Valley Forge Document

[This is a receipt for a provisions request by the third New Hampshire regiment at Valley Forge.]  Winter 1777, 1778.(...) George Washington's army marched into Valley Forge not as heroes, but as hollow men. They were hungry, barefoot, bleeding in the snow. Washington called it a dreary kind of place. Yet it was here in that bleak encampment that America was forged.

And amid the hardship, on January 28, 1778, the captains and sergeants of the third New Hampshire regiment signed a simple document. A request for pairs of stockings for their soldiers.(...) That humble paper, like the frozen camp around it, tells a greater story.

Valley Forge was not America's darkest hour. It was the crucible of her soul, where ordinary men became founders of a nation destined to light the world.