Women at Valley Forge

When I saw Beth, the ranger at Valley Forge National Historic Park in costume, I wondered about women at the encampment and had to do a little research. The last page of the Junior Ranger activity book is a matching quiz about the type of work different people did at the camp. Women and children are both on the list. So who were these women and children? The park service website had some answers that the kids and I found interesting.

There were 12,000 soldiers at Valley Forge (all men, of course), but only 250-400 women, who were mostly nurses, domestic staff, enslaved people, and the wives of soldiers and officers. The junior ranger book answer for what women did at Valley Forge is "sewed and washed clothes and nursed the sick." The children clearly "gathered firewood and water for the army." The children would have come along with their mothers, who were mostly following their husbands for whatever reason. I'll share a few of the stories I found most interesting.

Martha Washington was there at the Valley Forge encampment from February until May 1778, running the household at Washington's headquarters. Molly Pitcher, who is famous for helping load cannons when her husband was injured at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey in late June 1778, was also at Valley Forge with him a few month earlier.

Polly Cooper was in Valley Forge as part of the Oneida delegation. This tribe provided white corn to the soldiers and Polly Cooper taught them how to cook it and stayed behind to care for soldiers, earning her the gift of a black shawl from Martha Washington.

Hannah Till was enslaved and leased to George Washington as a pastry cook and servant during the war along with her husband, cook Isaac Till. Their service during the Revolutionary War for Washington allowed them to purchase freedom for themselves and their three children in 1778 from their two different owners. Their fourth child, Isaac Worley Till, was baptized a few months after his birth in 1778 as a free child. Hannah Till continued to work for Washington as a personal pastry cook for a while after the war, then she and Isaac both worked for various families in Philadelphia and had three more children. She lived to be 105 years old.

Margaret Thomas was a free woman who was hired to do laundry and mending for Washington's household. What makes her story so interesting is her marriage. She was educated and literate, paid for her work by Washington. She fell in love with George Washington's enslaved manservant, William Lee, and married him. Virginia wouldn't legally recognize the marriage because of Lee's status, and Washington himself was not happy about it, possibly because her children would have been considered free and therefore not his property but perhaps his financial responsibility. Unfortunately, this couple's story is not fully articulated on the park service's website, but it does say that their service during the war meant that Washington did feel some responsibility to them and tried to help Margaret and William move back to Mount Vernon, though it is unclear if they ever reached that destination.