Colonel Jacob Stroud - PLAQUE
Stroudsburg, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Col. Jacob Stroud is buried in this graveyard, originally the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury. Begun by the Moravian Brethren in 1743, the chapel destroyed in the Indian uprising of 1755, was erected in 1753 under the leadership of Daniel Brodhead who settled one half mile to the East in 1736. The members of the mission in 1747 were [list of 18 names]
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
This graveyard began as the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury, a Moravian outpost started in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. The mission chapel was destroyed during the Indian uprising of 1755 amid the French and Indian War, then rebuilt. Colonel Jacob Stroud — the frontier officer and founder of Stroudsburg — lies buried here.
Why it matters
The site joins two threads of the Pennsylvania frontier: the Moravian missionary effort among settlers and Native peoples, and the wartime violence of the 1750s that swept the exposed backcountry.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story rooted in this graveyard reaches back to the 1730s and 1740s, when the eastern edge of Pennsylvania's Pocono country was a meeting ground between colonial settlers and the Native peoples whose homeland this had long been. It was a place of frontiers in every sense — geographic, cultural, and spiritual.
This was also the great era of Moravian missionary activity in Pennsylvania. The Moravian Brethren, German-speaking Protestants with a powerful missionary calling, established outposts across the region to minister both to scattered settlers and to Native communities. Their reach into places like this reflected an unusually intense commitment to carrying their faith into the wilderness.
But the same decades brought mounting danger. As the rivalry between Britain and France hardened into open war in the 1750s, the frontier became a battleground, and settlements that had grown up in relative peace suddenly found themselves exposed to raids and destruction.
People & events
Several strands of frontier history are braided together on this single site. It began as the Mission of Dansbury, started by the Moravian Brethren in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. A chapel was raised here in 1753 under Brodhead's leadership, and the marker even preserves a list of the mission's members as they stood in 1747 — a rare snapshot of a frontier congregation by name.
Then came 1755. In the violence that swept the backcountry during the French and Indian War, the chapel was destroyed. The marker records that it was later rebuilt, a small line that carries a large truth: these communities were battered, but they returned and began again.
Over that older sacred ground rests Colonel Jacob Stroud, the frontier officer and the founder of Stroudsburg, the town that grew up here and still bears his name. His burial in the former mission cemetery ties the region's later story — its military service and its town-building — back to the mission that first gathered people to this spot.
Its place in the American story
This one graveyard captures, in miniature, several of the largest forces at work on the colonial American frontier. There is the missionary impulse that sent people of faith deep into contested country. There is the collision and coexistence of settler and Native worlds. And there is the imperial war that turned the whole borderland violent in the 1750s.
The destruction of the Dansbury chapel in 1755 is a local echo of a continental catastrophe. Up and down the Pennsylvania frontier that year, settlements burned and families fled as the French and Indian War reached ordinary people far from any formal battlefield. That such places were rebuilt afterward is part of the larger American pattern of persistence.
And in Jacob Stroud you see the arc that so often followed: the frontier soldier who became a town founder, helping transform a dangerous edge of empire into a settled American community. The name Stroudsburg on the map today is the living end of the story this stone begins.
If you visit
A historic graveyard asks for a different kind of attention than a museum does. Walk it quietly. This is ground that has been sacred to more than one community across nearly three centuries, and it holds layers of history beneath a small, unassuming surface.
Seek out Colonel Stroud's grave, and as you stand there, remember that the earth around it began not as a town cemetery but as a mission burial ground — a place of worship on a frontier that no longer exists. The marker's list of long-ago mission members is worth reading slowly; those names belonged to real people who gathered here when this was the far edge of the settled world.
The site sits in the heart of Stroudsburg, so it folds easily into a day exploring the Poconos. Let it anchor the deeper history beneath the modern town, and you'll never quite see the region's tidy streets the same way again.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jacob Stroud
- · Daniel Brodhead
Related events
- · Mission of Dansbury
- · Indian uprising of 1755
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dansbury Mission
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1947
About 1744, frontier founder Daniel Brodhead raised a building here for Moravian missionaries, part of the remarkable Moravian effort to carry their faith to settlers and Native peoples along the Pennsylvania frontier. The mission stood barely a decade: in 1755, as the French and Indian War set the backcountry aflame, it was destroyed in the raiding that emptied the region. Its site lay beside what is now the cemetery.
Nicholas Dupuy (1682-1762) - PLAQUE
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1930
In 1727 Nicholas Dupuy became the first European settler at Shawnee on the Delaware, buying some 3,000 acres — including river islands — from the Minsi (Munsee) band of the Lenape. He descended from Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution in France and reached New Amsterdam in 1662. By mid-century the growing community had land set aside, through proprietor William Allen, for a Dutch Reformed congregation that endures today as a Presbyterian church.
Edward Marshall
Portland, PA · est. 1948
Edward Marshall was one of the fast walkers hired to pace off the 1737 Walking Purchase, the land grab that stripped the Lenape of vast territory in the Delaware Valley. He later settled in this frontier area, where in 1757, amid the raids of the French and Indian War, his wife and eldest son were killed—by some accounts in reprisal for his role in the notorious survey. Marshall eventually withdrew to the safer settlements of Bucks County.
Nazareth
Nazareth, PA · est. 1966
Nazareth was founded in 1740 by Moravian settlers who had abandoned a struggling colony in Georgia and sought a fresh start in Pennsylvania. Under Bishop August Spangenberg they built the "Great Economy," a communal system running from 1745 to 1765 in which labor and goods were pooled. The whole enterprise was designed to sustain Moravian missionaries carrying their faith to Native peoples.