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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades before the American Revolution, the upper Allegheny valley was a country in flux. Colonial settlement pressing from the east and the far-reaching power of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy to the north kept Native communities in motion — displaced from old homelands and resettled in new arrangements across the Ohio watershed. This was colonial America, generations before any national border reached here.
This part of the river, in present-day Hickory Township, lay within the reach of Seneca authority. As the westernmost of the Iroquois nations, the Seneca held sway over much of this region, and before 1750 they allotted a portion of the valley to displaced peoples — including the Munsee, a northern branch of the Delaware (Lenape).
What took shape was a frontier of refuge: communities rebuilding on ground granted to them, making homes in a valley that was not their ancestral place but became, for a time, their own.
People & events
Tied to this ground is David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary whose life was spent largely among Native peoples of the eastern woodlands. His method was to go where the people were — to learn their tongues, live in their towns, and stay with them through relocation and hardship.
From 1767 to 1770 he worked among the refugee groups here, who then lived in three towns spread along this reach of the Allegheny. That the communities numbered three, not one, hints at a substantial population — enough people to sustain distinct settlements and to hold a missionary's attention over several years.
The work here was patient and daily: preaching and teaching, and the delicate meeting of a European faith with peoples already displaced once and resolved to keep their footing. It is that human effort, on both sides, that the marker gestures toward.
Its place in the American story
The refugee towns along this river carry a truth central to American history and often left out of it: the upheaval of Native peoples began long before the United States. Displacement and resettlement were already remaking the map of Indigenous life in the Ohio country during the colonial period.
The fact that the Seneca allotted this land to newcomers points to a fully functioning Native political order — one with its own authority and diplomacy — governing country that colonial records of the time hardly knew. This was not a blank frontier but a contested, negotiated homeland.
Much of what we can still say about these communities survives because missionaries like Zeisberger set it down in writing. The towns themselves have vanished, but their memory keeps this quiet valley connected to a far larger story of loss, movement, and the rebuilding of community.
If you visit
Expect a landscape of forest and flowing water. Near the marker, look toward the river and the level ground beside it — the kind of setting where riverside towns naturally took root, close to the water that carried people and news through this country.
Use the detail of "three towns" to change what you picture. This was inhabited land: fields, dwellings, and the daily life of people who had already come a long way to settle here. There are no structures to tour, so bring your imagination; the site rewards a slow look more than a quick photo.
This marker belongs to a cluster of Forest County stops that follow the same era of displaced Native communities and Moravian missions along the Allegheny. Make an unhurried afternoon of it, pull over safely, and let the river valley set the mood.
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
- · 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.