, Treese seems to argue, the placement of a memorial structure on the park grounds said more about its builder than it did about Valley Forge and its defenders. For example, the construction of Washington Memorial Chapel on the park grounds reflected the determination of a Norristown rector, the Rev. Dr. W. Herbert Burk, to portray George Washington as a devoutly religious man who knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray for his suffering troops; as Treese puts it, Burk took unto himself “the lifetime job of defending Washington’s religious nature against those who questioned whether Washington had been the ideal churchman” (p. 82). While many scholars of the Revolution would describe Washington’s private religious beliefs as inclining to deism of the sort that also attracted Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, clearly a deist George Washington was not the sort of Washington that the Rev. Dr. Burk wanted to present to the world.
Still later, in the 1930’s, replica huts meant to make the visitor feel as if he or she were present at the actual Continental Army winter encampment reflected the vogue of the time for “authentic” historical recreations, as “visitors to historic sites expected more accuracy and authenticity in what they saw, and restoration was being hailed more than erection of monuments” (p. 107). Some of these efforts at restoration did not go so well; an old building that had been described, on the basis of dubious evidence, as having been the headquarters of Major General Friedrich von Steuben underwent a series of “restorations” and was presented to the public as “Von Steuben’s Quarters.” Treese says of this building, long known as the “Mansion House,” that “Today the building is considered an unfortunate restoration” (p. 151).
Treese then takes us forward into the 1970’s, the time when the makers of the science-fiction film Silent Running (1971) gave an endangered spaceship carrying Earth’s last vegetation the name Valley Forge (and filmed their movie aboard the Korean War-era aircraft carrier U.S.S. Valley Forge, though that’s another story). This was a time when “Valley Forge was following the lead of many other institutions by adopting the ‘Williamsburg Formula,’ which utilized costumed guides stationed in historic structures to act as interpreters and to demonstrate arts and crafts and other activities” (p. 202). Before and after the National Park Service took over administrative responsibilities for Valley Forge in 1976, the site faced a siege of a different sort; as the Philadelphia metropolitan area continued to grow, suburban development, interstate highway traffic, and crime issues began to be of concern to the park’s directors.
In more recent years, the emphasis has been on trying to make sure that the park presents the history of Valley Forge as accurately as possible – a process that has involved making some changes, and moving some park artifacts, in a way that has not always been popular with all of the park’s various constituencies. Interpreting history has always been a tricky task, a theme that Treese conveys well.
Valley Forge was originally published in 1995, but I would encourage you to seek out the 2003 second printing, which captures particularly well the way in which history is always with us. In a preface to the 2003 edition, Treese tells how, “On September 11, 2001, I was driving to Valley Forge to be interviewed by the producers of a History Channel program when I heard about the terrorist attacks on my car radio.” Despite the closing that day of all national monuments, including Valley Forge, Treese and the History Channel interviewers “were permitted to remain in the shadow of the National Memorial Arch with a ranger posted reassuringly nearby.” Treese’s reflections on her 9/11 experience of Valley Forge are particularly moving: “On that day I realized as never before that regardless of who is interpreting the Valley Forge experience or what means they use, the Valley Forge message of endurance, perseverance, courage, and faith will never become irrelevant to the American people” (xiii).
Published as part of Penn State University’s Keystone Books series of works “intended to serve the citizens of Pennsylvania by educating them and others, in an entertaining way, about aspects of the history, culture, society, and environment of the state”, Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge does a very fine job of showing Americans hard at work in the ongoing task of interpreting the American experience. When I taught this book at Penn State, for a U.S. Studies class, a number of my students talked and wrote about how the book had encouraged them to think and feel differently about something they had always taken for granted. I took their testimony as evidence of the power and relevance of Treese’s book.
November 7, 2020
A highly informative, very interesting and generally well-written account of the evolution of Valley Forge Park and the way in which it has been interpreted and presented to tourists.
I would more properly rank this with an extra half star. But the text was just too dense in places with facts that verged on the extraneous (and if thought important to preserve should have been relegated to footnotes to keep the complex narrative clearer). As interested as I am in the story of the park, I found the text at points somewhat over-tedious, and the chronology of park development confusing. Such maps of the park as were provided were (at least in my paperback edition) much too small to be of use in following the location of monuments and structures referred to by the author.
I would more properly rank this with an extra half star. But the text was just too dense in places with facts that verged on the extraneous (and if thought important to preserve should have been relegated to footnotes to keep the complex narrative clearer). As interested as I am in the story of the park, I found the text at points somewhat over-tedious, and the chronology of park development confusing. Such maps of the park as were provided were (at least in my paperback edition) much too small to be of use in following the location of monuments and structures referred to by the author.
May 31, 2014
Valley Forge today is easily overlooked. In this modern age of commercialism, there are plenty of people on the Pennsylvania Turnpike who would look at Exit 326, the Valley Forge exit, and would think not of the site of the Continental Army’s winter encampment of 1777-78, but rather of the nearby King of Prussia Mall, the country’s second largest. And yet Valley Forge still has much to teach us.
Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol is not a conventional history of Valley Forge and the winter encampment there; for that sort of history, one would do better to look to a book like Wayne Bodle’s The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002). Treese’s purpose, rather, is to engage in a process of memory studies, looking for areas of change and continuity in how Valley Forge has been remembered, and how various keepers of the memory of Valley Forge have formally inscribed their versions of the area’s history upon the landscape, both before and after Valley Forge became a national park.
Treese, an archivist at Bryn Mawr College, brings her research expertise to the task of examining how Valley Forge became such a central site of American patriotic and national mythology. As Treese tells it, an ad-hoc volunteer group, the Valley Forge Centennial & Memorial Association, eventually gave way to a state park commission whose members were appointed by Pennsylvania’s governor. Monuments erected at the site reflected the changing sensibilities of changing times, from a modest 1901 obelisk known as the “Waterman Monument” to a massive National Memorial Arch (1917) that was based on the Arch of Titus in Rome and reflected its builders’ wishes to commemorate the suffering of the American soldiers at Valley Forge with some sense of grandeur – even though one Philadelphia newspaper pointed out that “Roman arches had always been part of the urban setting of Rome”, and suggested that “a triumphal arch seemed ridiculous in a lonely rural landscape” (p. 73).
Sometimes, Treese seems to argue, the placement of a memorial structure on the park grounds said more about its builder than it did about Valley Forge and its defenders. For example, the construction of Washington Memorial Chapel on the park grounds reflected the determination of a Norristown rector, the Rev. Dr. W. Herbert Burk, to portray George Washington as a devoutly religious man who knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray for his suffering troops; as Treese puts it, Burk took unto himself “the lifetime job of defending Washington’s religious nature against those who questioned whether Washington had been the ideal churchman” (p. 82). While many scholars of the Revolution would describe Washington’s private religious beliefs as inclining to deism of the sort that also attracted Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, clearly a deist George Washington was not the sort of Washington that the Rev. Dr. Burk wanted to present to the world. Still later, in the 1930’s, replica huts meant to make the visitor feel as if he or she were present at the actual Continental Army winter encampment reflected the vogue of the time for Colonial Williamsburg-style “authentic” historical recreations. And during the Cold War era, Valley Forge became a focal point for anti-communist demonstrations of American national pride.
Treese then takes us forward into the 1970’s, the time when the makers of the science-fiction film Silent Running gave an endangered spaceship carrying Earth’s last vegetation the name Valley Forge (and filmed their movie aboard the Korean War-era aircraft carrier U.S.S. Valley Forge, though that’s another story). Before and after the National Park Service took over administrative responsibilities for Valley Forge in 1976, the site faced a siege of a different sort; as the Philadelphia metropolitan area continued to grow, suburban development, interstate highway traffic, and crime issues began to be of concern to the park’s directors. In more recent years, the emphasis has been on trying to make sure that the park presents the history of Valley Forge as accurately as possible – a process that has involved making some changes, and moving some park artifacts, in a way that has not always been popular with all of the park’s various constituencies. Interpreting history has always been a tricky task, a theme that Treese conveys well.
Valley Forge was originally published in 1995, but I would encourage you to seek out the 2003 second printing, which captures particularly well the way in which history is always with us. In a preface to the 2003 edition, Treese tells how, “On September 11, 2001, I was driving to Valley Forge to be interviewed by the producers of a History Channel program when I heard about the terrorist attacks on my car radio.” Despite the closing that day of all national monuments, including Valley Forge, Treese and the History Channel interviewers “were permitted to remain in the shadow of the National Memorial Arch with a ranger posted reassuringly nearby.” Treese’s reflections on her 9/11 experience of Valley Forge are particularly moving: “On that day I realized as never before that regardless of who is interpreting the Valley Forge experience or what means they use, the Valley Forge message of endurance, perseverance, courage, and faith will never become irrelevant to the American people” (xiii).
Published as part of Penn State University’s Keystone Books series of works “intended to serve the citizens of Pennsylvania by educating them and others, in an entertaining way, about aspects of the history, culture, society, and environment of the state”, Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge does a very fine job of showing Americans hard at work in the ongoing task of interpreting the American experience. When I taught this book at Penn State, for a U.S. Studies class, a number of my students talked and wrote about how the book had encouraged them to think and feel differently about something they had always taken for granted. I took their testimony as evidence of the power and relevance of Treese’s book.
Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol is not a conventional history of Valley Forge and the winter encampment there; for that sort of history, one would do better to look to a book like Wayne Bodle’s The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (2002). Treese’s purpose, rather, is to engage in a process of memory studies, looking for areas of change and continuity in how Valley Forge has been remembered, and how various keepers of the memory of Valley Forge have formally inscribed their versions of the area’s history upon the landscape, both before and after Valley Forge became a national park.
Treese, an archivist at Bryn Mawr College, brings her research expertise to the task of examining how Valley Forge became such a central site of American patriotic and national mythology. As Treese tells it, an ad-hoc volunteer group, the Valley Forge Centennial & Memorial Association, eventually gave way to a state park commission whose members were appointed by Pennsylvania’s governor. Monuments erected at the site reflected the changing sensibilities of changing times, from a modest 1901 obelisk known as the “Waterman Monument” to a massive National Memorial Arch (1917) that was based on the Arch of Titus in Rome and reflected its builders’ wishes to commemorate the suffering of the American soldiers at Valley Forge with some sense of grandeur – even though one Philadelphia newspaper pointed out that “Roman arches had always been part of the urban setting of Rome”, and suggested that “a triumphal arch seemed ridiculous in a lonely rural landscape” (p. 73).
Sometimes, Treese seems to argue, the placement of a memorial structure on the park grounds said more about its builder than it did about Valley Forge and its defenders. For example, the construction of Washington Memorial Chapel on the park grounds reflected the determination of a Norristown rector, the Rev. Dr. W. Herbert Burk, to portray George Washington as a devoutly religious man who knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray for his suffering troops; as Treese puts it, Burk took unto himself “the lifetime job of defending Washington’s religious nature against those who questioned whether Washington had been the ideal churchman” (p. 82). While many scholars of the Revolution would describe Washington’s private religious beliefs as inclining to deism of the sort that also attracted Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, clearly a deist George Washington was not the sort of Washington that the Rev. Dr. Burk wanted to present to the world. Still later, in the 1930’s, replica huts meant to make the visitor feel as if he or she were present at the actual Continental Army winter encampment reflected the vogue of the time for Colonial Williamsburg-style “authentic” historical recreations. And during the Cold War era, Valley Forge became a focal point for anti-communist demonstrations of American national pride.
Treese then takes us forward into the 1970’s, the time when the makers of the science-fiction film Silent Running gave an endangered spaceship carrying Earth’s last vegetation the name Valley Forge (and filmed their movie aboard the Korean War-era aircraft carrier U.S.S. Valley Forge, though that’s another story). Before and after the National Park Service took over administrative responsibilities for Valley Forge in 1976, the site faced a siege of a different sort; as the Philadelphia metropolitan area continued to grow, suburban development, interstate highway traffic, and crime issues began to be of concern to the park’s directors. In more recent years, the emphasis has been on trying to make sure that the park presents the history of Valley Forge as accurately as possible – a process that has involved making some changes, and moving some park artifacts, in a way that has not always been popular with all of the park’s various constituencies. Interpreting history has always been a tricky task, a theme that Treese conveys well.
Valley Forge was originally published in 1995, but I would encourage you to seek out the 2003 second printing, which captures particularly well the way in which history is always with us. In a preface to the 2003 edition, Treese tells how, “On September 11, 2001, I was driving to Valley Forge to be interviewed by the producers of a History Channel program when I heard about the terrorist attacks on my car radio.” Despite the closing that day of all national monuments, including Valley Forge, Treese and the History Channel interviewers “were permitted to remain in the shadow of the National Memorial Arch with a ranger posted reassuringly nearby.” Treese’s reflections on her 9/11 experience of Valley Forge are particularly moving: “On that day I realized as never before that regardless of who is interpreting the Valley Forge experience or what means they use, the Valley Forge message of endurance, perseverance, courage, and faith will never become irrelevant to the American people” (xiii).
Published as part of Penn State University’s Keystone Books series of works “intended to serve the citizens of Pennsylvania by educating them and others, in an entertaining way, about aspects of the history, culture, society, and environment of the state”, Lorett Treese’s Valley Forge does a very fine job of showing Americans hard at work in the ongoing task of interpreting the American experience. When I taught this book at Penn State, for a U.S. Studies class, a number of my students talked and wrote about how the book had encouraged them to think and feel differently about something they had always taken for granted. I took their testimony as evidence of the power and relevance of Treese’s book.
October 19, 2015
I liked this book and its presentation on Valley Forge. Valley Forge changed throughout the times, but Treese does an excellent job calling into question who should present the history of the site and how that should be done. It did take me a while to get through it but I did eventually make it.
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