Daniel Brodhead
East Stroudsburg, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Settled here about 1738. Founder of the town, first called Dansbury. Lived here until 1755. His son Daniel became a Revolutionary War leader and later the State Surveyor General.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Around 1738, Daniel Brodhead pushed into the upper Delaware frontier and planted the settlement first known as Dansbury, the seed of today's East Stroudsburg. He lived here through the uneasy years before the French and Indian War drove many settlers out. His son of the same name would go on to serve as a Revolutionary War commander and later as Pennsylvania's Surveyor General.
Why it matters
It marks one of the earliest European footholds in the Pocono frontier and the founding family of a Pennsylvania town whose sons helped win independence.
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Related people
- · Daniel Brodhead
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Monroe County
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1983
Monroe County was formed in 1836 from Northampton and Pike counties and named for President James Monroe. The land had earlier been a frontier battleground, marked by Indian raids between 1755 and 1782 and crossed by part of General Sullivan's 1779 march against the Iroquois. In later generations its Pocono Mountains blossomed into one of the Northeast's most famous resort regions.
Jacob Stroud (1735-1806)
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1991
Jacob Stroud (1735-1806) was a militia colonel and Revolutionary patriot who fortified his home on this frontier as Fort Penn during the dangerous years of the war. He served in Pennsylvania's 1776 constitutional convention and later in the state legislature, then in 1799 founded the town that bears his name, laying out its streets with his son Daniel. His life spans the transformation of this Pocono country from exposed frontier to settled community.
Nicholas Depuy
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1947
Nicholas Depuy came to this stretch of the Delaware around 1727, among the very first Europeans known to settle the region. When the French and Indian War brought raiding to the frontier after 1755, his stockaded and garrisoned home was pressed into service as Fort Depuy, one of the fortified farmsteads that dotted the wartime backcountry. Such homes-turned-forts show how thin the line was between domestic life and frontier warfare.
Zane Grey (1872-1939)
Lackawaxen Township, PA · est. 1989
Between 1905 and 1918, along the Delaware and Lackawaxen rivers, Zane Grey turned this quiet corner of Pennsylvania into the workshop where he built the modern Western. Here he wrote "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1912), the sweeping tale of the sagebrush country that became one of the best-selling novels of its age and helped fix the mythic cowboy West in the American imagination. Grey loved the surrounding countryside so deeply that he chose to be laid to rest within sight of the house.