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.
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Related people
- · Moses Thomas
- · Daniel Skinner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Stone Fort
Matamoras, PA · est. 1948
Around 1740, when the upper Delaware valley was a raw and contested frontier, Dutch settler Simon Westfael raised a sturdy stone house here that neighbors could flee to when violence flared. Structures like this doubled as homes and fortifications in an era when European farming families lived amid the tensions of frontier warfare. Local memory long called it the Old Stone Fort, or Fort Matamoras.
Keyser Creek
Taylor, PA · est. 1948
In 1769, three families led by Timothy Keys, Solomon Hocksey, and Andrew Hickman built the first European homes in what became Lackawanna County, settling along the creek that now bears Keys's name. The frontier peace did not hold: in July 1778, amid the violence of the Revolutionary borderlands, Keys and others were killed in an Indian raid. Their brief settlement marks the earliest European foothold in the valley.
Monroe County
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1983
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Connecticut Settlement
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947
In 1762 settlers from Connecticut planted their first community here on the Susquehanna Purchase, a tract the colony claimed under its sea-to-sea charter deep in what Pennsylvania considered its own territory. The fragile settlement was destroyed in an Indian attack on October 15, 1763, and the valley lay unsettled by the newcomers until they returned in 1769. The episode opened one of colonial America's most contested land struggles in the Wyoming Valley.