The Day Must Dawn is a 1942 historical novel by the American writer Agnes Sligh Turnbull (1888–1982) set in 1777 in Hanna's Town, Pennsylvania, a frontier settlement thirty miles east of Pittsburgh.
The novel is an 18th-century pioneer romance about a Scots-Irish family living in Pennsylvania. The mother, toughened by hardships, tries to have her daughter go east to a more civilized life. The novel peaks with the burning of Hanna's Town in July 1782 by British-allied American Indians led by Guyasuta. The story concludes with her acceptance that her daughter will marry a frontiersman and go west to even wilder country.