River through Philadelphia

Usage examples of schuylkill.

The following day, the twenty-first, Howe made a rapid march high up the Schuylkill on the road leading to Reading, as if to capture the military stores kept there, as Washington kept pace with him on the opposite bank.

Meanwhile, Washington posted his own troops on the heights of the Schuylkill and scoured the country between it and the Delaware with cavalry and light infantry to prevent the British from foraging and to deter Tories and others from conveying provisions to their camp.

At the time, the village of Valley Forge, on the west bank of the Schuylkill, was owned by a wealthy Quaker who had built a sawmill and a gristmill on the banks of nearby Valley Creek.

Steep hillsides and the swift Schuylkill River helped fortify the perimeter of the wooded plateau where the army built its huts, but it was “a dreary kind of place and uncomfortably provided,” as Washington remarked.

Even water was not always in ample supply, despite the proximity of the Schuylkill River, since it had to be hauled up the steep slopes to the camp by hand.

An abatis made of felled fruit trees extended from the Delaware to the Schuylkill, with redoubts at intervals along the line.

As it happened, shortly after his arrival he accidentally drowned in the Schuylkill River, which “saved us much trouble,” wrote John Adams, “and embarrassment.

On the night of May 18, the marquis discovered a ford across the Schuylkill that had escaped the notice of British topographers, and he led his detachment to safety with a trifling loss.

Other eminent members of the Philosophical Society included John Bartram, who west of town, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, had created the first botanical garden in America.

Besides, like others, he found that to the west, toward the Schuylkill River, the city rapidly thinned out, beginning at about Sixth Street.

Jefferson, who had earlier given up living in town and moved to a house beside the Schuylkill, wrote of the crowds fleeing to the countryside, and allowed that he, too, would leave except that he did not wish to give the appearance of panic.

Jefferson had rented a summer place at Gray’s Ferry on the Schuylkill River, just outside the worst of the fever districts.

But that warm evening beside the Schuylkill River, Jefferson was a happy man.

If such a bridge as they shewed us can be thrown across the Schuylkill at Philadelphia, the floating bridges taken up & the navigation of that river opened, what a copious resource will be added, of wood & provisions, to warm & feed the poor of that city?