Agnew's Bloodstain

Brigadier General James Agnew, a British officer, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Germantown on 4 October 1777 while leading his brigade up Germantown Avenue in the British counterattack. During the occupation of Germantown that autumn he had taken John Wister's house, now called Grumblethorpe, as his quarters, and the Wister family had been pushed out. The house tradition is that he was carried back there and bled to death in the front parlour, and a stain on the parlour floorboards is shown as his blood. Attempts to remove it by scrubbing and bleaching failed, and the faded stain is still visible. The house was built in 1744 as a summer home by the merchant John Wister and is now a museum.

The story of who shot Agnew grew over the following century. The earliest printed version, in Samuel Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania in 1828, has him shot from ambush by a local man, Hans Boyer, as he rode up to the wall of the Mennonite graveyard on the main street. Later writers repeated the story and embellished it. A 2016 article in the Journal of the American Revolution argued that no lone sniper was involved: Agnew's servant, Alexander Andrew, wrote to his widow that a party of about 100 Americans rushed out from behind a house and fired a volley.

Andrew's letter also differs from the house tradition. He wrote that Agnew was carried into a house and laid on a bed, died between 10 and 11 o'clock, and that the body was then taken to his former quarters. He was buried the next day in a Germantown churchyard, and his remains were later moved to the De Benneville family burial ground on North Broad Street.