Here at Valley Forge the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777 to 1778 and came out a fighting force capable of winning the Revolutionary War. Washington led his army here in December 1777 after losing the battles of Brandywine and Germantown and watching the British occupy Philadelphia. The army of approximately twelve thousand men built a city of log huts in the hills above the Schuylkill River, and over the following months suffered terribly from cold, hunger, and disease.
Nearly two thousand men died here, most from typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia. But at Valley Forge, the Prussian drill master Friedrich von Steuben transformed a ragged collection of state militias into a disciplined professional army, teaching them to march, maneuver, and fight in formation with a ferocity and coordination they had never had before. When the army marched out of Valley Forge in June 1778 — inspired by the news that France had entered the war on America's side — it was a different army from the one that had marched in.
The huts have been reconstructed on their original foundations. Washington's headquarters, the Isaac Potts House, still stands. Walk the Grand Parade ground where von Steuben drilled the troops through the winter snow.