George Washington certainly didn't sleep there. And contrary to legend, he may not have stood there to address his troops or even marched them past there en rout to Valley Forge.

Nevertheless, Hanging Rock, which overhangs South Gulph Road Route 320) in Gulph Mills, has earned a permanent place in history - on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has finally decided to go around rather than though it, Hanging rock looks like it will hang in there permanently, too.

It's a real-life rocky story.

It begins in the winter of 1777. After spending eight days in the Gulph Mills area pondering where to make his winter quarters, Washington marched his troops under/around the rock on the way to Valley Forge via the old Gulph Road, according to local lore.

"there's an account that Washington actually stood atop the rock to address the army," Stacey Swigart of the Valley Forge Historical Society said.

And, she said, there's a "pretty cool story that the Americans propped up stuff underneath the rock so it would look like it might fall so if the British came, they would say, 'Oh, we won't cross here!'"

No records of the time document any of the, but the rock subsequently became the site of commemorative events, and, at the very least, a symbol of the sprit of Valley Forge.

So in 1917, when the state Highway Department (PennDot's precursor) first proposed dynamiting it because it partially stood in the way of motor-vehicle progress, residents rallied round the rock. (The first pet rock?)

It appeared they had succeeded seven years later, when a prominent local citizen bought the strip of land the rock sat on and later bequeathed it to the Valley Forge Historical Society.

But the battle of Hanging Rock continued until 1997, when the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission recommended it for the National Register of Historic Places.

PennDot, which literally had been chipping away at Hanging Rock for years, tried chipping away at historic claims by insisting it was just a rock - an obstruction to traffic, especially large trucks, which have struck and knocked off chunks.

But on Christmas Eve 1997, the federal Department of the Interior put Hanging Rock on the National Register: not for any role it may have played in the American Revolution, but for the symbolic significance it had acquired.

PennDot said last week that it will henceforth give the rock a wide berth. Plans in the preliminary engineering stage call for minor realignment of the two lanes of South Gulph Road between Upper Gulph Road and Arden road (where the rock is) "to avoid the rock," PennDot's Gene Blaum said.

"We're probably about three years away from construction," he said. But when the approximately $1.5 million project is completed, "The rock won't be touched."

Historical preservations are thrilled to hear that. Though there aren't any 18th-century documents to show whether Hanging Rock played a role in American history, Swigart said there's a hint in a book that was published for the nation's centennial celebration in 1876.

The book contains a map of the Gulph Mills area that "doesn't mention Hanging Rock - it's just identified as rock. It shows something that people wanted to make note of as far back as the centennial."

There is no plaque of sign or anything else on or around Hanging Rock to indicate it is a special site.

There once was - a bronze plaque dedicated on Dec. 19, 1924, that said: "General Washington and the American army passed under this rock on the march to Valley Forge, December 19, 1777."

It was stolen years ago. As to whether there are plans to replace it, Swigart said: "I'm not sure when and if and how to go about doing that." Nor is she sure what a new plaque would say. "It's not Plymouth Rock, "Swigart said. Her suggested epitaph: "It's a nice little rock"