Editorial: It’s important to continue to tell the story of the Battle of Wyoming

When people talk about the American Revolutionary War, they talk of Lexington and Concord, of Bunker Hill and Trenton, of Paul Revere and George Washington. Rarely outside of our area will you hear a discussion of the Battle of Wyoming.

It is a bit of local history brought to the forefront once a year with a commemorative service at the Wyoming Monument, a ceremony that beckons back to an early battle between American Loyalists and British Rangers alongside Native American allies.

The brief and bloody fight occurred July 3, 1778, and it was more of a massacre than a battle. The commemoration draws descendants of those who died that day, sometimes from distant states, who discovered their own connections through research using modern tools like ancestry.com.

It can be difficult to picture just how different Wyoming Valley was that long ago, much less to grasp the part our area played in the development of this nation. This year’s Wyoming Monument commemoration featured Lycoming College History Department Chair Christopher Pearl, who noted that ownership of the area was disputed.

Along with Native American claims to land they had long traversed, even the new colonies stood at odds, with both Connecticut and Pennsylvania insisting the turf belonged to them. And while the region became well known and prosperous thanks to industries like coal mining and knitting mills, the original lure was the river that runs through it.

“The Susquehanna River is not a boundary,” Pearl said of those early days. “It is a highway that carries people, diplomacy, trade, news and sometimes war.

“When we ask ‘Whose ground?’ we are not asking a rhetorical question. We are confronting a historical reality. This land was claimed, used, and understood in multiple ways by multiple people at the same time.”

And most of those disputes were about farmland. A few days before the battle, three brothers headed out to tend some crops. Returning after their work, they were attacked by an advance guard of Native Americans. Two brothers, Benjamin and Stukley Harding, died and are considered the “First to Fall” in what became the Battle of Wyoming.

Over the decades, speakers have used the annual commemoration to show just how far-reaching the events of our area back then proved to be. Former Wilkes University President Gregory Cant once reminded attendees that the American Revolution inspired the creation of penal colonies in what would become his home country, Australia.

Historian William Tharp talked of how the massacre fueled stories in newspapers designed to evoke support for the fight against British rule.“Rhetoric and representation mattered in the American Revolution,” he said. “It was as much a war of words as it was a war of action.”

In 2017, then-ceremony chair Christian Wielage called the battle the “Pearl Harbor of the American Revolution.”

And State Sen. Lisa Baker once reminded those at the ceremony that the deaths of so many men in the massacre— many farmers or merchants, not soldiers — forced some of the area’s women and children to flee the settlement.

The annual commemoration keeps all of that and more alive.

“History is more than just the details of a battle. It is about the beliefs and principles and the legacies of the individuals involved,” Baker said at the 2017 service. “Because of our attention to history, because of this annual commemoration, we have come to know the settlers fairly well.”