Lawunakhannek
Hickory Township, Forest County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Name of Indian mission near here, at which the first Protestant church building west of the Allegheny Mountains was built by Zeisberger in 1769. Term is Delaware word meaning "northerly stream place."
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It marks a frontier crossroads of European religion and Native life, where a Delaware place-name and a pioneering Protestant congregation meet on the same ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the middle of the 1700s, the forested country along the upper Allegheny River was a meeting ground and a moving frontier. This was still colonial America, decades before there was a United States, and the land here in what is now Forest County lay at the western edge of European reach — beyond the mountains that walled off the coastal colonies from the Ohio country.
The river valleys were Delaware (Lenape) country in a deep and living sense: the people had names for every reach of water, every bend and stream mouth, mapping the land in their own language long before any surveyor arrived. Lawunakhannek, "northerly stream place," is one of those names, and it survived because a small Christian community grew up around it.
Into this world came the Moravians, members of a German-speaking Protestant church known for sending missionaries far past the settled frontier. Where most colonists saw wilderness, the Moravians built mission towns — orderly little villages of Native converts and their teachers, tucked along the rivers that were the highways of the age.
People & events
The figure at the center of this story is David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary who spent much of his long life among Native peoples of the eastern woodlands. He learned their languages, lived in their towns, and moved with them as war and displacement pushed communities from place to place.
Here, near the stream the Delaware called Lawunakhannek, Zeisberger and his Native converts raised a church building in 1769 — remembered as the first Protestant house of worship west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was a modest structure by any measure, but its location made it remarkable: a permanent church on ground where, from a European point of view, there had been none.
The congregation that gathered there was a blend of two worlds. The hymns and scripture came from the Moravian tradition of central Europe; the people, the place-name, and the surrounding life were Delaware. That meeting of cultures — sometimes hopeful, always fragile — is the real substance behind the plain fact on the marker.
Its place in the American story
Firsts like this one help chart how European settlement and Christianity crossed the Appalachian barrier. For generations the mountains had been a rough dividing line; a church raised beyond them in 1769 signals that the frontier of both faith and settlement was already spilling into the Ohio watershed on the eve of the Revolution.
The Moravian missions occupy a distinctive place in that larger American story. Unlike many frontier ventures, they were built around gathering Native converts into settled Christian communities rather than pushing Native people off the land. Their careful records and journals became, almost by accident, some of the most detailed accounts we have of Native life in this region during a time of upheaval.
And the survival of the Delaware name itself matters. On a map otherwise crowded with English and later names, "northerly stream place" is a small act of preservation — a reminder that this country was known, named, and inhabited long before it was charted by newcomers.
If you visit
Come to this corner of Forest County expecting quiet. This is deep Allegheny river-and-forest country, and the setting does much of the storytelling — tall woods, moving water, and a sense of how remote this ground once was from the colonial coast.
Stand near the marker and let the name do its work. Try saying "northerly stream place" and then look at the water; the Delaware were describing exactly what you're seeing. The 1769 church is long gone, so this is a place for imagination rather than ruins — picture a small cluster of cabins and a plain meetinghouse where two languages once shared the same Sunday.
It pairs naturally with the other Allegheny-valley markers in the area, which trace the same era of missions and Native communities along this stretch of river. Bring a full tank and a good map; the pleasure here is the drive and the hush as much as the history at any single stop.
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.
Goschgoschink
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
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.
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.
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.