Keyser Creek
Taylor, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
At this point was established the first white settlement in Lackawanna County. In 1769, Timothy Keys, Solomon Hocksey, Andrew Hickman built homes here. In July, 1778, Keys and others were slain by Indians. The Creek is named for Keys.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Keyser Creek captures both the reach of frontier settlement and the deadly conflicts between settlers and Native peoples that shaped the Revolutionary-era backcountry.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the late 1760s, the valleys of what is now northeastern Pennsylvania were a frontier in every sense — thickly wooded, sparsely settled by newcomers, and long home to Native peoples whose presence and claims shaped everything that happened here. For a European family, putting up a house in this country meant living at the far edge of colonial settlement, days from the comforts and protections of established towns.
The land was contested in complicated ways. Rival colonial interests, competing land claims, and the deep grievances of Native nations all overlapped in this region. Settlement here was never a simple matter of clearing trees; it was an intrusion into a landscape that others already knew as home.
When the American Revolution came, the frontier became one of its most dangerous theaters. Far from the famous battles of the seaboard, the backcountry saw a brutal, close-range kind of warfare, and the small clearings of settler families sat squarely in its path.
People & events
In 1769, three men — Timothy Keys, Solomon Hocksey, and Andrew Hickman — built homes at this place, establishing what is remembered as the first settlement of its kind in what became Lackawanna County. It was a tiny foothold: a few dwellings raised by hand in a valley far from any secure town.
The peace of that first settlement did not last. In July 1778, amid the violence that swept the Revolutionary frontier, Keys and others here were killed in an attack. The creek beside which they had built their homes carries Keys's name to this day, a quiet memorial worked into the map itself.
That naming is the settlement's most lasting mark. The homes are long gone, but the water still runs, and it still remembers the man who came to live beside it and died on this ground.
Its place in the American story
The story told here is the story of the American frontier in miniature — the reach of settlers pressing into new country, and the deadly conflict that so often followed. Behind every early marker like this lies the larger, harder truth that these lands were not empty, and that settlement meant collision with the Native peoples who lived here.
The Revolutionary years turned that collision especially bloody along the backcountry. While armies clashed near the coast, the frontier endured raids, reprisals, and the destruction of homes and lives on all sides. The events at this creek belong to that wider pattern of violence that marked the war away from its famous fields.
Remembering a place like this means holding both parts of the account together: the courage and hardship of the families who built here, and the loss and dispossession that frontier settlement carried with it. It is a small window onto one of the most difficult chapters of the nation's founding era.
If you visit
This is a place to slow down and read the land. The creek is the living part of the story — follow it with your eyes and remember that its name is the settlement's surviving trace. There is a quiet power in a stream that still carries the name of someone who lived and died on its banks more than two centuries ago.
Come with a sense of the frontier as it truly was: not a scenic backdrop, but a hard and contested edge of the colonial world, where a handful of homes stood exposed to everything the wilderness and the war could bring. The marker asks you to imagine both the ambition and the danger of that life.
As a road-trip stop, it pairs well with the region's other early-settlement and Revolutionary-era sites, filling in the human texture behind the dates. Give it a respectful pause; a place named for a life lost here has earned it.
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
- · Timothy Keys
- · Solomon Hocksey
- · Andrew Hickman
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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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.
George Catlin
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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.
Monroe County
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