Goschgoschink
Hickory Township, Forest County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Name applied at the time of Zeisberger's arrival in 1767 to all three of the refugee Indian towns. Later the name was given to "Upper Town," located across the river at this point.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger arrived in this stretch of the upper Allegheny in 1767, the name Goschgoschink applied to all three of the refugee Indian towns clustered along the river here. It was later attached specifically to the "Upper Town" that stood across the water. These were communities of displaced Delaware, Munsee, and Seneca peoples, gathered in the Ohio country during a decade of upheaval that followed the French and Indian War and preceded the American Revolution.
Why it matters
Goschgoschink records the Native refuge settlements of the upper Ohio Valley in the 1760s — a landscape of displacement and adaptation that shaped the contest for the American interior on the eve of the Revolution.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When David Zeisberger came to this stretch of the upper Allegheny in 1767, he arrived in a landscape shaped by displacement. The years after the French and Indian War had scattered Native communities across the Ohio country, and many regathered along rivers where they could rebuild. Here, along the Allegheny, three refugee towns stood close together, sharing this reach of the valley.
Goschgoschink was the name that covered all three of them at that time — a single name for a cluster of settlements. Only later did it narrow to mean the "Upper Town," which stood across the river from this point. Names on a frontier were fluid things, and this one's story of narrowing tells you these were living communities, not fixed places on a map.
This was the eve of great change. The Revolution was still years away, but the pressures that would remake the interior — settlement, trade, and the reach of European missions — were already gathering.
People & events
The arrival of a Moravian missionary was a notable event in the life of these towns. The Moravians were unusual among Christian missionaries: rather than preaching from a distance, they moved in among the people they hoped to reach, learning languages and living alongside them. Zeisberger devoted much of his career to exactly that work in the Ohio country.
What he found at Goschgoschink was not a blank slate but a set of established communities with their own leaders and beliefs. The name applied to all three towns when he came, and its later attachment to the Upper Town suggests how the settlements were sorted and remembered as time passed.
The meeting of a European faith and Native tradition here was part conversation, part contest. It unfolded town by town, and Goschgoschink — first as a name for all three, then for one — was at the center of it.
Its place in the American story
The refuge towns of the upper Allegheny are a window onto a chapter of American history that rarely makes the textbooks: the story of Native peoples who, uprooted by war and expansion, gathered in the Ohio Valley and worked to hold their communities together.
This was contested ground. The interior of the continent was still very much up for grabs in the 1760s, and the decisions made in towns like these — about land, alliance, and belief — fed into the larger struggle for the American interior on the eve of the Revolution.
Remembering a name like Goschgoschink matters because it keeps the Indigenous presence in this valley from being erased. Before the counties and the townships, there were these towns, and this name held them together.
If you visit
From the marker in Hickory Township, look across the river. The "Upper Town" that eventually carried the Goschgoschink name stood on the far bank, so the crossing itself is part of what you're seeing.
There is little to find on the ground today — no ruins, no reconstructed village. What the marker offers instead is a name and a moment: 1767, when a missionary arrived and three towns shared a single word. Let the river and the hills do the rest of the work.
This is one of several markers along this reach of the Allegheny that together map the eighteenth-century Native towns of the valley. Visiting them in sequence turns a quiet drive into a walk through a vanished neighborhood of 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
- · David Zeisberger
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Refugee Towns
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
This part of the Allegheny was allotted by the Seneca before 1750 to Munsee and other Native peoples displaced from lands to the east. From 1767 to 1770 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger lived and preached among these refugee groups, who occupied three towns along the river here. Their presence reflects the broad mid-1700s upheaval that scattered Indigenous nations across the Pennsylvania frontier.
Hickory Town
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
Across the river from this point stood the "Middle Town" of the Goschgoschink cluster, later called Hickory Town, one of the Native refuge villages the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger came to in 1767. Here Zeisberger held his celebrated debate with Wangomen, a Munsee religious leader who challenged the missionary's Christian teaching — a rare recorded clash of spiritual worldviews on the colonial frontier. The town also marked the northern end of Indian paths running up from the south, along which trade goods reached these upper-Allegheny communities.
Lawunakhannek
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
At the mission the Delaware called Lawunakhannek — "northerly stream place" — the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger and his Native converts raised what is remembered as the first Protestant church building west of the Allegheny Mountains in 1769. Moravian missions like this one gathered Delaware and other Native peoples into small Christian communities along the frontier rivers. The name itself preserves the Delaware language mapping of this stretch of the Allegheny.
Indian Paths
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
Long before roads followed the Allegheny, Native travelers used seasonal footpaths that climbed the hills toward Oil Creek. Each spring they gathered crude petroleum skimmed from natural oil pits, boiled maple sap into sugar, and shaped canoes from tree bark — a round of harvests keyed to the season and the land. Forest County's oil seeps were valued generations before the 1859 Drake Well launched the world's petroleum industry nearby.