Dansbury Mission
Stroudsburg, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Erected about 1744, by Daniel Brodhead, for use by Moravian missionaries. Destroyed by the Indians in 1755, during the French and Indian War. The site adjoined the present cemetery.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It recalls the Moravian missionary presence on the colonial frontier and how quickly the French and Indian War shattered the fragile settlements of the upper Delaware.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1740s, the upper Delaware frontier of Pennsylvania was a meeting ground of peoples and faiths. The colony's founding ideals had drawn a remarkable mix of settlers, and among the most striking were the Moravians — members of a devout Protestant church, originally from central Europe, who came to Pennsylvania with an unusual sense of mission.
The Moravians were famous for carrying their faith directly to others, including to Native peoples, and for building a network of missions and settlements across the colonial backcountry. On a frontier where different communities lived warily side by side, their missionary work was one of the era's boldest attempts at reaching across those lines.
But this was also fragile, contested ground. The relative peace of Pennsylvania's early years was not permanent, and by the middle of the century the backcountry sat on the edge of a much larger struggle among European empires and Native nations for control of the continent's interior.
People & events
About 1744, the frontier founder Daniel Brodhead raised a building here for the use of Moravian missionaries. It became known as the Dansbury Mission, a small outpost of that far-reaching Moravian effort to plant their faith along the Pennsylvania frontier, and its site adjoined what is now the cemetery.
The mission stood for barely a decade. In 1755, as the French and Indian War set the backcountry aflame, it was destroyed in the raiding that swept the region. That war — the North American front of a wider global conflict between Britain and France — drew many Native nations into the fighting and turned frontiers like this one into dangerous, contested ground almost overnight.
The destruction of the mission in 1755 was part of a wider unraveling: across the upper Delaware, settlements were burned and abandoned as the violence spread, and the fragile experiment of a frontier mission was one of its casualties.
Its place in the American story
The Dansbury Mission speaks to two large themes in the American story. The first is the deep religious motivation behind so much of colonial settlement — the conviction, held intensely by groups like the Moravians, that carrying their faith to new peoples and places was a sacred duty. Their missions were among the earliest sustained points of contact between European and Native communities on this frontier.
The second is how suddenly that world could shatter. The French and Indian War was a turning point in North American history: its outcome reshaped which empire controlled the continent and set in motion tensions that would help lead, within a generation, to the American Revolution. Out on frontiers like this one, that world-changing conflict arrived as fire and flight.
The mission's short life — built about 1744, destroyed in 1755 — captures in miniature how precarious frontier settlement truly was. A decade of hopeful effort could be erased in a single season of war.
If you visit
Come to this spot mindful that you are standing at the site of something that no longer exists — a frontier mission that lived barely ten years. The adjoining cemetery gives the place a fitting quiet, and a sense of the long memory of the community that grew here.
There is little of the original building to see, so the reward is in reflection rather than spectacle. Picture the 1740s frontier: a modest structure raised for missionaries, set in a landscape where very different peoples and faiths met, and where peace could not be taken for granted.
It fits naturally into a tour of the Stroudsburg area's colonial history, and pairs well with the region's other early sites. Take a moment beside the cemetery to consider both the faith that built the mission and the war that destroyed it — two forces that shaped the whole colonial 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
Related events
- · French and Indian War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Colonel Jacob Stroud - PLAQUE
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1931
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.
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.
Gnadenhuetten
Lehighton, PA · est. 2005
In 1746 Moravian missionaries established Gnadenhuetten, a mission town meant to shelter a growing community of Mohican and Delaware converts and the first European settlement in what is now Carbon County. As the French and Indian War engulfed the frontier, tensions boiled over, and on November 24, 1755, the settlement was attacked and burned in a raid encouraged by the French. The victims were laid to rest in what is now the Lehighton Cemetery nearby.
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.