Nicholas Dupuy (1682-1762) - PLAQUE
Smithfield Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The first settler of Shawnee in 1727, purchased 3,000 acres of land, including the Island of Shawno and Manwalamink, from the Minsi Indians. He was a grandson of Nicholas Dupuy and his wife Catherine De Vos, Huguenot refugees from Antois France, who with their sons Nicholas, John and Moses arrived in New Amsterdam, in 1662. William Allen in 1750 conveyed five acres of land to Nicholas Dupuy and others for a Dutch Reformed Congregation, now the Presbyterian Church.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1727 Nicholas Dupuy became the first European settler at Shawnee on the Delaware, buying some 3,000 acres — including river islands — from the Minsi (Munsee) band of the Lenape. He descended from Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution in France and reached New Amsterdam in 1662. By mid-century the growing community had land set aside, through proprietor William Allen, for a Dutch Reformed congregation that endures today as a Presbyterian church.
Why it matters
The Dupuy family traces a classic American arc — European refugees seeking religious freedom who pushed onto the colonial frontier — and marks the founding of one of the earliest European settlements in the upper Delaware Valley.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1700s, the upper Delaware Valley was a meeting ground rather than a settled countryside. The river ran through the homeland of the Lenape people, and Europeans arriving here were entering a landscape that already had names, paths, and long-standing communities. Shawnee on the Delaware sits in exactly this kind of border country between Native and colonial worlds.
Pennsylvania in these decades was still a young colony built on the promise of religious tolerance and, at least in principle, fair dealing over land. That reputation drew people from across Europe who had reasons to leave home — and it shaped how the earliest transactions along the Delaware were framed, as purchases from Native owners rather than simple seizures.
For a European family to plant itself here in 1727 was to live at the very front of settlement. The nearest towns were small and far, the forest was close, and daily life depended on the river, the soil, and relations with Native neighbors who had lived here for generations.
People & events
The marker centers on Nicholas Dupuy, remembered as the first settler at Shawnee, who acquired a large tract — some three thousand acres, including river islands — from the Minsi, a band of the Lenape. That detail matters: this was a negotiated purchase of a specific, named place, not an anonymous claim, and it fixes Dupuy at the founding moment of one of the earliest European footholds on this stretch of the Delaware.
Behind him stands a family story of flight and survival. The Dupuys were Huguenots — French Protestants — who left Antois in France as religious refugees and reached New Amsterdam in 1662 with their sons. To be a Huguenot in that era was to belong to a hunted minority, and thousands scattered across the Atlantic world rather than abandon their faith. The family that ended up buying land on the Delaware had already crossed an ocean to be free to worship.
By mid-century the community had grown enough to want a church of its own. In 1750 the proprietor William Allen conveyed a small parcel — five acres — for a Dutch Reformed congregation, an institution that endures today as a Presbyterian church. In one plaque you can watch a frontier settlement mature: first a single family and a land purchase, then neighbors, then a house of worship meant to last.
Its place in the American story
The Dupuy story traces an arc that would repeat across American history: people fleeing religious persecution in the Old World, crossing the Atlantic, and then pushing outward to the edge of settlement to build something new. The particulars are Huguenot and Lenape and Delaware Valley, but the shape of the journey is deeply familiar.
It also captures a quieter truth about how European America expanded — not only by conquest, but through land purchases, negotiations, and the slow knitting-together of communities around a church or a mill. The founding of Shawnee is a small, concrete example of that process near the very beginning of Pennsylvania's inland growth.
And the survival of that early congregation, from a Dutch Reformed beginning to a Presbyterian present, is its own kind of national significance. Institutions like this are among the oldest continuous threads connecting a modern town to its colonial origins — living proof that the people named on the plaque actually built something that outlasted them.
If you visit
Come to Shawnee with the river in mind. The Delaware and its islands were the reason a family settled here in the first place, and standing near the water you can still sense why: this was a place that offered passage, fish, bottomland, and a natural spine for a new community.
Look for the church that grew from the land set aside in 1750. A congregation that traces its roots this far back is a rare thing, and even from the outside it anchors you to the settlement's earliest years. Let it remind you that the marker is not describing a vanished world so much as the seed of the one still around you.
For a road trip, Shawnee pairs naturally with other early-settlement and frontier sites in the upper Delaware Valley. Read this stop as the founding chapter — a refugee family, a Native land sale, and the first church — and the region's later history will read more clearly for 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
- · Nicholas Dupuy
- · William Allen
Related events
- · Settlement of Shawnee
Themes & tags
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