PHOTO: ©VALLEY FORGE CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU
u During the winter of 1777–1778, George Washington rented this two-story, five-room stone house, known as the Isaac Potts House, and turned it into his Valley Forge headquarters.
the condition of his army too loudly so that the British would not hear of it and real- ize how weak the American position at Valley Forge re- ally was. Consequently, Con- gress was skeptical about his reports of deprivation. To get by, the soldiers at Valley Forge ate almost anything they could find, like shad from the Schuylkill River and small game. More than one thou- sand horses are believed to have died of starvation at Val- ley Forge, but it appears that not many of the animals were eaten that winter. As well as disease and hun- ger, Washington’s army at Valley Forge faced a painful lack of clothing. Five days af- ter arriving in the area, it was discovered that nearly
those supplies to the troops at Valley Forge. Reading, Penn- sylvania, the army’s primary supply depot, was located on the Schuylkill River a mere forty miles away from Valley Forge, but poor, muddy roads prevented many wagons from reaching the army, and the Schuylkill River was largely impassable in the winter, so few supplies arrived by boat. Compounding these problems were the inefficiency of the procurement process mandated by Congress and the incom- petence and occasional corruption of those who oversaw it. In theory, each Continental Army soldier was to be given daily rations consisting of one pound of bread, one pound of meat or fish, a pint of milk, and one pint each of beer, peas, beans, and butter. The reality, however, was that nothing like this amount of provisions was available for distribution to individual soldiers at Valley Forge. To make matters worse, the Americans found that British foraging parties from Philadelphia had already been through the area by the time the Continental Army arrived there to make camp and had taken almost everything that could have been used to supply the Continental Army.
Evidence of the dreadful deprivation the troops faced at Valley Forge can be found in the writings of those at the top of the military hierarchy as well as those at the bottom. At one point, Washington wrote to Congress saying that the army had “not a hoof of any kind to slaughter and not more than twenty-five barrels of flour.” Joseph Plumb Martin, a seventeen-year-old private who served at Valley Forge, wrote in his journal, saying: “I lay here two nights and one day and had not a morsel of any thing to eat all the time, save half of a small pumpkin, which I cooked by placing it upon a rock . . . and making a fire upon it. . . .”
Unfortunately, Washington was obliged not to advertise PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES 54 A P R I L 2 0 1 2
one quarter of the roughly twelve thousand soldiers under Washington’s command were insufficiently supplied with shoes and other clothes, making them unfit for duty. By early February, the number of American soldiers without sufficient clothing and shoes had risen to nearly one third. “Here comes a soldier,” Continental Army surgeon Dr. Abilgence Waldo wrote at one point, “his bare feet seen
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