Morristown National Historical Park
Ford Mansion: The War Room Behind the Revolution
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Most visitors expect the centre of a revolutionary battlefield to be a cannon, a monument or a line of soldiers.
Here, it is a house.
During the winter of 1779 to 1780, Ford Mansion became George Washington's headquarters while the Continental Army camped nearby at Jockey Hollow.
The house belonged to Jacob Ford Jr., a local industrialist and militia officer, and his family. Their home became the place where military decisions were made during one of the hardest periods of the Revolution.
The contrast is important. Washington worked from a comfortable headquarters while thousands of soldiers faced shortages. That was not unusual for eighteenth-century armies, but it reveals the gap between command and daily survival.
Morristown is not the story of one famous person. It is the story of whether an entire organization could continue functioning under extreme pressure.