Pennsylvania Dutch Guide-Book
9781465655929
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Lancaster County soil was fertile Indian territory long before the discovery of America. Before the coming of William Penn, French traders bartered with the native Shawanese. In the later days when there was trouble between the French and the English in America, the governor of the province, John Evans, visited these Indian settlements in order to establish their loyalty to Queen Anne. As early as 1709 a colony of Mennonites came from Switzerland under the leadership of Hans Herr—whose house is still standing, the oldest in the County—and began to make this district the richest agricultural region in the United States. Then came the French Huguenots, the Scotch-Irish, the Quakers, the Welsh, the Palatines. At the time when Pennsylvania had only three counties, Philadelphia, Bucks and Chester, from the last-named county a section was separated, to which John Wright, a native of Lancaster, England, one of the first settlers in this region, gave the name of Lancaster County. This separation took place in 1729. Out of the original Lancaster County, York, Cumberland, Berks, Northumberland, Dauphin and Lebanon counties have since been taken, leaving Lancaster County today an area of 928 square miles of territory which for beauty, fertility and picturesqueness is unexcelled. On a plot of ground owned by Andrew Hamilton, and divided by him into town lots, there sprang up two hundred and thirty years ago an embryo village called “Hickory Town” or “Gibson’s Pasture” which was the beginning of what is now known as Lancaster City. When Andrew Hamilton laid out this village in 1730 on the 500-acre tract of land he owned, there were less than two hundred inhabitants in the town. It was through his son, James Hamilton, that the village was turned into a borough in 1742. The first Burgess of Lancaster was Thomas Cookson, an Englishman, whose remains are interred in the church yard of St. James Episcopal Church. A number of important Indian treaties were made at Lancaster in 1744 between the chiefs of the Six Nations and the rulers of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. In the formulation of these treaties, all the disputes between the whites and the Indians came up for discussion. During the French and Indian War, through the influence of Benjamin Franklin, hundreds of wagons and pack horses were sent from Lancaster to General Braddock. Many officers and soldiers from this section served in the battalions which marched with Forbes and Bouquet to the Ohio. In this list of Lancaster County men who served in the French and Indian Wars are found the names of Shippen, Grubb, Atlee, Hambright, Reynolds and a roll of five Presbyterian clergymen serving as chaplains. The Indian history of Lancaster County ends in 1763, when a band of sixty men called the Paxton boys came to this city, stormed the jail and workhouse, then located at the northwest corner of West King and Prince Streets, and massacred all the Indians confined there for protection. In the days of the American Revolution, Lancaster was an important center of patriotic activities. After the closing of Boston Port, a meeting of protest was held in the Lancaster Court House. Her deputies attended the Pennsylvania Convention in Philadelphia and joined in a call for a Colonial Congress. After Lexington, the citizens at a public meeting pledged their lives and fortunes to the cause of all the Colonies, and companies of expert riflemen were organized. William Simpson of Captain Smith’s Lancaster company, was the first Pennsylvania soldier who fell in the Revolutionary War. Many British prisoners were brought to Lancaster, among them being Major Andre, kept for a time at the Cope House, corner of Grant and North Lime Streets.
