Refugee Towns
Hickory 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
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.
Why it matters
It records how Native refugees rebuilt community on granted land, a human dimension of the displacement that accompanied colonial expansion.
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Related people
- · David Zeisberger
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
Lawunakhannek
Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947
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.
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.