George Catlin
Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The great painter of Indian portraits was born here July 26, 1796, of Connecticut ancestry. Until 1823 he practiced law here and nearby. He began painting Indian pictures six years later.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1796 the boy who would become America's great chronicler of Native peoples was born in this corner of the Wyoming Valley, of Connecticut stock. George Catlin trained and practiced law here before abandoning the bar around 1823 for the paintbrush, and within a few years he set out to record the faces and lives of Indian nations across the young republic. His hundreds of portraits and scenes remain among the fullest visual records of Native America before it was transformed.
Why it matters
Catlin's decision to document vanishing ways of life gave the nation an irreplaceable pictorial archive of its Indigenous peoples, and it began in this ordinary Pennsylvania town.
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Related people
- · George Catlin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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
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.
Fort Durkee
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947
Begun in April 1769, Fort Durkee was the first stronghold raised by Connecticut settlers in the Wyoming Valley, named for their leader. It became a flashpoint of the First Pennamite War of 1769–71, the armed contest between Connecticut Yankees and Pennsylvania authorities over who rightfully held the land. The fort stood just a thousand feet from its rival, Fort Wyoming, a measure of how close the two colonial claims pressed against each other.