Refugee Towns
Tionesta Township, Forest County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This part of the Allegheny was allotted to Munsee and other displaced Indians by the Seneca before 1750. In 1767-70 Zeisberger worked among these refugee groups, then occupying three towns along the river here.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
By 1750 the powerful Seneca had set aside this reach of the Allegheny for Munsee and other displaced Native groups pushed from their homelands farther east. In the years 1767–70 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger worked among these refugees, who lived in three towns strung along the river here. The settlements were part of the great mid-18th-century displacement that reshaped Native geography across the Ohio Valley frontier.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of Native refugee communities — a reminder that dispossession and resettlement were reordering Indigenous life well before the United States existed.
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Related people
- · David Zeisberger
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Forest County
Tionesta, PA · est. 1982
Established in 1848 from Jefferson County and enlarged with part of Venango County in 1866, Forest County was named for the deep woodlands that still define it. Long before county lines, the region was laced with Native American paths, and between 1767 and 1770 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger carried his mission among the Munsee people here. The county seat later moved from Marienville to Tionesta.
Damascus
Tionesta, PA · est. 1947
Along the Allegheny River in what is now Forest County stood one of a cluster of Native refuge towns visited by the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger in the 1760s. Known by the Munsee word for "muskrat," the town was later called Damascus, and at the time it was home to a Seneca sentinel chief who watched over this stretch of the river. The site belongs to a fraught moment when displaced Delaware, Munsee, and other Native peoples gathered in the upper Ohio country amid the pressures of colonial expansion and missionary activity.
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.
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.