Waterman Monument

The Waterman Monument, a 50-foot granite obelisk raised in 1901 by the Daughters of the Revolution, stands over what was long called the only identified grave at Valley Forge, that of John Waterman of Rhode Island. In the Victorian era visitors imagined that thousands of Revolutionary soldiers lay buried across the camp. One supposed burial ground lay south of the present Route 23, where a lone headstone carved with the initials J.W. stood among unmarked graves, and that stone was taken to be Waterman's. Popularly named for him, the obelisk was in fact dedicated to all the soldiers who sleep in Valley Forge. Accounts differ on whether John Waterman was a captain or a lieutenant.

The record is much thinner than the monument. The headstone was moved in 1939 and its original position is now unknown, and it cannot be proven that he was buried at Valley Forge at all. Documents of the encampment mention few burials, archaeology in the park has found many offal pits but no graves, and the historian Joseph Lee Boyle has written that no substantiated human graves have ever been found in the park.

The reason is where the soldiers died. Nearly 2,000 men died of disease during the encampment, most often of influenza, typhus, typhoid and dysentery, and two thirds of them in the warmer months of March, April and May. Doctors sent the most serious cases away to outlying hospitals, at least 50 barns, houses and churches across eastern Pennsylvania, among them a purpose-built hospital at Yellow Springs. Washington also ordered inoculation against smallpox for men who had never had it, and some 3,000 to 4,000 were inoculated.