History: Local: Part VI - Luzerne County, PA; Lackawanna County, PA; Wyoming County, PA Contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Jean Vineyard: vineyard@ohiou.edu USGENWEB ARCHIVES NOTICE: Printing this file by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged, as long as all notices and submitter information is included. Any other use, including copying files to other sites requires permission from the submitters PRIOR to uploading to any other sites. We encourage links to the state and county table of contents. http://www.usgwarchives.net/ http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/luzerne/holltoc.htm URL of html Table of Contents. Also available in html at the Luzerne County page. http://www.rootsweb.com/~paluzern/ 技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技 HOLLISTER'S HISTORY OF THE LACKAWANNA VALLEY 技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技 Transcriber's notes: I have transcribed this book as written and spelled, with the exception of footnotes and italics which cannot be saved as ASCII Text. The author H. Hollister makes reference to and footnotes several author's and books and to name a few they are: Smith's "History of New York; American Antiquities;" Charles Miner's "History of Wyoming;" "Colonial Records," "Pennsylvania Archives;" "Westmoreland Records" and Chapman's "History of Wyoming." Any footnote important to the meaning of the passage has been inserted within the text. I have also noted the original page number in the book as "page x" so that the reader can use their browser to "find" the page referenced in the "Index to History of the Lackawanna Valley" already transcribed. page 9 through 15 TABLE OF CONTENTS ON-LINE FILE NAME INDIAN HISTORY OF WYOMING 17 - 29 lackv001.txt INDIAN VILLAGE OF CAPOOSE 29 - 39 " LACKAWANNA RIVER AND VALLEY 40 - 43 " WAS WYOMING ONCE A VAST LAKE? 43 - 49 " WAR-PATHS 49 - 50 " INDIAN SPRING UPON THE MOOSIC MOUNTAIN 50 - 51 " INDIAN RELICS AND FORTIFICATIONS 51 - 59 " INDIAN APPLE-TREE 59 - 61 " BEACON FIRES 61 - 63 lackv002.txt SILVER MINE ON THE LACKAWANNA 63 - 64 " GOLD MINE 64 - 67 " SALT SPRINGS 67 - 68 " LEAD MINE 68 - 70 " GENERAL HISTORY 70 - 105 " GENERAL HISTORY (continued) 105 - 121 " ISAAC TRIPP 121 - 130 lackv003.txt WESTMORELAND 130 - 132 " WILLENPAUPACK SETTLEMENT 132 - 134 " JAMES LEGGETT 134 - 137 " FIRST WAGON ROAD FROM PITTSTON TO THE DELAWARE 137 - 139 " MILITARY ORGANIZATION 139 - 141 " RELIGION, MORALITY AND STILL-HOUSES 141 - 148 " MILLS UPON THE LACKAWANNA 148 - 149 " DR. JOSEPH SPRAUGE 150 - 151 " DR. WILLIAM HOOKER SMITH-OLD FORGE 151 - 154 " THE SIGNAL TREE 154 - 154 " THE WYOMING MASSACRE 155 - 177 " GENERAL HISTORY (resumed) 177 - 186 lackv004.txt PROVIDENCE TOWNSHIP AND VILLAGE 186 - 205 " DUNMORE 206 - 211 " HISTORY OF SCRANTON 211 - 268 lackv005.txt BLAKELEY 269 - 273 " YANKEE WAY OF PULLING A TOOTH 274 lackv006.txt THOMAS SMITH 275 " SETTLEMENT OF ABINGTON 275 - 282 " THE GREAT HUNTER, ELIAS SCOTT 282 - 284 " "DRINKER'S BEECH" - (Now Covington) 284 - 288 " SETTLEMENT OF JEFFERSON 288 - 291 " CHASED BY A PANTHER 291 - 293 " DUNNING 293 - 295 " CARBONDALE 295 - 300 " LACKAWANNA VALLEY IN 1804 300 - 310 " FORMATION OF TOWNSHIPS; PRIMITIVE MINISTERS 310 - 314 " PROPRIETORS' SCHOOL FUND AND PRIMITIVE SCHOOLS 314 - 316 " PATHS AND ROADS 317 - 322 " THE RISE OF METHODISM IN THE VALLEY 322 - 326 " SMELLING HELL 326 - 328 " FORMATION OF ANTHRACITE COAL 328 - 329 lackv007.txt ORGANIC REMAINS FOUND IN THE COAL STRATA 329 - 331 " MINERALS AND MINING 331 - 332 " COAL LANDS FIFTY YEARS AGO 332 - 333 " THE DISCOVERY AND INTRODUCTION INTO USE OF ANTHRACITE COAL 333 - 343 " WILLIAM AND MAURICE WURTS 343 - 363 " FALLING IN OF THE CARBONDALE MINES 363 - 367 " EARLIEST MAIL ROUTE THROUGH THE VALLEY 367 - 369 " THE PENNSYLVANIAL COAL COMPANY 369 - 372 " FROM PITTSTON TO HAWLEY 372 - 379 " DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA, AND WESTERN RAILROAD 379 - 393 lackv008.txt LACKAWANNA AND BLOOMSBURG RAILROAD 393 - 396 " SKETCH OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LEHIGH AND SUSQUEHANNA RAILROAD 396 - 403 " HON. GEORGE W. SCRANTON 403 - 410 " LEHIGH VALLEY RAILROAD 410 - 417 " APPENDIX 419 - 442 " 技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技技 page 274 YANKEE WAY OF PULLING A TOOTH Long before doctors, armed with lancets and well-filled saddle-bags, went forth in the valley, empowered, like the beast in Revelations, "to kill a fourth part", at least of those whom they might meet on the way, the more trivial duties of the physician necessarily fell upon the patient himself or the skill of some good-natured neighbor, or perhaps were assumed by some officious doctress, whose roots and "yarbs", gathered from the meadow and mountain, had such wonderful "vartu" in their simple decoctions that no disease could deny or resist. Toothache, rarely treated with the inexorable dignity of turnkey or forceps, vexed many a nervous sufferer by its presence. Sometimes, however, its court was summarily adjourned by a process original, sudden, and cheap. Among the settlers in Blakeley, at the time spoken of, was a long, lean, bony son of a farmer, troubled with that most provoking of all pains, or, as Burns called it--"thou h--ll o' a' diseases"--the toothache. The troublesome member was one of the wide-pronged molars, as firm in its socket as if held in a vise. The pain was so acute as it ran along the inflamed gums, that the usual series of manipulations with decoctions and "int-ments", alternated with useless swearing, failed to bring relief to the sufferer. As the ache grew keener with torture, a "remejil" agent was suggested and tried. One end of a firm hemp string was fastened upon the rebellious member, while the other, securely fixed to a bullet, purposely notched, was placed in the barrel of an old flint-lock musket, loaded with an extra charge of powder. When all was ready, the desperate operator caught hold of the gun and "let drive". Out flew the tooth from the bleeding jaw, and away bounded the musket several feet. After this new way of extracting teeth had thus been demonstrated by one so simple and unskilled in the dental page 275 science, it became at once the chosen and only mode practiced here for many years. THOMAS SMITH Among other resolute pioneers who sought the shores of the Susquehanna in 1783, appears the name of Thomas Smith, grandsire of the late T. Smith, Esq., of Abington. On the east side of the river below Nanticoke, he laid the foundation for his future home. The great ice freshet of 1784, which bore down from the upper waters of the Susquehanna such vast masses of ice, overflowing the plains and destroying the property along the river, swept his farm of all its harvest product, leaving it with little else than its gullied soil. Hardly had his recuperative energies again made cheerful his fireside, when the "pumpkin freshet", as it was called, from the countless number of pumpkins it brought down the swollen river, again inundated its banks, sweeping away houses, barns, mills, fences, stacks of hay and grain, cattle, flocks of sheep, and droves of swine, in the general destruction, and spreading desolation where but yesterday autumn promised abundance. Smith, not stoic enough to receive the visits of such floods with indifference, moved up in the "gore" (now Lackawanna Township) in 1786, "for", said the old gentleman, "I want to get above high-water mark." His son, Deodat, intermarried with the Allsworth family in Dunmore, from whom sprung a large family of children. THE SETTLEMENT OF ABINGTON (footnote: Named after Abington, Connecticut.) Of the highlands of Abington, lying between the Susquehanna River and the Lackawanna, now rendered productive by a comely and industrious people, little was known by the white man at the beginning of the page 276 century, else that its wild thresholds were crossed by the Indians' pathway from Capoose village to Oquango, N.Y. In 1790 a party of trappers, consisting of three persons, penetrated the wilderness where now spreads out the rich sloping farm of the late Elder Miller, with a view of making a settlement, as trapping grew dull and furs became scarce. Here they felled the underbrush and a few of the forest trees, rolled them into a cabin roofed with boughs, while the great crevices, liberally seamed with wedges of wood and mud, imparted to the new structure a Hottentot appearance. Their provisions having become exhausted, and bear meat losing its relish, they shouldered their guns and traps before the close of summer and abandoned the enterprise, so that no permanent settlement was made until 1794. In the spring of this year Stephen Parker, Thomas Smith, Deacon Clark, and Ephraim Leach, father of E. Leach, Esq., of Providence, led by the intrepid John Miller, on foot, slung their packs and guns over their shoulders, and with ax in hand, first marked and widened this ancient pathway of the wild man through the mountain gap, known as Leggett's. This gap, in the low range of the Moosic, offered then, as now, the only natural eastern outlet to the township of Abington. Before the work was completed, it was abandoned because of the unvarying obstruction offered by trees to the passage of a cart or wagon, and the declivity rising from Leggett's Creek abruptly into the very mountain. The slighter depression in the range, half a mile south of Leggett's Gap, was then selected for a wagon road, even with the disadvantages of its treble height. In 1791 encroachments were made upon the warriors' path through the notch for the passage of a wagon, when the mountain road relapsed again into forest. Near the location of the present grist-mill of Humphreys, the white man's clearing first emerged from the Abingtonian woods. This was made by Ebenezer Leach, who afterward sold out his right at this point, and moved page 277 down in the vicinity of Leggett's Gap, where he soon became a tenant of a small, low, lo-cabin, remarkable only for its rude simplicity. A clearing was niched out upon the slope of a hill, there the corn soon sprouted from the fresh burned fallow, and the pumpkins, with their yellow sides and rounded faces, threw a Yankee and domestic look over a region naturally rugged and lonely. Corn once raised and husked, was either cracked in stone or wooden mortars, for the brown mush, or carried in back-loads down to the corn-mill in Slocum Hollow, to be ground. Sometimes, when the snow was deep or drifted, the journey was made to the mill upon the slow and cumbrous snow-shoe. The utter solitude of Leggett's Gap, interrupted only by the screech of the panther or the cry of the wolf, as they sprang along its sides with prodigious leaps, made even the trip to mill perilous in the cold season of the year. "Many a time", said Leach, "have I passed through the notch, with my little grist on my shoulder, holding in my hand a large club, which I kept swinging fiercely, to keep away the wolves growling around me; and to my faithful club, often bitten and broken when I reached home, have I apparently been indebted for my life." At length he hit upon a plan promising exemption from their attacks. Being told that they were afraid of the sound of iron, he obtained from the valley below, a saw-mill saw. To this he attached a strong withe, by which he drew the saw by one hand over a trail or road, as yet unconscious of the dignity of a sled or a wheel, making a tinkling alternately so sharp and soft as it bounded over a stone or plunged into a root as to inspire them at once with fear so great that his passage was only interrupted after this by their indignant growls. During one of his mill trips to Capoose, a timid fawn page 278 being pursued closely by two wolves, ran up to him, and placed its head between the legs of Leach to seek protection from its half-starved pursuers. This was done in a manner so abrupt and hurried, as to first convey to the rider a knowledge of the chase. The wolves came up with a bound, within a short distance of where the fearless arm interposed for the trembling animal, and, giving one ferocious view of their white, sharpened teeth, crouched away to their retreats. So frightened had the fawn become, that not until the path opened distinctly upon the clearing of Leach, could it be induced to leave the side of its protector. Deer and elk, at that period, thronged along the mountains in such numbers that droves often could be seen browsing upon saplings or lazily basking in the noonday sun. The Moose, from which the mountain range bordering the Lackawanna derived its name of MOOSIC, were found here in vast numbers by the earliest explorers in the Lackawanna Valley. The clearing of Mr. Leach subsequently embraced the Indian salt spring, mentioned heretofore. Parker and Smith located upon land north of this, while Clark, drawn by the delicious landscape of Abington's fairest mount, plunged into the woods, where now thrives a village honoring his memory, in the preservation of the name--Clark's Green. On the summit of the hill commanding such a sweep of mountain, meadow, lowland, and ravine, as stretches to the eye turned to the south or the east, there then stood the straight pine and the shaggy hemlock, interspersed with the maple and the beech, where was erected the original dwelling place of Deacon Clark. It was a substantial compact of unhewn logs, notched deep at either end, placed together regardless of beauty or timber. The floor came from ask-plank, full of slivers, unaided by the saw or plane--the keen ax alone being responsible for page 279 smoothness and finish. It was, withal, a comfortable affair built in the wood-side, some 1,300 feet above tide-water; but energetic, contented, and industrious, the old gentleman passed under its humble roof many a pleasant hour in the long evenings of autumn, when the hearth glowed with the crackling fire, while his daily duties were to give thrift and culture to one of the finest farms in Abington. John Lewis, James and Ezra Dean, Job Tripp, Robert Stone, Ezra Wall, and Geo. Gardner, also settled in the new region the same year. Job settled in the western portion of Abington while it possessed all its native ruggedness. Most of those who had plunged here in this old forest, were, like those who had commenced along the Lackawanna, so poor as to be unable to pay for their land, until from the soil, they could, by their honest industry and frugal management, raise the necessary means. Not so, however, with Job; he had a little money, and was determined to make the most of it. He purchased a grindstone and brought it into Abington, which for six years was the only one here. This he fenced in with stout saplings, allowing no one to grind upon it unless they paid him a stipulated sum, and turned the stone themselves. This enterprise, although it was comprehensive in its design, and brought to his barricaded grindstone one or two dull axes a week of the toiling chopper, could not bring into play all the energies of his mind, so he fenced in much of the woods by falling tree, for a deer-pen or park, into which, after the deer had wandered for his morning browse, or had been driven by Job, the passage to the pen was closed, when the deer was to be slain, and dried venison and buckskin were to effect such a revolution in the commercial aspect of Abington, and he was to be the Midas who had brought it. The chase over the acres he had thus fenced proved more invigorating to his stomach than beneficial to his pocket, and the project of the old man died with him a few years page 280 later, marked only by the remaining debris of the fence yet seen around "Hickory Ridge" Elder John Miller, a man alike eminent for his long services as a minister, and his virtues as a man, settled in Abington in 1802. He was born February 3, 1775, in Windham, Connecticut. Young, hopeful, and robust, he emigrated to the inland acres of Abington, where for half a century, identified intimately with its local and general history, he gave cheer and character to society around him as much as the brook crossing the meadow imparts a deeper shade and more luxuriant herbage to its banks. The great influence he exerted over the people of the township up until the very day of his death, in February, 1857, in keeping alive the spirit of improvement, husbandry, and morality, can yet be observed along the farms of his neighbors, in the enterprise, intelligence, industry, customs, and habits of the yeomanry of Abington. Previous to the coming of Mr. Miller to "The Beech", as Abington was designated until the formation of the township in 1806, few had inclined toward its rigorous domain. He located upon the spot marked and vacated by the trappers twelve years before, purchased three hundred and twenty-six acres of land for forty dollars--$20 in silver, $10 in the customary tender of maple-sugar, and $10 in tin-ware. The only store in the county of Luzerne was kept in Wilkes Barre by Hollenback & Fisher, offering a variety surpassed by the ordinary pack of the modern peddler of to- day. At this store, Elder Miller was furnished with the necessary tin, which he manufactured into such ware as the county called for. Almost simultaneously with his arrival, he began to preach the gospel and "turn many to righteousness". During this long five-and-fifty years of spiritual labor, he married nine hundred and twelve couples, baptized (immersed) two thousand persons, and preached the enormous number of eighteen hundred funeral sermons before page 281 he was called to receive his reward on high. It was rare to witness a funeral in the valley when the elder was in his prime, and find absent from the mournful gathering his frank, friendly face, ever full of words of comfort and kind reminiscence of the dead. For a period of twelve years he officiated in the valley as the only clergyman laboring here of any denomination. Being a practical surveyor withal, there are few farms in the northern portion of Luzerne County he did not traverse while tracing and defining their boundaries. His wife--an estimable lady--was the fifth white woman living in Abington. Elder Miller, although he held his own plow and fed his own cattle, was the great representative of Abington, whose various qualifications to counsel and console, whose characteristic desire to do good, whose benevolence of heart, grave but kind deportment as a man of the world or the adviser of his flock, gave him an ascendency in the affections of the community attained by few. While he has passed away, he left behind him in manuscripts events of his life, and incidents in the early history and growth of Abington, whose publication could not fail to interest all who knew him, and recall to the mind of the reader the gray head and kindly greetings of a man whose age, calm, deliberate air, whose venerable and unquestioned piety, and whose great sympathy in the hour of sorrow, made him one of the most remarkable persons ever living in Abington. This township was the twelfth one formed in the county of Luzerne, and is sixty- three years old. At the Court of Quarter Sessions, held at Wilkes Barre, August, 1806, Abington was formed from a part of Tunkhannock, "Beginning at the southwest corner of Nicholson township, thence south nine and three-quarter miles east to Wayne County, thence by Wayne County line north nine and three-quarter miles", etc. The original inhabitants were from Connecticut and page 282 Rhode Island; and even now, after the lapse of over half a century with its mutations, the stern morality, the honest industry, and the social virtues literally impressed upon the hills of the parent State, are distributed and distinguished among their descendants. Although no evidence of coal or iron exhibits itself within the boundaries of Abington, it furnishes one of the best farming and grazing areas found in the county of Luzerne. The only colored feature in the picture of Abington is a colony of negroes, which, in spite of the double disadvantage of prejudice and hereditary indolence, has drawn from the frosty hills thereabout the wherewithal to sustain animation in a very creditable manner. ELIAS SCOTT, THE HUNTER Daniel Scott emigrated to the Lackawanna in 1792. His son Elias was widely known throughout the country forty years ago as a successful Nimrod, but the encroachments of civilized life crowded the forest world from his reach with the same remorseless force that the Indians have been rolled up and frenzied to the very base of the Rocky Mountains. Some years ago, while he was standing near the Wyoming House, in Scranton, in an apparently thoughtful and sorrowful mood, the writer asked him what was the matter. "Matter! matter!" he exclaimed, as he looked up with a sigh, and pointed his wilted hand and hickory cane towards the depots. "See how the tarnal rascals have spiled the huntin-grounds where I've killed many a bear and deer." In the autumn months he would take long hunting-jaunts, sometimes being absent a week from his home. Upon his left hand appeared unmistakable evidence of an encounter with a bear many years ago, while out upon such an excursion on Stafford Meadow Brook, running page 283 through the southern portion of Scranton. Encamped at night among the willows on the border of the run, with his leather knapsack for a pillow, his belt, keen knife and long, heavy rifle for his companions, where the glare of his camp-fire startled the fawn as it browsed along the mountain side, or was chased by a wolf or more blood-thirsty panther down into the valley, he met old bruin at daybreak, as his bearship was gathering berries for his morning lunch. His organs of digestion, however, did not relish the tickling sensation of the bullet thrown from Scott's rifle, and he immediately approached the hunter with all the familiarity and warmth of an old friend, until he came frightfully close. Scott, declining his advances, retreated as rapidly as possible from the wounded and enraged brute, and by the frequent punches of his gun, now empty and broken, avoided the embraces of the bear. Walking backward from the animal, the heel of his boot caught in a treacherous root of a tree, and he fell to the ground. Before he could raise himself again, commenced the death-struggle. Bruin sprang on the hunter with such violence as to rupture an internal blood-vessel, and for a moment the copious flow of blood from his mouth threatened suffocation. Smarting from the wound of the bullet, the bear seized the left hand of Scott in his mouth, as it was uplifted to divert attention from his throat, while with his right arm he drew from his belt the well- tried trusty knife. This he plunged repeatedly into the bear, until, exhausted from the loss of blood, he fell dead on the mangled hunter. Hunters then lived a life of plenty, for game of all kinds was so abundant at that period, that in the course one year's casual hunting, Scott killed one hundred and seventy-five deer, five bears, three wolves, and a panther, besides wild turkeys in great numbers. He has killed and dressed eleven deer in one day, three of them being slain at one shot. Mr. Scott informed the writer that many years ago, page 284 finding a rattlesnake den on the upper waters of Spring Brook, he killed seven hundred and fifty of the reptiles in a single day; the next day he slew three hundred and seventy- five more; making a total of thirteen hundred and twenty-five of the bright occupants of the rocks thus fraternizing in this snake castle or rendezvous, and destroyed by the hand of a single man. He died in the summer of 1867. EARLY HISTORY OF THE SETTLEMENT OF "DRINKER'S BEECH", NOW COVINGTON As the dweller in wigwams turned his footsteps toward the setting sun, in search of hunting-grounds better stocked than the Pocono, he left behind him no region more wild than the section of country lying between the Delaware and the Lackawanna, known as Drinker's Beech--a name made popular by the vast number of beech-trees growing upon lands owned by Drinker. No attention of the white man was directed to the tract until 1787. During this year, and that of 1791, Henry Drinker, Sr., of Philadelphia, father of the late Henry W. and Richard Drinker, purchased from the State some twenty-five thousand acres of unseated land in the Beech, now embraced by Wayne, Pike, and Luzerne counties. An effort was made in 1788 to turn this purchase to some practical account by opening a highway through the lands. It failed for want of means. Four years later, John Delong, a hardy woodsman of Stroudsburg, was employed, with other persons, to mark or cut a wagon-road to these beechen possessions, from at or near the twenty-one-mile tree on the north and south road, which was also called the Drinker road, from the fact that it was opened principally at the expense of Henry Drinker, Sr., who was an uncle of Henry Drinker, Jr. and was withal a large landholder in the more northern portion of the State. page 285 The road cut by Delong extended in a westerly direction, passed that romantic sheet of water, Lake Henry, crossed the present track of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, and thence taking a southerly course, terminated on a small branch of the Lehigh, called Bell Meadow Brook, near the old Indian encampment before mentioned, upon the edge of this run. After the return of the choppers, the road grew full of underbrush, and forbade passage to all but the hunter and his game. In reopening it, in 1821, the name of "Henry Drinker, 1792", was round rudely carved upon a tree. The late Ebenezer Bowman, Esq., of Wilkes Barre, was employed to pay taxes upon these lands as late as 1813, after which time Henry W. Drinker, as the agent, offered them for sale and settlement. In the spring of this year, Henry Drinker, Sr., with his sons, Henry W. and Richard Drinker, visited Stoddartsville--a faint village brought into being by the late John Stoddard, who, being an alien, was impelled from the city of Philadelphia to a tract of land embracing the great Falls on the Lehigh, where his lumbering operations eventuated into a village of considerable note in the days of the stage-coach over Wilkes Barre Mountain. As the southern portion of the Drinker lands lay on the Lehigh and its upper tributaries, about twelve miles northeast of Stoddartsville, it was decided to open a communication to them from that place by a road nearly following the course of the river, if the same was found at all practicable. Previous, however, to running any line of road, H. W. Drinker determined to ascend that stream in a small canoe or skiff, up to the very mouth of Wild Meadow Brook--now called "Mill Creek". This the old hunters and sturdy woodsmen declared impossible, as the stream in one place was completely closed by a compact body of drift-wood of a very large size and great extent, on the top page 286 of which a considerable strata of vegetable and earthy matter had accumulated, and brushwood was growing luxuriantly; in other places there were swift and narrow rapids, beaver dams, and alder and laurel, twisted and interwoven over the very current in such a manner that it seemed as if no boat could ascend the Lehigh, unless carried upon shoulders the greater portion of the way, as the bark canoes of the Indians were sometimes taken. Notwithstanding these discouraging representations, by offering high wages, a resolute set of axmen were at length engaged to undertake this truly formidable task, and after the expenditure of no little energy and money, accompanied with some of the hardest swearing among the choppers, a boat channel to the desired point was opened in the course of two months. The first encampment of the Messrs. Drinkers, with their choppers, was near the mouth of Wild Meadow Brook, where they erected a bark cabin, or shed, open in front and at the sides, and sloping back to the ground. Each man was furnished with a blanket, in which he rolled himself up at night, and while a large crackling fire blazed in front of the cabin without, the soft hemlock boughs within furnished invigorating repose after the fatiguing labors of the day. Now and then, they were annoyed by the serenade of a school of owls, attracted to the camp by the strange glare of the fire, or the piercing scream of the sleepless panther, watching the intruders; in damp, rainy weather, by the bite of gnats or "punks", as they were termed. Trout and venison were so abundant around them, that an hour's fish or hunt supplied the cabin for a week with food. This encampment was made in 1815, when this new avenue along the Lehigh was sometimes used for boating and running logs. Provisions and boards were taken up the stream from Stoddartsville in a large bateau drawn by a tough old mare, hitched to the bow with a plow harness, and with a setting pole to assist her when there was page 287 a tight pull, and push en derriere when the speed slackened too much to suit the Rear- Admiral, as the hands called the driver and owner of the animal; sometimes swimming through deep beaver-dams, or scrambling along the narrow, rocky passes and rapids, to the astonishment of otters, minks, and muskrats, the soft-furred inhabitants of the banks of the stream. "And if a beaver lingered there, It must have made the rascal stare, To see the swimming of the mare." In the summer of 1814, these lands were resurveyed by Jason Torrey, Esq., of Bethany, Wayne County, into lots averaging one hundred acres each. Lots were sold at five dollars per acres, on five years' credit, the first two years without interest; payment to be made in lumber, shingles, labor, stock, produce, or any thing the farmer offered or had to spare. The first clearing was made in Drinker's settlement, in 1815, by the late H. W. Drinker, on a ridge of land, where he built a log-house, about a quarter of a mile south of the spot long adorned by his later residence. During the year 1816 a road was surveyed and opened from the Wilkes Barre and Easton Turnpike, at a point about half a mile above Stoddartsville, to the north and south road, near the Wallenpaupack bridge, a distance of some thirty miles. This road is also known as the old Drinker Road. At the Court of Quarter Sessions, held at Wilkes Barre in 1818, Covington was formed out of a part of Wilkes Barre, embracing the whole of Drinker's possession. "In honor of Brigadier-General Covington, who gallantly fell at the battle of Williamsburg, in Upper Canada, the court call this township Covington." H. W. Drinker being an intimate friend of General Covington, this name was given to the new township at his suggestion. page 288 Among the earlier settlers were John Wragg, Michael Mitchell, Lawrence Dershermer, Ebenezer Covey, John and William Ross, John and George Fox, John and Lewis Stull, Samuel Wilohick, Archippus Childs, John Lafrance, John Genthu, Henry Ospuck, John Fish, David Dale, Edward Wardell, John Thompson, Mathew Hodson, Peter Rupert, Wesley Hollister, John Besecker, Jacob Swartz, Nathaniel Carter, Samuel Buck, Richard Edward, John Koons, and Barnabas Carey. The Philadelphia and Great Bend Turnpike, originated by Drinker, whose name it still bears, was the first to gain admittance into the valley from the east as a public highway. This turnpike commenced at the Belmont and Easton road, some three miles above Stanhope, and ran thence a northerly course to the Susquehanna and Great Bend Turnpike, at a point near Ithamar Mott's tavern, in Susquehanna County. The charter for this road, over sixty miles of vast inland frontier, was obtained in 1819, but the State, willing to foster an enterprise promising to enlarge its development and dignity, had so little faith in the civilizing advantages of this proposed road that it favored it with the limited subscription of only $12,000. The balance of the stock was taken by the Messrs. Drinkers, Clymer, Meredith, and other wealthy landholders. Drinker, who located the road, superintended its general construction, and was elected president of the company. The four villages, Moscor, Dunning, Dalesville and Turnersville, diversifying the agricultural centers among the hills and dales of the Beech, are all increasing in population and importance, and yet have ample room for expansion. SETTLEMENT OF JEFFERSON Although Jefferson Township was only formed in 1836, from Providence, its settlement dates back to 1784, when Asa Cobb, taking advantage of the repose succeeding the page 289 Revolution, located his cabin, and made a clearing at the foot of one of the larger and steeper elevations, deriving its name from him, Cobb's Mountain, as it sends down its steep slope to the old Connecticut road crossing the range at this high point. This cabin, offering its unwavering hospitality to a friend or foe from Wyoming, was the primitive structure in Jefferson, and its former location is indicated by the mansion of his great-grandson, Asa Cobb. Between the solitary dwelling in Dunmore and the clearing at Little Meadows, in Wayne County a distance of sixteen miles eastward, the cabin of Mr. Cobb was for many years the only one intervening. In 1795 Mr. Potter chopped a place for his home in the extreme eastern border of the township and county, upon a tributary of the Wallenpaupack issuing from Cobb's Pond. Jefferson has achieved no local history of interest, yet its uplands were once familiar to the savage clans crossing from the Delaware to their Wyoming villages. Upon the very summit of the mountain, north of the old Cobb house, the camp and signal fires of the Indian often rose, as the hunter or warrior gathered around the resinous logs, while the flames of the fire glowing high and red among the tree-tops, were visible miles away to the eastward. At an early period, a large number of Indian implements, to smite an enemy or secure the game, were found commingled with the debris of these upraised encampments. The township is sparsely settled and generally covered with timber, yet in spite of its altitude, it possesses a few farms of surprising fertility and beauty. The Moosic or Cobb's Mountain, interposing its granite bowlders between Jefferson and the Lackawanna, has shut off all traces of coal formation, yet a coal mine was discovered east of this range, a quarter of a century ago, by a voluble, inventive genius, who was promised a farm by the owner of the land, should the explorer find coal in a certain locality. Making an excavation deep in the page 290 mountain side, he actually toiled weeks in carrying upon his shoulder baskets of anthracite for a distance of six miles before the blackened appearance of the drift gave satisfactory evidence of the existence of coal. The owner of this supposed coal property, always liberal in his gifts, cheered by his good luck in the discovery, promptly deeded a tract of land, from his many thousand acres, as a reward to the finder, who, like the kind-hearted possessor, lived long to join in the laugh at the joke. The country east and southward of Cobb's, alternating with forest and meadow, possesses much of the gloom natural to the primitive wilderness in American when trodden by the warriors. Wild beasts, to a certain extent, inhabit the ravines and woods extending from this point to the head-waters of the Lehigh over the Shades of Death, on the Pocono, and haunt in places less accessible to the footsteps of the hunter making now and then such demonstrations upon the farmers' sheep-pens as to satisfy the fastidious that the keen, frosty air of the mountain imparts a keener whet to the appetite than rum. The winter of 1835 was one of great length and severity, from the vast quantity of snow which had fallen. It lay upon the ground for many weeks four and five feet in depth on the level, while drifts, crossed only upon snow-shoes, often rose to a prodigious height. Game perished on the mountains in large numbers, and wolves even sought the settlements for food. A gray, lean wolf, thus impelled by hunger, found its way into the barn-yard of the late John Cobb, Esq., in Jefferson, during the winter, while the members of the family, with the exception of Mrs. Cobb, were absent from home. The commotion among the sheep in the yard, some distance from the house, attracted her attention. With a heroism that rose instinctively with the occasion, Mrs. Cobb, though naturally a mild and slender lady, caught the pitchfork in her hand and hurried forth to repel or dispatch the intruder. This page 291 was comparatively an easy matter for the brave woman, as the brute, in its starved condition, had become enfeebled, and, although for a moment it turned its lurid eye and long, white, keen teeth upon the assailant, it soon fell a trophy to a woman whose sterling courage, thus displayed, exhibited in a broader and better light the requirements and qualifications of the earlier women of the country. For the scalp of the wolf, Luzerne county paid Mrs. Cobb the usual reward or bounty at that time of ten dollars. There lived upon a time in Jefferson a man of fair mental endowments, upright and honorable, glib in speech, of unmeasured egotism, whose ambition led him to hope for a division of the great county of Luzerne and the selection of the green plateau of his plantation for the county seat. Visions of court-house, jail, and prominence, rose before him as he diffused his convictions among all parties throughout the county with a persistency worthy of success, urging the cutting in twain of its ancient boundaries for the especial good of the Beech and Jefferson, offering land gratuitously for the public buildings; and, as a final unanswerable counterpoise, the old gentlemen, in his enthusiasm for his favorite scheme, exclaimed to the writer, "Rather than see the thing fail, I would consent to act as judge myself the first year or two for nothing." CHASED BY A PANTHER To the east of Cobb's clearing, eight or ten miles upon the old Connecticut road, nestles down at the foot of a long hill a tract of low, swampy land, known in the ancient Westmoreland Records by the name of "Little Meadows". Two natural ponds, flooding hundreds of acres, lying a mile apart, divided by a strip of wild meadow-land grown over with coarse grass and willows, afforded the earliest pioneers to Wyoming a place to cheer their cattle with food, and led to the adoption of the name. The first page 292 settlement in the county of Wayne, aside from that upon the Delaware, was made upon the edge of this meadow. From this place to the Paupack settlement, a distance of less than a dozen miles, stretched the woods, unbroken save by a single farm-house, kept for a tavern, remarkable for its neatness within, and its slovenish appearance without. A portion of this distance is swamp-land, grown full of alder, laurel, beech, and the long, wrinkled hemlock, and is a continuation of the swamp or "Shades of Death", extending their desolating aspect for a great space along the Pocono. Midway through this swamp flows the Five-mile Creek in the most sluggish manner, from which the land upon either side of it gradually ascends for a distance of three or four miles. In the autumn of 1837, while the writer was passing from this tavern homeward on one bright, frosty midnight, accompanied by a friend, just as the clearing receded from the view, the horse and ourselves were startled by the loud cry of a panther, coming from the thicket along the road-side. The dry limbs cracked as the enormous creature sprang into the road behind us, and it is difficult to tell whether the horse or the whitened drivers most appreciated the perilous condition. The moon shone bright down among the opening tree-tops, as over the road, frozen, steep, and stony, trembled the slender vehicle. Deeper and father the forest closed up behind us, leaving little chance for us to reach Little Meadows in safety. Turning the eye backward, and the approaching form of the panther could be seen within a stone's throw, leaping along at a rate of speed corresponding with our own. The silence of the woods, stretching back in such utter loneliness, the sound of the nervous horse-feet, the jar of the wagon over the stones, the terribly distinct yells of the pursuing animal breaking in upon the surrounding gloom, and our own defenseless condition, made such an impression upon boyhood--that its mention here may seem page 293 a wide digression--it never was effaced or forgotten. We shot down hill after hill, around curve after curve, with fearful rapidity, without uttering a word or hardly drawing a breath, fearing every moment that the wagon would either prove treacherous to its trust, or that every leap of the panther would interrupt our ride. For three miles, down to the brook and over it, did the yellow beast follow up our trail, uttering as it came its shrill, appalling cries at intervals of every minute. Crossing the creek on a rude, log bridge here thrown across the stream, the horse, conscious of the danger, sniffed instinctively, hurried up the ascent with all possible speed, while the panther, slackening his pace perceptibly and ceasing his cries, led us to believe that the chase was abandoned. Now so, however. As we emerged from the woods into the edge of Little Meadows, where courage rose to a wonderful pitch, we gave one "hollo!" to ascertain the whereabouts of the animal, hesitating whether to leave or spring upon us. Hardly had the echo of our voices returned from the wood-side before the replying scream of the panther reached us, in accents so distinct and appalling as to remove all desire or effort to hold further intercourse with his panthership. As for the panther, which had accompanied us six or eight miles during our moonlight flight, with no benevolent intentions, we took leave of his society with less regret than we had left the fair ones at the homestead on the Paupack. DUNNING Madison Township, embracing an area of twenty-eight square miles, much of which is timbered with the knotted hemlock or the smoother beech or maple, was formed from Covington and Jefferson in 1845. Pleasant Valley, lying ten miles east of Scranton, on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, within this township, is a deep vale scooped out of the page 294 hills for the passage of Roaring Brook, in its descent to the Lackawanna, where the village of Dunning animates the spirit of industry, and carries on a profitable traffic with the people of Drinker's Beech. Like the Lackawanna region, this short and narrow valley bears evidence of once having been a lake, whose waters, enlivened by fish and water-fowl, were liberated with heavy murmur through the fractured mountain below. About one mile west of the village, "Barney's Ledge" (see footnote), a long, bold bending of vertical rock, rises up some five hundred feet at the door of Cobb's Gap, with rugged outlines, and stretching its strong arms right and left, half encircles the village in its embrace. The old Drinker turnpike, once merry with the passing stage- coach, finding its way from Providence to Stroudsburg, and the light track of the Pennsylvania Coal Company, pass through it. Hunter's Range, once famed for its trout-fishing and whisky, lies in the vicinity. Although the rough sides of Pleasant Valley, capable of great cultivation and production, if brought out by patient toil, are marked by an eruption of stumps wherever cleared, there is a fresh business air about the village, with its vast leather-trade and lumbering interests, that arrests the attention of the passer, and that gives assurance that when the scalping ax disperses the forest farther from the brook, it will, in point of thrift and enterprise, excel many older towns upon the line of this great locomotive road. Hon. Abram B. Dunning, who represented Luzerne County in the Pennsylvania Legislature in a manner so eminently satisfactory to his constituents during the years 1852-3-4, as to be thrice elected-- a compliment seldom paid in this county--has grown up with the place, and given it a name and an impetus alike permanent and favorable in its character. Dunning enjoys the advantages of a depot, two stores, post-office, two hotels, and a (footnote: Named from the late Barney Carey, who for any years kept a toll-gate on the Drinker turnpike, within view of this ledge.) page 295 large tannery of Eugine Snyders, able to convert quarter of a million's worth of raw hides each year into ready leather. CARBONDALE Carbondale Township, underlaid with rich seams of coal, lies on the Lackawanna, twenty-four miles from its mouth, some 700 feet above the level of its confluence, and was formed from Blakeley and Greenfield, in April, 1831. On the eastern slope of the Moosic, near the present location of Waymart, Captain George Rix, whose name lives in the notch of the mountain, chose a dwelling-place, before Waymart had even a name. This led to the settlement of Ragged Islands (now Carbondale by David Ailsworth in 1802. He was a farmer from Rhode Island. He fixed his habitation in the spring of this year upon the spot known since 1830 as the "Meredith Place", cut away and burned the forest for a single crop of corn he planted and secured by his little cabin; in the fall returned for his family. The backwoods became his permanent abode in 1803, and by the aid of his trap, gun, and new land productions, he lived a life of contented obscurity. His self-reliant wife wove and spun every yard of clothing material worn, other than that manufactured from furs and skins, secured with little trouble from the bold inhabitants of the woods. Franklin Ailsworth ascended the Lackawanna from Capoose, to share the fortune of his father, in 1806. A daughter of Mr. Ailsworth, 66 years old, familiarly called "Aunt Ruth Waderman", who accompanied her mother here in 1802, yet lives above Carbondale. The first white child born in Carbondale was born on the Meredith Place in 1806. The second family that ventured into the Carbondale wilderness was James Holden, who in 1805 chopped and logged a piece of land near Ailsworth. He abandoned it the second year, and moved into the Lake country. Peter Waderman and James Lewis moved upon page 296 Ragged Island in 1807. Lewis abandoned his clearing the second year, while Waderman reared up a bevy of sturdy youngsters. The attire of Mr. Waderman, when full, was imposing and unique. A bear-skin worn for a coat, the fore-legs serving for the sleeves, a fawn-skin vest, buck-skin pants, and a raccoon cap, with the tail hanging behind when worn, set off his tall figure to great advantage, and when he visited Capoose, to vote or carry his grist to Slocum's mill, children stood dismayed or fled to their mothers at his approach. Near where the toll-gate stands, below Carbondale, Rosell B. Johnson, from New York, who had married a Boston lady, took possession of land covered with the tall hemlock and the low thicket in 1809, and lived upon it for five years. The "big flats", now occupied by a portion of Carbondale, was never disturbed until 1809. During this year, George Parker and his son-in-law, Winley Skinner, both more familiar with the rifle than the ax, cut away the timber for a corn-patch early in the spring of 1809. A small, one story log-hut, warmed by the abundance of fuel lying at the door, supplied them with shelter the few months they inhabited it, when they abruptly withdrew from the place, in despair of ever seeing it emerge into civilization. The green logs soon rotted down, and the young saplings again triumphed in the place where the cabin stood. In 1810 Christopher E. Wilbur, an ingenious wheelwright from Dutchess County, N. Y., became a resident of the farm now occupied by Horace Stiles. He emigrated here to manufacture wooden wheels, then used along the borders for spinning wool and flax, worked by the foot or hand. There was no other wheelwright along the Lackawanna other than him, and so clever was his hand in working wood for the use of the busy housewife, that every fireside in the valley was gladdened by the hum of his wheels. In 1812 he erected a miniature corn or grist-mill upon the stream where he lived. It had no bolt, and page 297 but a single run of stone diversified its work; corn, crushed by its rudely wielded power, had to pass through a common seive before being fit for use. Mr. Wilbur was a plain, practical man, and his house afforded a place for a school and meetings as early as 1813; Elder John Miller and Mr. Cramer alternately itinerated their diverse doctrines at this point once a month. Carbondale, by its origin and nature a mining village, as indicated by its name, owes the vigor of its development to the genius of William and Maurice Wurts. In 1814-15, these true pioneers in the valley, with compass and pick, a knapsack of provisions slung over their shoulders, penetrated and bivouacked along the eastern range of the Moosic, exploring every gorge and opening favoring the exit of coal, two bodies of which they found, and uncovered a few years later, by the aid of Mr. Nobles and Mr. Wilbur, one at Carbondale, under the bluff, on the western edge of the Lackawanna, the other on a strip of half-cleared land in Providence, since known as the Anderson farm. The wild land about Carbondale, originally owned by an Englishman named Russell, living at Sunbury, came into possession of William and Maurice Wurts at the time of these explorations. In November, 1822, these men, in quest of honest reward for their labors, cheered onward by no friendly hand from the inhabitants of the upper or lower valley, laughed at for their perseverance in digging among rock and rattlesnakes for naught, erected a long, low log-house for the joint occupancy of themselves and their workmen. Up until this time but a single horse-path showing its narrow and indefinite outline by marks upon trees, led to the site of Carbondale, and passed through Rixe's Gap to Belmont and Bethany. Dundaff--named from Lord Dundaff, of Scotland--became a place of some note in the backwoods before Carbondale enjoyed even the honor of an appellation. Redmond Conyngham, an uncle of our excellent judge of page 298 the county of Luzerne, purchased the land where the village now stands in 1822, laid it out for a town, whose growth was to be stimulated by the rugged agricultural developments of the country, and by the considerable travel on the Milford and Owego turnpike, which passed through the place as a stage route. Three or four small houses stood here before this time. The settlement expanded into a village of such prospect, that Mr. Stone Hamilton started a democratic weekly newspaper, called the Dundaff Republican, the first number of which was issued in February, 1828. It was the only paper, with the exception of one or two published in Wilkes Barre at this time, issued within the county of Luzerne. James W. Goff, Esq., afterward sheriff of the county, raised the first frame-house in Carbondale, in October, 1828. For a series of years the development of the village, enriched by its subterranean possessions, surpassed in promise and rapidity every settlement within the county. Churches were built, a railroad, licensed by mountain planes, led its iron way to the waters of the Dyberry, and a spirit of thrift blended its impulse with the sober notions of the farmers of the surrounding townships, hitherto poor and embarrassed. Awakened thus by the activity of these brothers, whose spirit and effort unlocked the mountains of the Lackawanna, and gave luster to a name unhonored in their earlier achievements, the village, deriving nurture from the operations of the company, of which they were the organic head, compares favorably to-day with the towns of the lower valley. The principal persons who found remunerative occupation in the new, prosperous coal settlement, prior to 1832, were James Dickson, Charles Smith, Thos. Youngs, Stephen Mills, Dr. Thomas Sweet, Salmon Lathrop, John M. Poor, Samuel Raynor, Stephen Rogers, D. Yarington, Esq., R. E. Marvin, Henry Johnson, Hiram Frisby, page 299 James Archbald, H. Hackley, John McCalpine, and E. M. Townsend. Carbondale is now an incorporated city, rugged somewhat in the general style of its architecture, and yet from the uplifted anthracite within and beyond its boundaries, it gives employment, and even a comparative competency to its thousands of inhabitants. It abounds in churches, the first of which, the First Presbyterian church, was erected in 1829. However (page includes an engraved illustration of First Baptist Church in Carbondale) page 300 counter and diverse may be the religious convictions of the mass, ample scope for their harmonious enjoyment is here found in the different churches, representing every Christian denomination. The oldest coal-mines of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company are located at this point, which was for many years the western terminus of their railroad leading to the canal at Honesdale. The first car-load of coal passed over this road, October 9, 1829. Maurice and William Wurts, in 1816, attempted to transport a sample of coal across the mountain to the Paupack waters upon sleds, from a superficial body they had uncovered in Providence township, some five miles above Slocum Hollow, and failed. After this route was found to be impracticable the irrepressible energy of these men turned to the Carbondale placer, where the first sled-load of stone-coal from the Lackawanna valley left its bed, by the creek side, and was floated to Philadelphia upon rafts; and while it claimed attributes for heat, brought jeers from the passer to its patrons, it wore and won its way into favor after many struggles, as the stream, sometimes baffled in its upper waters, becomes serene and goes unwearied to the sea. APPEARANCE OF THE VALLEY IN 1804 A brief retrospective view of Lackawanna valley, as it appeared to the eye in 1804, while shut out from the great world almost as much as the Icelander among his glacial peaks, will have a local interest, enhanced by the fact that the reader is indebted for the faithfulness of the picture to the memory of the late Elder John Miller. In searching for material for publication, the writer visited the elder in May, 1856. He was found alone in the plowed field planting corn, dropping the seed from a huge, leather bag, made from a boot-leg, hung by his side; and although he then was eighty- one years of age, page 301 his extraordinary powers of vitality enabled him to fill the farmer's place as ably as one forty years his junior. Leaning his right arm upon his hoe, and successively raising handfuls of corn, to be dropped again in the bag through his fingers, he stood affixed for two long hours, describing the appearance of the country as he saw it sixty-four years before, interwoven with the remembrance of lively gossip and anecdote. It was done with that sober good sense and cheerful temper that always gave his conversation a charm suited to every taste, circle, and place. The first house standing near the confluence of the Lackawanna with the Susquehanna, at this period (1804), was that of Ishmael Bennett, a blacksmith. He was a great Indian fighter and hater, having witnessed many of the cruelties practiced by them after the battle across the river. A huge elm-tree, seen a little east of the railroad depot at Pittston, indicates the original location of his dwelling. On the farm, now known as Barnum's, a little pretension in the potash and agricultural line was made by James Brown. Captain Isaac Wilson, who married a daughter of John Phillips, owned a narrow patch of land immediately above. Just as the road, skirting along the western border of the Lackawanna, below Old Forge, emerges from the strip of wood into the sandy plain, stood the residence of that old sunburnt veteran, Ebenezer Marcy. In 1778, he was engaged in the Indian battle and his wife was among the fugitives who fled from Wyoming on the evening of the memorable 3d of July of this year. The tourist, as he passes down the valley, can not fail to observe, as he passes over the Lackawanna bridge, below the rapids, a deep, ragged, narrow passage cut through a rock, that here turns aside the waters of the stream as they come fretting and chafing over the rocky bed, like an ill-curbed colt. This channel, dug out as early as 1774 for mill purposes, now conveyed to the forge below motive power from the stream above. At this forge, standing a little below the bridge spoken of, page 302 Dr. Wm. Hooker Smith and James Sutton lived and manufactured iron. Opposite this point lay the farm since known as Drake's on which a cabin had been fashioned by Hermans, who claimed the land, while on the adjoining clearing there lived Deodat Smith, father of the late Thos. Smith, Esq., of Abington. An old gentleman named Cornelius Atherton resided at Keys or Keiser's Creek. (see footnote) He was a blacksmith by trade; and it is claimed that the first clothier's shears in the United States were made by him in Connecticut. His son Jabez was shot in the Indian battle at Wyoming, the bullet passing through the femur, or thigh-bone, without a fracture. One of those tragic episodes so frequent in the earlier history of Wyoming was enacted upon this creek, at the present location of Taylorsville. The day after the Wyoming massacre, the whites remaining unharmed fled from the plains of Wyoming by every path leading from it. To escape the knife or the merciless ax, homes were hurriedly left, and all fled toward the Delaware for safety. A party of six persons, two men, their wives and children, were thus urging their single yoke of oxen over this route, when they entered the glen with comparatively little apprehension, as the savages were supposed to be present at their bloody carnival below. Hardly had a draught been taken from the creek before the whoop and uplifted tomahawk announced the presence of the savages as they sprang from the ambuscade. Before the whites could raise their guns upon their foes, and defend their families or themselves, one man fell by the dash of the tomahawk, while the other darted away in the forest with such rapidity, as to draw away entirely from the rest of the party the notice of the pursuing Indians. It was now a moment big with peril. To flee at once was the only hope to escape captivity, or perhaps a lingering, barbarous death. Each mother gathered a (footnote: This creek took its name from Timothy Keys, once living there, who was killed by the Indians in 1778.) page 303 child to her bosom, and instinctively hurried away in the deep, dark thicket of willows bordering this stream, as it flowed along that swampy lowland. From the knife, already gleaming and tried upon those they had loved so long, these bold women, with their nursing babes, successfully escaped. Although the stern wilderness frowned before them, and their assailants were prowling in their rear, they left their hiding-place at night; and, creeping from bush to bush along the Lackawanna, continued their journey over Cobb Mountain toward the settlements upon the Delaware. They subsisted upon roots and berries--the manna of the wilderness--and at night huddling together under some friendly tree, found wild-dreaming repose. After passing every danger and enduring every hardship, heart-heavy, stripped, and starved, yet trusting in God, they arrived at the village of Stroudsburg in safety. The Indians, as they returned from the chase, with the warm and dripping scalp in their hands, finding their victims beyond reach, cut out the lolling tongue of one of the oxen for a roast, leaving the other undisturbed, in which condition they were found the next day by some of the escaping settlers. Along the path from this creek to Providence the woods retained their native aspect until the highland farm, now known as "Uncle Joe Griffin's" came in view. Upon this plateau, where the rich outlines of the Indian region rose up in every form of beauty, stood a log cabin, with its roof running to the very ground--better to withstand the storms of winter. Reuben Taylor lived here at this time. Mr. Lafronse had a possession right immediately above Taylor's, while Joseph Fellows, Sen., who came to the valley in 1796, had made a permanent residence on the slope of the hill, near the present family mansion of Turvy Fellows, Esq. Subsequently he received a commission as a justice of the peace, an office which he filled with page 304 ability and great satisfaction. His nearest neighbor up the valley was Goodrich. Hyde Park, as a village, had no existence, and but a single cleared acre, half- hidden in the green park on all sides surrounding it, was inhabited. Upon the site of the residence of Hon. Wm. Merrifield, stood, in 1804, the unhewn-log habitation of Elder Wm. Bishop, who, as early as 1795, officiated as the first stationed minister in Providence. With the exception of the "Indian clearing", and a little additional chopping around it, the central portion of Capoose Meadow, or Tripp's Flats, was covered with tall white pines. The road lay along the brow of the hill for nearly half a mile from the house of Bishop, when it reached the two-roomed log-tavern of Stephen Tripp, who at this time had a large distillery operating here. Tripp was a man of singular evenness of temper. He never became boisterous or belligerent. The nearest approach to it occurred here at his tavern. A stranger stopping at his house, finding the landlord agreeable and full of social qualities, ventured to ask his name. He was told it was Tripp. "Trip, Trip, is it?" said the stranger, please with the reply; "that is a capital, capital name I know, for I have a dog by that name--and 'Trip' is a good dog!" Entering a small, dark cabin, near where now lives Ira Tripp, Esq., there sat a short, gray-headed man, more cheerful and communicative than his associates of the day, whose earliest life was full of incident and hardships, and who emigrated from Rhode Island at the time of the formation of Luzerne County, in 1786. This was the father of Stephen. About midway between this point and the Lackawanna River, a little to the northeast of the "Diamond mines", a small tract of rich land had been purchased by Lewis Jones from Wm. Tripp and John Gifford--a son-in-law of Isaac Tripp--who lived here at this time. Jone's farm page 305 included that intervale where yet lies the debris of an old still-house. John Staples occupied the Widow Griffin farm--adjacent to that of Alderman Griffin--which soon after passed into the hands of Mathias Hollenback. The Von Storch property, originally passing from the proprietors of the town of Capoose to Dean, and from him to Nathan Roberts, for a barrel of whisky, came into the hands of H. C. L. Von Storch in the spring of 1807, before coal lands had a name or a value in the valley. A strip of pines lay between the clearing of Von Storch and the cabin of Enock Holmes, standing on the site of the village of Providence. Where now stands the cottage of Daniel Silkman, lived Henry Waderman, who, as late as 1810, when the census was first taken in the valley by the Hon. Charles Miner--a gentlemen to whom all accorded the possession in a high degree of those frank, pleasing, and intellectual qualities, which seldom fail to secure the regard of every one--occupied the only dwelling he found above Providence. Mr. Miner recollected this more distinctly from the fact of staying over night with Waderman, whom he found cheerful, sociable, and fond of relating stories of Boneparte. Upon the flats, now known as the Rockwell farm, dwelt James Bagley, whose porchless abode gave welcome shelter to children, cats, and dogs. Bagley's fordway crossed the Lackawanna, near his dwelling. At the mouth of Leggett's Creek, Selah Mead cultivated the narrow intervale, while Mr. Hutchins occupied a patch of land rising up from the brook, known now as the McDaniels' farm. The adjacent clearing, thick with stumps, marked the well-chosen location of Ephraim Stevens, who, bending and white with the years of almost a century, passed away a short time since, leaving his estate to his son Samuel, subsequently deceased. Half a mile beyond, on the farm so long rendered productive by Colonel Moses Vaughn, one of the worthy page 306 descendants of Captain John Vaughn, lived John Tripp. The orchard spread over the meadow crossed by the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, on the western bank of the Lackawanna, planted by Captain Vaughn, denotes the place where he and his sons long drew nurture from the soil. Upon the Decker farm lived Wm. McDaniels, whose sluggish ideas of agriculture governed each successive inheritance until the property came into possession of Messrs. Pancost and Price, two Philadelphia gentlemen of education and fortune. The village of Price, peopled by hardy and industrious Germans, stands upon a portion of the Decker farm. The first clearing made in Blakeley turned to practical account, was that of Timothy Stevens, who, about the close of the Revolution, began a chopping on the farm known as the Mott farm, where he "logged-off" land for a corn and potato patch, which yielded abundance to the wants of his family. Nicholas Leuchens, the erratic genius before mentioned, lived at the present site of Peckville. Along the forests of the Lackawanna, above Leuchens, the ax had rung, only to mark the course of the trapper or trader coming from Pleasant Mount, and but a single hut or cabin stood between. Blakeley, Carbondale, Rushdale, Archbald, and Jessup, had no impulse even toward a settlement, nor was there a township formed in the valley north of Providence; a "chopping", with the fallen pines divested of their lesser limbs by fire, edged its way into the green woods, where in latter years the "Meredith Cottage", made rural and attractive by warm hospitality, stood and still stands to gladden the wayside. Having now reached the extreme point of the valley, on the west side of the Lackawanna, as far as settled in 1804, a glance of the eastern border, less sought after for a dwelling-place or heritage at this time, will be as briefly given. There are yet a few remaining who can bear testimony to the rugged, narrow path along the stream, page 307 overhung with interlocking trees, which led its way from Ragged Island to Capoose, with only here and there a break in the woodland for the occasional occupant. Upon the farm known as the Dolph farm, in Olyphant, lived Moses Dolph, father of Alexander and grandfather to the present owner, Edward Dolph; immediately below, Samuel Ferris, father of Samuel, William, and John, won by hard toil a resting-place for his young family. From the lands of Ferris it was nothing but woods, broken only within a single mile by the blackened fallow of John Secor, whose cabin, built from logs of great strength and size, served to dispel all fears inspired by wolves never slumbering about the clearing after nightfall. Between Secor's and Dunmore, two miles away, two rights had been improved respectively by Charles Dolph and Levi Depuy. The Corners (Dunmore) had two houses only--the tavern of Widow Alsworth and the residence of David Brown. Between this point and Slocum Hollow, a log-house of John Carey's, with its huge, stone chimney and mud-chinked sides, had risen from the clearing, and the bevy of children issuing from the door to wonder at the occasional passer, or building dams of mud across the stream running at the door, made up the daily picture of domestic life at this solitary habitation between these two named places. At Griffin's Corners, there lived an old man named Atwater, while on the Dings or Whaling property (now Green Ridge, where the Hon. George Sanderson has brought a town into being), stood by the brook-side the rude yet hospitable dwelling of Conrad Lutz, occupied by his son John. The old Connecticut road, familiar to the Wyoming pioneers, following the Indian trail, came into Capoose Meadow, and crossed the Lackawanna at Lutz's fordway. This fording-place, deriving its name from Mr. Lutz, was traversed from 1769 until 1826. Tall pines, alienated from Indian tenure, crowded upon the page 308 road leading to Slocum Hollow, where Ebenezer and Benjamin Slocum, with their less than a dozen employees, enumerated the entire white inhabitants of this tranquil and independent settlement. James Abbott, whose iron energy had animated the glen of Roaring Brook, resided on the bank of Stafford Meadow Creek. Some two miles below Slocum Hollow, a tract of land improved as early as 1776, by Comer Phillips, was tenanted jointly by David Dewee and David David. The latter met with a sudden death a year or two later. Engaged at the break of day in prying up a rock for a hearth-stone, he was mistaken by Dewee, in search of game, for a beast of prey, and shot dead upon the spot. His widow subsequently married Mr. Abbott. John Scott, father of the great hunter Elias, lived upon the farm lying farthest down in the township of Providence. His nearest neighbor was Joseph Knapp, a brave old revolutionary soldier, spurning alike title or pretension. At the surrender of Burgoyne he received a wound long incapacitating him from active service. After the declaration of peace he resumed farming in Columbia County, New York, until 1790, when he emigrated to the valley and settled in the "gore". (see footnote) His son Zephaniah, attaining eighty years, yet lives among us. Much of his early life was spent in hunting and trapping various animals inhabiting the valley over half a century ago. Sometimes during the autumn months he was out alone for weeks, engaged in hunting, subsisting on the trophies of his gun, and finding on friendly leaves and boughs his only bivouac. He has kept a curious record of the number of bears and other wild animals he killed upon the Lackawanna; of the time and manner of their capture, with their respective weight, in a work of over one hundred folio pages; a work probably page 309 unmatched in novelty and interest by any manuscript of the kind found in the country. He has given it the inimitable title of "The Leather Shirt". This enumeration, embracing no particular creed nor politics, comprised the entire inhabitants of the valley four and sixty years ago. To many who may peruse these pages the foregoing particulars may seem out of place, but to those who visit the Lackawanna Valley, or make it their home, it will not be amiss to thus catch a retrospective glance of the days gone by, so as better to contemplate the changes years have wrought, and judge from the past how rapid and marvelous will be the prosperity of the future. Six years later the census was taken by the Hon. Charles Miner. Within the Lackawannian district existed but two townships, Pittston and Providence, the first having a population of 694, the last, 589, or a total population of 1,283 for the entire valley in 1804. Abington had an inhabitancy of 511. The same territory, divided and sub-divided into cities, townships, and boroughs, will furnish in 1870, according to the same ratio of increase, a population of one hundred thousand. Diffused along its living border, it falls to-day a little short of eighty thousand, and a more enterprising, intelligent community, a more thrifty and successful people, remarkable alike for their love of liberty and their attachments to their country, can nowhere be found. The thrift everywhere diffused along the intervale, no longer hid in its native fastnesses, has kept pace with the steady hum of its population. It is in fact impossible to contemplate the unvaried progress of the Lackawanna Valley for the last thirty years without astonishment and pride. It has been a progress at once so rapid, so liberal, so vast and comprehensive in its character, as to exhibit alike the importance of the valley, and the sagacity of those to whom its development has been intrusted. Buried deep in the forest of northeastern Pennsylvania, as it has (footnote: The gore was a narrow strip of land, lying between Pittston and Providence. It is now Lackawanna Township, set off as an electoral district, Feb. 25, 1795; into a township at the November sessions, 1838.) page 310 been within a few years, walled in from the great world by natural mountain barriers, like the Northmen among their glimmering crags, with no outlet to the east or the west, but for the slow coach, swinging along at the rate of four miles an hour behind the jaded stage-horse, with no incitement but its slumbering wealth, it has risen like a man awakened from his slumbers, strong, refreshed, invigorated, until it has become one of the most commercial and prosperous valleys in the State. FORMATION OF TOWNSHIPS UNDER PENNSYLVANIA JURISDICTION: PRIMITIVE MINISTERS Pittston was formed in 1790. Providence was formed, August 1792. Abington was formed, August, 1806. Greenfield was formed, January, 1816. Covington was formed, January, 1818 Blakeley was formed, April, 1818. Carbondale was formed, April, 1831. Jefferson was formed, April, 1836. Lackawanna was formed, November, 1838. Benton was formed 1838. Newton was formed 1844. Madison was formed 1845. Fell was formed 1845. Scott was formed 1846. The same territory, divided into lots of 300 acres each, extending back two and a half miles, was covered by two towns, while under Connecticut jurisdiction, viz.: Pittston and Providence. Three hundred acres of land were appropriated or reserved in either of these original towns for the use of the first minister in fee, before other lots were offered to the settler. Before the ministerial occupancy of these reservations, the adjoining town of Wilkes Barre with that of Kingston, prospered under the spiritual pleadings of the Rev. Jacob Johnson, a Presbyterian minister, for whom a house was built by the colony in 1772, and whose salary this year was fixed at sixty pounds Connecticut currency. page 311 After the annihilation of the Connecticut claim in 1782, by the court at Trenton, the commissioners allowed "The Rev. Mr. Johnson to have the full use of all the grounds he Tilled for two years, ending the first of May, 1785." He refused the kindness of the favor in a spirit less chafing than biblical, as evinced by the following letter of "JACOB JOHNSON To the Comte of the Pennsylvania Landowners, &c.: Gentlemen, I thank you for your distinguished Favor shewed to me the widows, &c., in a proposal of Indulgence, Permitting us to reside in our present Possessions and Improvements for the present & succeeding Year. Altho I cannot Consistly accept the offer, having Chosen a Comte for that purpose, who are not disposed to accept of or Comply with your proposals. However, I will for myself (as an Individual) make you a proposal agreable to that Royal President, Saml 9the, 16the & 19the Chapter, if that dont suit you and no Compromise can be made, or Tryal be had, according to the law of the States, I will say as Mepheboseth, Jonathan's son (who was lame on both his feet) said to King David, Saml 19, 30, yea let him take all. So I say to you Gentlemen if there be no resource, Neither by our Petition to the Assembly of the State of Pennsylvania or otherwise, Let the Landholders take all. I have only this to add for my Consolation and you Gentlemen's serious Consideration, Viz: that however the Cause may be determined for or against me (in this present uncertain State of things), there is an Inheritance in the Heavens, sure & Certain that fadeth not a way reserved for me, and all that love the Saviour Jesus Christ's appearing. I am Gentlemen, with all due Respect, & good Will your Most Obt Humble Servt, JACOB JOHNSON. Wioming, Apl 24the, 1783. To the Gentlemen Comte, &c. page 312 N. B. it is my Serious Opinion if we proceed to a Compromise according to the Will of heaven that the lands (as to the Right of soil) be equally divided between the two Parties Claiming, and I am fully Satisfied this Opinion of mine may be proved even to a demonstration out of the Sacred Oracles. I would wish you Gentlemen would turn your thoughts and enquiries to those 3 Chapters above refered to and see if my Opinion is not well Grounded & if so, I doubt not but we Can Compromise in love and Peace--and save the Cost and Trouble of a Tryal at Law." The doctrines of Methodism were occasionally expounded to the people of Pittston and Providence in 1790. In 1794 an Englishman named William Bishop, a fervid Baptist preacher, kindled his fire on the parsonage lot in Providence. This lot lay on the east side of Hyde Park, and extended over the marsh or pond which a few years since gave to the interior of Scranton such a piscatory appearance. The principal hotels and churches, as well as the greater portion of Scranton, stand upon these ancient church lands. On the bluff, upheaved from the Lackawanna, whose waters so gracefully bend around its base, the log-house and church of Elder Bishop, combined in one, emerged from the forest. It was a rude, paintless affair. No bell, steeple, pulpit, nor pews, marked it as a house of worship; four plain sides, chinked with wood held by adhesive mud, formed a room where the backwoodsmen gathered in a spirit of real piety, sincerity, and an absence of display impossible to find to-day in the more costly and imposing sanctuaries around us. The habits of the assemblage were in keeping with the character of the humble edifice. Women wore dresses made from flax and woolen, fitting them so closely and straight as a bean-pole. These were sometimes plain from the loom, but generally colored and striped with a domestic dye, giving to the woolen fabric every variety of page 313 finish and shade. Instead of the negative shoe worn nowadays, the old-fashioned ones then in use furnished to the wearer one of the essentials to long life and health--a generous warmth. The shadowy and often senseless duties of the milliner were but slightly appreciated here at that time, for one instance is related to the writer of a woman whose bonnet, cut from pasteboard and trimmed as plainly as a pumpkin, was worn summer and winter for the long period of twenty-two years, with no other change nor "doing up" than the addition of a single new ribbon or string! Appalling and incredible as may appear the fact to the girl or the matron of the present time, the person yet lives in the valley who remembers this pious and economical mother well. The prudent wife and mother who understood the necessity of supplying the wants of the family from the scanty means within her reach, so united industry with economy as to exhibit in the most favorable light the qualities of the New England women. Broadcloth coats were never seen unless brought from Connecticut. Their place was supplied by the rough, warm, honest homespun, or more frequently by a suit of bear, or the coveted deer skin. Hats and caps ingeniously constructed from the skin of wild animals found in every thicket, were universally worn in winter, while in summer the straw hat, braided from the well-thrashed rye, gave comfort and dignity to the wearer. Men and boys went barefoot until they reached the place of meeting, carrying their shoes in their hands, putting them on during preaching, and after meeting would walk home, sometimes many miles, upon the bare feet, and the shoes were returned in the same manner in which they had been brought. Many of the settlers, pressed by the needs of the household did not enjoy the luxury even of carrying shoes. The women were always seated upon one side of the house, the men upon the other. The habit of the male page 314 and female portion of the community being seated promiscuously in a country school or meeting-house was indulged in here only within the last forty years. PROPRIETORS' SCHOOL-FUND AND PRIMITIVE SCHOOLS The fund in the township of Providence, known as the "Proprietors' School- Fund", came from a provision full of forethought and wisdom. The original proprietors of the seventeen towns certified to Connecticut settlers in Westmoreland, in setting aside certain lots for religious and literary purposes, inaugurated a measure that speaks for itself. Nearly 2,000 acres were thus reserved by the Yankees in the town of Providence. The commissioners appointed under the act passed in April, 1799, offering compensation to Pennsylvania claimants, issued certificates or patents for the land from the State to the committees for the said town or township, and the annual committee had from time to time sold or leased for a term of years a great part of such lots, reserving the remainder for the proprietors' use. As the committees, however, were supposed by many to be invested with little or no legal powers, the sales and leases made by them were so little regarded, that some debts and rents, due the original Yankee proprietors, are yet remaining unpaid. A portion of the land thus appropriated by the old Susquehanna Company for school purposes, was sold the 17th of September, 1795, to William Bishop, by Constant Searles, James Abbott, and Daniel Taylor, who acted for the township. With a view of confirming such contracts and sales, which at the time were deemed advantageous for the school fund, the proprietors of the township obtained an act of incorporation from the Legislature during its session of 1835, similar in its character to that obtained in 1831 page 315 by the townships of Wilkes Barre, Hanover, and Plymouth, clothing the trustees of the township with all the privileges and franchises of corporations. John Dings, Samuel De Puy, William Merrifield, Joshua Griffin, and Nathanial Cottrill were vested with the authority of trustees under this act, until after the annual election. Although this act did not affect any sales previously made by individuals acting for the township, and consequently failed to reach and recover lands forever lost to it, yet it enabled the proprietors who were subsequently elected by the taxable inhabitants of the district, to sell the remainder of this land, lying in the vicinity of Hyde Park, for the sum of $3,300, which being secured by bond and mortgage upon the property, now furnishes by its yearly interest the "School Fund", a fund which contributes so justly toward the support and success of what is considered so essential to the promotion of national welfare--common schools. The first house built in the valley with especial reference only to schools was erected in 1818, upon a plot of land now within the limits of Providence village. The building was nine by twelve, without paint, steeple or bell, yet no college hall now offers more willing culture to the young than did this plain edifice beneath the murmuring pines, open its doors to the mischievous urchins of the valley just half a century ago. In reviewing the history of the Yankee settlements in Westmoreland, much of the thrift and sprightliness of the New England character can be traced in the elementary education imparted to them from the cabin school-house along the forest. Many of the pioneers were men of deep religious sentiment and principle, and after their families had been sheltered from the storms and the intrusion of the inmates of the wigwam, they made provisions for the school-house. The school records of various townships in the valley, present no striking peculiarity, but as far as any page 316 judgment can be formed from the contents and character of the former records, both of school and society, it leads unavoidably to the conclusion that there has been no relaxation of effort in the cause of education since the earlier settlers passed away. The standard which they created has not been overlooked, nor has the common interest of every citizen in the education of the community been forgotten. While the district and higher school arrangements in the Lackawanna valley are justly looked upon as superior--and some are eminently so--they would suffer none to-day by a comparison with any school found within the precincts of the oldest settled counties in the State. The schoolmaster was, at an early period, an object of terror to school-children, and of vast importance in a small neighborhood where he "boarded around". The respected parson, frequent in his visits, and beloved by all for his good wishes and kind words, only received more courteous attention from the farmer and his wife, than did the country schoolmaster--especially a new one, whose reputation for "licking" his scholars had happily preceded him. It is well for the timid, nervous child, that the barbarous and often surgical whip and ferule, and the triumphant blows of a master strong in muscle and weak in mind, have been exchanged for a more rational discipline. While the writer recollects his own school-boy days, when he spent many an idle hour in the old school-house on the hill, surrounded on every side but one by saplings, whose branches were often applied to the coatless backs of the pupils by some itinerating vendor of a b c's, after the boys had been seated upon a high, hard, hemlock bench, six or eight hours, half frozen in winter and quite boiled in summer, he can not but rejoice at the progressive character of government in our common schools, as well as in their grade. page 317 PATHS AND ROADS -- JOURNEY FROM CONNECTICUT TO PITTSTON IN 1793 The general poverty of the earlier emigrants, united with the agitated condition of Wyoming while the Province of Pennsylvania acquiesced in British allegiance, restrained the inhabitants from planning and working roads needed for ordinary intercourse. Mountain trails trodden by the red men centuries before, and by the whites seeking Indian homes for traffic in rum and skins, led over the Moosic toward Connecticut undisturbed until 1769, when a narrow road long called the "Cobbroad" was opened from the Province of New York to Wyoming. This was the great and only highway entering the valley eastward from 1769 to 1772. From the Lackawanna to the Great Council Fires of the Six Nations along the Lakes, there was no pathway other than the warriors' trail connecting Capoose with Con-e-wa-wah (Elmira), until 1788. Among the traders roaming along this wood-wrapped avenue for traffic with its tribal masters, was the afterward celebrated John Jacob Astor. The conflicting claims to the territory embraced by Wyoming and Lackawanna valleys, provoked a controversy between Pennsylvania and Connecticut, long and embittered. The claim of the Yankees being summarily disposed of by the Trenton Decree, Pennsylvania assumed jurisdiction over the valleys known as Westmoreland no longer. This obliteration of rival interest, however final and prejudged it might have been, gave the settlers who remained under the new order of things, leisure to repair roads sadly neglected during and after the war. The first appointment by the justices in 1788 of the supervisors of roads in Pittston, was John Philips and Jonathan Newman; in Providence, Henry Dow Tripp. At the September sessions, 1788, held in Wilkes Barre, a petition was received from "Job Tripp and others, page 318 praying that proper persons may be appointed to lay out a road in the town of Providence. It is ordered that Ebenezer Marcy, Isaac Tripp, Samuel Miller, Henry D. Tripp, Waterman Baldwin, and Jonathan Newman, be, and they are hereby appointed to lay out necessary roads in said town and make return to this court at the next session." At the December session, 1788, they reported that they had laid out roads through Pittston, but had surveyed none in Providence, so their report was not accepted. As the road was essential to the wants of the upper township, the court appointed six housekeepers to survey one fifty feet in width. This followed the old road leading up through the Capoose, constructed under Yankee jurisdiction. The next year, John Philips and David Brown were appointed supervisors of highways in Pittston, and Job Tripp and Wm. Alsworth in Providence. It does not appear, however, that any new roads were laid out or worked up to this time, by any of these supervisors--old roads only being surveyed and repaired. Job Tripp, Constant Searles, Jediah Hoyt, Daniel Taylor, and James Abbott, living in Providence, were appointed in 1791, to lay out roads here. The present road leading from Pittston to Providence was surveyed by them on the 4th and 5th of April, 1791. This began "on the northeast side of the Lackawanna River in the town of Providence, beginning at Lackawanny River, near where Mr. Leggett now lives", and thence through Providence to the Pittston line. Gabriel Leggett then lived a short distance above the residence and mill of the late Judson Clark, in Providence. The Lackawanna was yet bridgeless, and only crossed by fording. Different fording-places took their respective names from the respective owners of the land in the immediate vicinity. Thus at the capoose Works of Mr. Carter, located a mile from the center of the ancient meadow by that name--was Bagley's ford; at Providence, near the mound of Capoose, Lutz's ford, etc. page 319 Leggett's Gap road was laid out in 1795. The Lackawanna Turnpike Road Company was incorporated in 1817, and was the first turnpike along the valley. The journey from Connecticut to the Lackawanna in 1793, through a half-opened wilderness of nearly two hundred miles, was no easy matter. A day's drive with the slow ox-team over a road barely answering its purpose, was but eight or ten miles. At nightfall, a camping ground was chosen by the road-side near some spring or rivulet, when fuel was gathered and the bright, welcome blaze of the fire in the woods lonely and deep, offered light and company while the supper was being prepared and partaken. If from the forest thronged with deer, none was secured for the evening's meal, bread and bacon issued from the chest, or corn-meal from the saddle-bags was readily converted into "Johnny cakes". Supper disposed of, and the oxen cared for by a liberal supply of browse, a few extra logs were piled on the fire as the party crowded under the cover of the wagon and found repose amidst the silence of night. Along the Lackawack, whose sober waters no longer rocked the Indian's craft, this road offered few inducements to pursue it as it drifted toward Wyoming, passing through the "Lackawa" settlement, and crossing Cobb Mountain into Capoose. From the Paupack clearings to the Lackawanna there was in 1793 but three dwellings, at Little Meadows, Cobb's, and Alsworth's at Dunmore. Several acres of land overgrown with wild grass and lying ten miles west of the Wallenpaupack in a rich intervale, were found inhabited by the red tribes when the whites explored it in 1769. A small creek stretches its languid line across the meadow into a neighboring pond, where the abundance of fish gave joy to the wigwams on the western edge of the meadow, from whence the warriors came forth with peace-pipe to smoke the friendly welcome. This point, because of its prolific growth of wild grass, was selected for a residence by page 320 Seth Strong, in 1770. It was the first attempt to settle the territory, now known as Wayne County. Mr. Strong lived here at the time of the Wyoming massacre. This farm is known as the Goodrich property, into whose possession it came in 1803. It was the birthplace of that eccentric genius, Phineas G. Goodrich, known in every nook and corner of Wayne, as "long-nosed Goodrich" who writes of Strong, "I had this from the early settlers on the Paupack, who in 1778 hid their effects in the woods and fled to Orange County, to escape the tomahawk and scalping-knife. There was a skirmish here on our old place (Little Meadow) between the whites and Indians. The whites were mostly slain. I remember the mound that was raised over their one common grave. Indians and whites were buried together. When a boy, I used to find the arrows and broken hatchets of the red-men around the mound and the hill." In 1793 there lived a man here by the name of Stanton, whose one-roomed log- house, early styled an "Inn", furnished accommodation for the wayfaring man and beast. The structure itself, standing on the knoll rising westward from the meadow, was half occupied by a huge fireplace and chimney grouped from stone and mud. The guest, emboldened to ascend a ladder to the upper story where the bare rafters greeted the head of the aspirant, found only boughs and grass spread upon the pole flooring for their reception and repose. Such was this rustic inn, whose counterpart was seen in many of the new settlements. Homely as was its fare, plain as were its pewter dishes and single hunting-knife, the venison or bear meat swinging from the trammels, hunger made always welcome. Fox-meat was not so readily appreciated. A stranger passing the way, was drawn to the table by the smell of roasting meat. Taking a morsel of the smoking viand in his mouth, it stung him like cayenne. Thinking that the housewife had peppered one side of the roast too highly, page 321 he turned the dish around and took a slice from the other side with the same provoking result. He laid down his knife and fork, and asked the good-natured landlady, what kind of meat it was. "Why', replied she, very innocently, "this morning my husband killed a fox, so I thought I would roast the hind quarter". The stranger was furious. "D-- n your fox!" he exclaimed as he dashed platter, grease, fox, and all to the floor, and hastily resumed his journey. Bishop Asbury, after visiting Wyoming in 1793, returned to New York over this route by Strong's, and thus records it in his diary. "Monday 8, 1793.--I took the wilderness, through the mountains up the Lackawanna, on the Twelve Mile Swamp; this place is famous for dirt and lofty hemlock. We lodged in the middle of the swamp, at S------'s, and made out better than we expected." Cobb's house on the slope of the Moosic Mountain, a distance of about eight miles from Little Meadows, was reached. The white cover of the wagon, jerking up or down as it mounted over a root, or plunged into a rut, passed over creeks never yet spanned by a bridge. The plain house of Cobb, floored, ceiled, and shingled with the split slabs, was too small to accommodate the emigrating party, who found in the hospitable wagon repose for the night. Asa Cobb made the first clearing here soon after the close of the Revolution. It was seven miles, or one day's journey from Cobb's, to where now stands the village of Dunmore. One green wave of tree-top was carried to the very summit of the mountain, disturbed by no clearing upon its western slope save that of William Alsworth, whose cabin half hid under hemlock and spruce, was also termed an inn. And, although the rude dwelling had little of the finish about it of modern times, the social comforts and the substantial meals and beds it furnished page 322 to the casual emigrant, was evidence that Alsworth had lost none of the New England character. The good old man, who acted as landlord, hostler, and waiter, and doing every chore essential to household affairs, never was so delighted as when he saw gathered around him the happy face of the emigrant or his guests, and his greatest pleasure seemed to be, to smooth with his dry jokes and racy stories the ruggedness of each man's daily road. Pittston, a tidy village on the Susquehanna of half a dozen houses, two only of which were frame, was thus reached after a journey of thirty-one days. THE RISE OF METHODISM IN THE VALLEY As the emigrants encamped upon Wyoming generally acquiesced in Presbyterian tenets, an organization friendly to their diffusion was easily effected under the ministrations of the Rev. Jacob Johnson, an officiating minister in the colony, as early as 1772, and who for many years was the only one, with a single exception, in all the wide territory lying between Sunbury and the Mohawk. Not so, however, with the Methodists. As the noiseless border of the Lackawanna began to thicken with a population, whose physical wants for a time pressed those of a spiritual character aside, Sabbath morning, with its associations of youthful days in the old village church at home, came and went with better observance. Hunting, fishing, horse-racing, or wrestling for drinks for the crowd, were among the many ways chosen to wear Sunday away by a large proportion of the inhabitants many years ago, before religious influences crept into the new settlements of Capoose or Pittston. The birth of Luzerne county, in 1786, modified elements hitherto adverse to either the achievements of Methodism, or the favorable propagation of the doctrines of any organic religious interests. One of those happy characters able to hew their way page 323 into a prominent usefulness emerged from a blacksmith shop in Kingston, and commenced to exhort and explain the liberal doctrines to the world in 1787. This was Anning Owen. He had early emigrated from Connecticut to Wyoming with the pioneers; had fought beside the gallant Butler in the Indian battle on the plain until the day was lost, escaping only with his life. He accompanied the fugitives to the East after the massacre, where he remained for nine years before he again crossed the mountains and rolled up his log-cabin and shop on the bank of Toby's Creek in Kingston. Never neglecting the duties of his shop until his appointments multiplied far and near, he officiated in the double capacity of blacksmith and exhorter for a few seasons before he became a circuit preacher of singular efficiency and power. A Methodist class was formed at Ross Hill, Wyoming Valley, in 1787-8; three years later a similar society, fewer in numbers, was first organized in the Lackawanna Valley, at the forge of Dr. Wm. Hooker Smith and James Sutton, by the Rev. James Campbell, who had been sent hither by the Philadelphia Conference for this specific purpose. The group, composed of five members, were led by James Sutton as class- leader. In the summer of 1792 Mr. Owen ascended the Lackawanna to Capoose and upper Providence, where he preached alternately at Preserved Taylor's and Captain John Vaughn's, in private houses. Captain Vaughn had imbibed the broad doctrines of Universalism, but their fallacious character was so demonstrated and proven by the plain blacksmith, that he forsook them forever, and became a zealous convert to Methodism. Meetings were also occasionally held in other log-houses or cabins along the stream, where the minister, generally poor and penniless, tarried all night, and enjoyed the abundant and real hospitality of the valley. Bishop Asbury, in his reconnoiter of the Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys in 1793, appointed Valentine Cook presiding elder. page 324 In 1800, Methodist meetings were held once a month at the house of Preserved Taylor, in Providence, who lived upon the western border of Capoose Meadow. After Mr. Taylor's removal, the dwelling of Squire Potter, two miles farther up the valley, became a stated preaching point. In fact, the lonely school-house or the isolated cabin, afforded the only places for religious gatherings in the valley until the fall of 1828, when there was erected the first meeting-house in that very portion of it last settled--in Carbondale. Meetings were sometimes held in cool groves or woods from bare necessity. Some shaded nook, watered by a spring or brook, was chosen for a camp-ground. Here, around a circle well cleared of underbrush and sheltered by hemlock or beech from the rays of the sun, rose the whitened tents like the wigwams of the cunning bow- men, in which were collected groups of old and young, whose pilgrimage to this wild joyous Mecca was long remembered with pleasure and profit. In 1803, two noisy itinerants went forth like John the Baptist, to prepare the way of the Lord. They preached at Kingston, Plymouth, Shawney, Wilkes Barre, Pittston, Providence, crossed the Moosic Mountain at Cobb's, journeying through Salem, Canaan, Mount Pleasant, Great Bend, and Tunkhannock, and preaching in all these places before returning to Wyoming. In 1807, a regular circuit was formed, and a portion of the same route was traveled over twelve times a year, or once in every four weeks. From 1810 until 1818, George Harman and Elder Owen officiated in this vineyard. One of the prominent members of the church here then was old "Father Ireland", as he was familiarly called, who emigrated to Providence Township in 1795, and settled upon what is now known as the Briggs's farm. He was a long time a class- leader. In his intercourse with the world, his kindness of heart, and his calm and virtuous life, until his sun passed behind the horizon after a long day, page 325 contributed no little toward softening the prejudices of the illiberal against the Methodist Society. The two events marking their distinctive era in the development of Methodism in the valley were the visit of Bishop Asbury in 1793, and the accession to its strength of the young but bold and fervid presence of the Rev. George Peck, D.D., in 1818. He brought with him a fixed purpose to diffuse Christian truths in the new field before him, in the exercise of which he was made familiar throughout the country as the great champion of Methodism. "In less than a century", said he to Brother Taylor, as he was threading his way along the infant settlement, "this charming valley, from its beauty and fertility, will have a large population and need great conversion." Heaven, in its mercy, has given the venerable elder fifty-three years in the pulpit, with a yet firm step and bright eye, so that he has not only lived to witness the fulfillment of his prophecy, but has shared in the triumphs of faith with a fidelity and complacency enjoyed by few. Dr. Peck has achieved distinction as an author of great ability, as his numerous, popular volumes offered the public attest. Although many of the uncharitable charge the spiritual advisers of this denomination, with mercenary views as they direct the wanderer on to the New Jerusalem, we find them as a body to possess as little selfishness, and quite as much true, honest, available capacity, and appreciation of the right, as can be found in the same number of men of any creed or profession in the country; and, although some within the writer's acquaintance command a fortune, few a competency, while very many are comparatively poor, thus affording a decisive commentary on the utter want of judgment of the illiberal. And, yet, beset, with every inducement, with no hope of personal advantage or emolument from their ministerial labors, and pressed by wants that pride conceals from the careless eye, how rarely do they wield their talents for money, page 326 position or power! And yet when a whole life has been spent to diffuse those sublime, simple truths which form the basis of all morals, how little security does the purity of character or the claim of age offer from the assaults of parishioners whose liturgy seems but a desire to exile their pastor, and whose devotions are the convenience or but the fashion of the hour! SMELLING HELL Anning Owen was a son of Vulcan, a stout, swarthy, genuine specimen of earnestness, who spoke all he knew and sometimes more, in the most impulsive manner. He remarked often, that he preached as he hammered out hot iron, to make an impression. His sermons were always extempore; after he warmed up in his favorite subject, his eye grew animated, his voice full and clear, as he displayed eloquence of a high order. The Methodists labored under many disadvantages. The self-sacrificing and sometimes boisterous itinerants who were toiling for their race merely for the sake of good, and no possible hope of pecuniary gain, with few thanks, little or no remuneration, often with scanty fare, were sometimes accused of ignorance, bigotry, and fanaticism, and yet under the effective appeals of Elder Owen, much of this common error was dispersed, while the church, augmenting in numbers, surpassed every other denomination in the extent of its prosperity. The loud "hallelujahs", "glories", and "amens", which pealed forth from the preachers in such sharp accents as to be heard at least half a mile from the stand at this period, was so different from the sober mode of worship of the more numerous Presbyterians, that many thought them crazy, and in one or two instances attempted to enforce silence by violent measures. A good story is told of Elder Owen by an old uncle page 327 of the writer, who heard him preach at a quarterly meeting, held at the court-house in Wilkes Barre, in the winter of 1806. Never closing his sermons without reminding sinners of the danger of brimstone, it had at length become so proverbial that the boys in a sportive mood (for there were sons of Belial in those days as well as now), had a living illustration of the virtues of his doctrine, at the elder's expense. In the south wing of the old court-house there was a large fire-place, in which smoked a huge beechen back-log. Behind this some of the boys had placed a yellow roll of the genuine article before the meeting commenced in the evening. The elder--or the Son of Thunder as he was called--opened his battery with more force than usual upon the citadel of Satan. He began to grow excited while elucidating the words of his text, "he that believeth not shall be damned". The flames of the fire began to penetrate the region where lay concealed the warming and wicked brimstone, the fumes of which spread through the room in the most provoking manner. The elder, with such a re-enforcement to his brain and his battery, felt inspired. Although ignorant of the joke the devil was playing upon him, he soon appreciated the odor of his resistless agent. Turning his eye upon the unconverted portion of the congregation, he exclaimed in a loud voice, "Sinners! unless you are converted you will be cast in the bottomless pit." Pausing a moment as he glanced indignantly upon the tittering ones who were enjoying the scene in an eminent degree, he raised himself to his utmost height, elevated his voice to a still loftier key, and at the same time bringing down his clinched fist with a powerful stroke upon the judge's desk, cried out "Sinners, why don't you repent, don't you smell hell?" It may be interesting to note that in 1833 the long-remembered patriarch, Lorenzo Dow, with his long white beard and imposing equipage, in passing down the valley to his Southern death-bed, preached to a vast assemblage page 328 in a barn in Providence. This barn was blown over by the great gale in 1834.