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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1730s, the upper Delaware River country was the far edge of European settlement in Pennsylvania — a green, rugged frontier where the colony's reach thinned out into forest. William Penn's colony had been founded on a reputation for relatively fair dealing with Native peoples, and for a time that reputation helped keep the backcountry more peaceful than many other colonial frontiers.
Into this borderland, around 1738, came the first settlers who would plant a permanent European foothold here. The place they founded was first called Dansbury, an early seed of what would grow into today's East Stroudsburg, tucked into the valleys of the Pocono region.
This was the late colonial era, a generation before the Revolution, when a frontier family's daily life meant clearing land, raising shelter, and living at the very margin between the settled colony and the vast Native and contested lands beyond. Every such settlement was both a hopeful venture and an exposed one.
People & events
The marker honors Daniel Brodhead, remembered as the founder who settled here about 1738 and gave rise to the town first known as Dansbury. He made his home on this frontier through the uneasy years that followed, remaining until 1755 — the eve of a conflict that would upend the whole backcountry.
His story, though, reaches beyond his own lifetime through his son of the same name. That son grew up to become a leader in the Revolutionary War, and later served Pennsylvania as its Surveyor General — the official responsible for the surveying and mapping of the state's lands, a post of real importance in a young country still defining its boundaries and distributing its territory.
So the marker really commemorates two generations: a father who dared to settle a frontier, and a son whose service to the new nation carried the family name into the story of American independence and into the governing of the state itself.
Its place in the American story
The founding of a small frontier settlement like Dansbury is a piece of a much larger American pattern — the steady, often perilous push of European settlement into new country, one family and one clearing at a time. These earliest footholds became the anchor points from which towns, counties, and a whole settled landscape eventually grew.
The arc of the Brodhead family also mirrors the arc of the colonies themselves. A father settles a frontier under colonial rule; a son comes of age to fight for independence and then to help govern the new state. In that single family you can trace the passage from colonial outpost to sovereign American commonwealth.
The office the son held — Surveyor General — points to something easy to overlook: the young United States had to be measured and mapped before it could be fully settled and governed. The work of drawing lines on the land was foundational nation-building, and this Pocono town produced a man who did it.
If you visit
This is a place to stand where a town began. There may be little dramatic to see of the earliest settlement itself, but that is part of the appeal — you are looking at the humble origin point of a community that has grown up around it in the centuries since.
Let your imagination strip away the modern town and picture the forested frontier of the 1730s, when a single family's cabin and cleared field were an outpost at the colony's edge. The Pocono setting still hints at the rugged country those first settlers faced.
It makes a thoughtful stop for anyone exploring the upper Delaware and Pocono region, especially paired with the area's other colonial-era sites. Read the marker, look around at the town it began, and consider how many American places trace back to one determined family arriving at the frontier.
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
- · 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.