Cushetunk
Damascus Township, Wayne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The first Connecticut settlement on the upper Delaware was made here in 1755, under lead of Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner, on lands called Cushetunk by the Indians. Settlement seized by Indians and Tories, 1778.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1755, settlers from Connecticut led by Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner planted the first colony on the upper Delaware, on lands the Native peoples called Cushetunk. Their arrival reflected Connecticut's sweeping and contested claims to lands stretching west across Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the little settlement was overrun — seized in 1778 by a force of Indians and Loyalist Tories — a casualty of the brutal frontier warfare that swept the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys.
Why it matters
Cushetunk marks both the reach of colonial land claims into Native country and the savage frontier fighting that made the Revolution a war for the backcountry as much as the seaboard.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the upper Delaware Valley was still deep frontier country — a land of forested ridges and fast river water where the maps of colonial governments overlapped with the homelands of Native peoples who had lived there for generations. When settlers first arrived at the place recorded here in 1755, this was the far edge of the British colonial world, a corner of the continent where the reach of coastal towns thinned out into wilderness.
The settlers came from Connecticut, and that detail is the key to the whole story. In this era, several of the original colonies held royal charters with vague western boundaries — grants written when no one in London had any real idea how vast the interior was. Connecticut read its charter as a license to claim a broad band of land stretching west, straight across territory that Pennsylvania also considered its own. The little colony planted here was one expression of that sweeping and hotly disputed claim.
And it was planted on land that already had a name. The ground was called Cushetunk by the Native people of the region, a reminder that the "first" settlement was first only from the newcomers' point of view. The frontier was not empty; it was contested from the very beginning, layered with older histories that the arriving families were stepping into rather than opening.
People & events
The settlement here was led by two men whose names still anchor the site: Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner. They guided the first Connecticut families onto these lands in 1755, building homes and clearing ground in a place far from the protection of any established town. To do so took nerve and stubbornness — the nearest help of any kind was days away through hard country.
For more than two decades the community held on. But the American Revolution turned the whole frontier into a battleground, and remote settlements like this one were terribly exposed. In 1778 the settlement was overrun and seized by a force of Native fighters and Loyalist "Tories" — colonists who had taken the Crown's side. Whole families who had spent a generation building here saw that work swept away in a single stroke.
The marker's spare wording — settlement made, settlement seized — carries a hard truth about backcountry life in the Revolution. Out here, the war was not fought between uniformed armies on open fields. It was fought farm by farm, valley by valley, and the people caught in it were often ordinary settlers whose homes sat squarely in the path of a wider conflict.
Its place in the American story
Cushetunk sits at the crossing point of two big themes in early American history. The first is the collision of colonial land claims. When colonies like Connecticut pressed charters that reached far to the west, they set off boundary quarrels that would take decades — and in some cases the new federal government itself — to untangle. This quiet spot in the woods was a small piece of a continental-scale argument over who owned what, an argument that shaped how the young nation eventually organized its western lands.
The second theme is the brutal character of the Revolution beyond the famous seaboard battles. Along the Delaware and Susquehanna frontiers, 1778 was a year of fire and flight, as raids swept through scattered settlements. The seizure of this community was one episode in that larger story — proof that the war for independence was also a savage war for the backcountry, where the stakes were measured not in territory captured but in homes lost.
Together these strands make the site a reminder that the American founding was not only a story of statesmen and declarations. It was also a story of frontier families on contested ground, absorbing the full violence of a revolution whose outcome, in their lifetimes, was anything but certain.
If you visit
Come to this marker in the rolling, wooded country of Wayne County and the first thing to do is simply look at the land. The setting still reads as frontier: ridges, forest, and the pull of the Delaware River not far off. It takes very little imagination to picture how remote and demanding this place would have felt to families arriving in the 1750s with only what they could carry.
Stand here and hold two dates in your mind — the founding and the fall, more than twenty years apart. That span is the human story of the place: a generation of labor and hope, and then the swift blow of frontier war. The quiet you'll likely find here is worth pausing in, because that quiet is the aftermath of a much louder history.
This is a fine stop to fold into a slower drive through the upper Delaware region, where marker after marker tells the story of settlement, rivers, and the long process by which this borderland became settled country. Pair it with a look at the river itself, and you'll come away with a feel for why people fought so hard to hold ground here.
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
- · Moses Thomas
- · Daniel Skinner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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