The first shot in the Whiskey Insurrection was fired on July 14, 1794, at the house of Oliver Miller, where the Old Stone Manse stands, when Major John Lennox, a United States Marshal from Philadelphia, accompanied by General John Neville, a tax inspector for Allegheny County, attempted to serve a warrant for Miller’s failure to make a return on his still in compliance with the grievous excise tax laws of the time. The more furious insurgents threatened to have western Pennsylvania secede from the Union. President George Washington personally headed an army of fifteen thousand troops to quell the uprising, one of the most serious in American history aside from the Revolutionary War.
