Old Jail
Lancaster, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The Lancaster jail was located a half block to the north from 1753 to 1851. The last remaining Conestoga Indians were held here in protective custody in 1763. They were killed by a vigilante group, the Paxton Boys. No arrests were made.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Lancaster's colonial jail once stood just north of this spot, serving the county from 1753 to 1851. In December 1763, the last surviving members of the Conestoga—a small community descended from the once-powerful Susquehannock—were sheltered here for their own safety. A frontier mob known as the Paxton Boys broke in and murdered them, and no one was ever charged for the killings.
Why it matters
The Conestoga massacre stands as one of colonial America's starkest examples of vigilante violence against Native people, a killing that shocked even Benjamin Franklin and exposed the failure of law to protect the vulnerable on the frontier.
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Related people
- · Paxton Boys
Related events
- · Conestoga Massacre of 1763
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church
Lancaster, PA · est. 1975
Founded in 1730, this Lancaster congregation stood at the heart of a bustling colonial town where the Pennsylvania frontier met the settled east. Its early building even hosted a 1762 Indian treaty council, a reminder that diplomacy with Native nations often unfolded in the plainest of civic spaces. The stone church dedicated in 1766 still guards the graves of two Pennsylvania statesmen of the Revolutionary era, Thomas Wharton and Governor Thomas Mifflin.
Conestoga Indian Town - PLAQUE
Manor Township, PA · est. 1924
The people remembered here were survivors of the once-powerful Susquehannock (Minquas) nation, an Iroquoian people whose towns had commanded the lower Susquehanna before war and disease shattered them. Regrouped as the Conestoga, they lived on land within William Penn's proprietary manor and treated with Penn himself in 1701 under his policy of peaceful dealing. That fragile peace ended in 1763, when a vigilante mob from Paxton murdered the last of them.
Great Minqua Path
Manor Township, PA · est. 1951
This was the great artery of the mid-17th-century fur trade, the chief trail by which the Minqua—also known as the Susquehannock—carried beaver pelts eastward to the European settlements along the Delaware. The trade was so lucrative that the Swedes, Dutch, and English fought one another to control it. The path traced a route of immense commercial and political importance in the early contest for the region.
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Along a bend of the lower Susquehanna River lies one of the densest clusters of archaeological sites in Pennsylvania, holding traces of human presence stretching back some 11,000 years — from fleeting hunting camps to sprawling palisaded villages. Its most powerful inhabitants were the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian-speaking people who dominated the regional fur trade with European colonists through much of the 1600s. By 1675, warfare with rival nations and devastating epidemics had shattered their power. Generations of excavation here have reshaped how scholars understand Native lifeways in the mid-Atlantic.