Munsee Indian Village - PLAQUE
Scranton, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This stone marks the site of a former Indian village, occupied after 1743 by a band of Munsee, under Chief Capoose. About 150 feet east of this spot stood a famous apple tree, under which the Indians held their councils. This tree was designated as "the town sign-post of Providence" by the settlers in 1774. It was 13 1/2 feet in circumference when it was blown down in 1885.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
After 1743 a band of Munsee, a division of the Delaware people, settled here under Chief Capoose, in the valley that would one day become Scranton. Their council ground lay beneath a great apple tree that settlers later adopted as a landmark, calling it the town sign-post of Providence; it stood until a storm felled the thirteen-foot giant in 1885. The village is a reminder that Native communities lived and governed across this region well into the era of European settlement.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of a Native presence in the Lackawanna Valley during the contact era, a chapter often erased beneath the industrial city that followed.
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Related people
- · Chief Capoose
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Capoose
Scranton, PA · est. 1947
Long before Scranton's anthracite furnaces lit the valley, the flat ground along the Lackawanna River held a Native village led by a chief remembered as Capoose. Its people were Munsee, a Lenape (Delaware) group who moved here from the upper Delaware valley in the years after 1743 — part of the slow, forced displacement of eastern Indigenous nations as colonial settlement pushed westward. The marker fixes their presence to a specific place that would later be swallowed by an industrial city.
Lackawanna County
Scranton, PA · est. 1982
The last of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, Lackawanna was carved from Luzerne County in 1878, its name drawn from a Native word for a forking stream. Its heart was Scranton, a city that rose on the black wealth beneath it: hard anthracite coal. By the late nineteenth century the region had become, by its own proud claim, the anthracite mining capital of the world, drawing waves of immigrant laborers into its collieries and coal towns.
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.
Sullivan's March
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1947
During the Revolution's Sullivan Expedition of 1779, General John Sullivan's Continental army moved north up the Susquehanna from Fort Wyoming at Wilkes-Barre toward Tioga. On August 1–2 the troops encamped on the lowland across the river here — the second stop on a grueling march through frontier country. The campaign was Washington's answer to raids on the frontier, aimed at the Iroquois Confederacy allied with the British.