Museum of the American Revolution

This guide to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia opens in eighteen twenty-four, when the Marquis de Lafayette returned to America and grown men wept beneath George Washington's old campaign tent, raised again forty-six years after it was sewn. It reaches back to seventeen seventy-eight, when craftsmen in Reading, Pennsylvania stitched the flax linen while Washington's army starved at Valley Forge, and to the years the tent served as his only office, where he slept on a folding cot and wrote by candlelight planning the campaign ahead. Soldiers said his glowing tent was the last thing they saw each night, and the first each dawn.