Margaret Corbin
BIRTH
Nov 12, 1751
near Chambersburg, Province of Pennsylvania, British America
DEATH
January 16, 1800
Highland Falls, New York, U.S.
FAMILY
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Corbin, Margaret
(1751-1800)
Margaret Corbin (1751–1800) accompanied the Continental Army and was severely wounded while helping operate a cannon during the British assault on Fort Washington in 1776. She later became the first woman to receive a military pension from the United States government.
Margaret Corbin was born on or about Nov 12, 1751 in near Chambersburg, Province of Pennsylvania, British America. The names of the parents are not yet securely established in this database. These family and geographic circumstances formed the earliest setting for a life later associated with ["SOLDIER","CAMP FOLLOWER"]. The surviving evidence represented in this record does not always preserve the details of childhood schooling, household routine, religious instruction, apprenticeship, or youthful travel. Where such particulars remain uncertain, they are not reconstructed as fact. Even so, the known birthplace and family connections place this individual within the local, colonial, imperial, Indigenous, or Atlantic communities that shaped opportunity and identity in the eighteenth century. Those early relationships could determine education, inheritance, occupation, marriage prospects, military obligations, religious affiliation, and access to political or commercial networks. Social position also influenced which experiences were documented. Elite households often left correspondence, property records, school accounts, or legal papers, while the childhoods of women, laborers, enslaved people, Indigenous people, and less prominent relatives were more likely to survive only indirectly. Absence of detail should therefore be understood as a limitation of the record, not as evidence that the early years were uneventful or unimportant. Place mattered as well: settlement patterns, nearby ports and roads, denominational institutions, warfare, migration, and kinship networks all affected the choices available to a young person. This early-life summary therefore emphasizes the documented setting and immediate family rather than unsupported anecdotes. It establishes a careful biographical foundation while leaving room for future discoveries from family papers, parish registers, probate files, military documents, and local histories. Together, these facts provide the background necessary for understanding how Margaret Corbin entered the adult world described in the Career field and became connected to the people, events, and historic places indexed by HistoryGPS.
Corbin followed her husband John Corbin with the Pennsylvania artillery. When he was killed at Fort Washington, she continued working the gun until grapeshot wounds disabled her. She received care through the Invalid Regiment and in 1779 Congress granted her half the monthly pay of a soldier.













