Morristown's Revolutionary War History

Morristown is the only place George Washington chose to winter the Continental Army twice. The first time was in early 1777, after the army’s surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton. The second was 1779 to 1780, the coldest winter in recorded New Jersey history. Both encampments shaped the war, and both left enough on the ground that Morristown National Historical Park became the first National Historical Park in the United States in 1933.

Why Morristown, twice

The strategic answer is geography. The Watchung Mountains form three parallel basalt ridges that run roughly forty miles from the Hudson Valley south into Somerset County, rising four to five hundred feet above the lowlands east of them. Morristown sits in the protected valley behind those ridges, with British-held New York City roughly thirty miles east across the coastal plain. Washington could monitor enemy movement from the high ground while staying shielded from the surprise cavalry raids that crushed American positions elsewhere in the war.

The other factor was infrastructure. Morristown sat at a road junction giving access to both New England and Philadelphia. The surrounding hills held the iron forges that produced the Continental Army’s munitions. And the local population was overwhelmingly Patriot, which meant the army could winter here without burning through political capital it didn’t have.

In spring 1779, General William Alexander, Lord Stirling, ordered a network of twenty-three signal beacons built along the Watchung ridge, with the chain reaching up the Hudson and toward Boston. A British move toward Morristown would be telegraphed by smoke and fire within minutes.

First encampment, January to May 1777

The army arrived on January 6, 1777, marching in from the Princeton victory three days earlier. Washington took up headquarters at Jacob Arnold’s Tavern, a three-story frame building overlooking the Morristown Green at what is now 20 North Park Place. The tavern is gone, but the spot is still walkable from the Green.

The most consequential thing that happened that winter wasn’t a battle. It was a public health campaign. In February 1777, Washington ordered the mass inoculation of the entire Continental Army against smallpox, demanding secrecy and speed so British spies wouldn’t learn the army was temporarily incapacitated. Morristown was one of the two primary inoculation centers, alongside Philadelphia. The Morristown Presbyterian Church and the Baptist Church on the Green served as makeshift smallpox hospitals.

Two to three hundred soldiers who died from the disease were buried at the Baptist Church and later moved to Evergreen Cemetery on what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. The campaign worked: sickness rates in the army fell from over thirty-five percent to as low as nine percent, and smallpox stopped being a strategic threat to the Revolution.

Second encampment, December 1779 to June 1780

The second winter is the famous one. The army arrived in early December 1779 and stayed through the following June, the longest single encampment of the war. Washington moved into the Ford Mansion, the home of Colonel Jacob Ford Jr.’s widow Theodosia at what is today 30 Washington Place. He shared the house with Mrs. Ford, her four children, the household servants, his aides-de-camp (Alexander Hamilton among them), and a rotating cast of visitors. Martha Washington arrived from Mount Vernon on New Year’s Eve 1779.

The weather was historic. Twenty-eight separate snowfalls. A two-day blizzard in early January 1780 dropped about four feet of snow. Washington described the winter in letters as “intensely cold and freezing,” and meteorological records still rank it as the coldest winter on record in New Jersey.

Five miles southwest of the Ford Mansion, at Jockey Hollow, ten to twelve thousand troops constructed roughly a thousand log huts across the wooded hills. Attrition from cold, disease, and desertion reduced effective strength to about eight thousand. At the worst point, one-third of the army was unfit for duty.

A year later, on January 1, 1781, about 2,400 Pennsylvania Line troops under General Anthony Wayne mutinied at Jockey Hollow. The grievance was contract: enlistment terms (“three years or during the war”) were being interpreted differently by men and officers, pay was in arrears, and only the original twenty-dollar bounty had been paid. Captain Adam Bitting was killed in the unrest. The mutiny was settled by negotiation on January 8, 1781. Historians have called it the most successful soldier insurrection of the war.

Who walked these streets

Most of the names you’d want from the Revolutionary cast passed through Morristown that second winter. Alexander Hamilton, then Washington’s aide-de-camp, spent the winter courting Elizabeth “Betsy” Schuyler, who was visiting her uncle Dr. John Cochran and his wife Gertrude at the Schuyler-Hamilton House on Olyphant Place. They became engaged the following spring and married in December 1780.

Henry Knox’s artillery brigade encamped at Artillery Park near present-day Mendham Avenue. Baron von Steuben drilled troops at Jockey Hollow. The Marquis de Lafayette arrived at the Ford Mansion on May 10, 1780, bearing the news that France would send roughly six thousand troops and six ships-of-the-line under the Comte de Rochambeau. That moment is what the 2007 bronze sculpture “The Alliance” on the Morristown Green commemorates: Lafayette delivering the news to Washington and Hamilton.

Benedict Arnold’s court-martial, which would eventually push him toward his act of treason later that year, was held at Dickerson (Norris) Tavern on Spring Street in December 1779 and January 1780.

What survives today

The federal Morristown National Historical Park preserves four of the Revolutionary sites:

Total park acreage is 1,711 acres across three municipalities. All four sites are free.

Outside the federal park boundary:

The first National Historical Park

The legislation establishing Morristown National Historical Park was signed by President Herbert Hoover on March 2, 1933, three days before the end of his presidency. Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur called it “the most important park project before this department at the present time.”

It was the first National Historical Park in the United States. Roughly 180,000 people visit the site each year.

For a half-day visit, the standard loop is Ford Mansion → Fort Nonsense → Jockey Hollow, plus a stop at the Schuyler-Hamilton House if it’s a Sunday. The whole circuit is free and stays inside about a fifteen-mile drive.