Smithfield Church
Smithfield Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Believed to be the first of four early churches built by Dutch Settlers, it stood below the road toward the river. The log structure housed the Dutch Reformed congregation until it moved to the Old Stone Church in Shawnee ca. in 1752.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the mid-1700s the Dutch families who had settled this region raised a simple log meetinghouse, said to be the first of four early churches they built. It sheltered a Dutch Reformed congregation until roughly 1752, when the worshippers moved to the Old Stone Church at Shawnee. In an age when the church was the heart of frontier community life, this humble structure anchored the faith of one of the region's earliest European settlements.
Why it matters
The church reflects how colonial settlers carried their religious traditions into the American backcountry, planting congregations that helped bind scattered frontier families into communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first half of the 1700s, the wooded ridges and river bottoms of what is now Monroe County sat on the edge of European settlement in Pennsylvania. This was frontier country — hard to reach, thinly peopled, and shaped by the rivers that served as the highways of the age. Families who pushed into these valleys were staking a claim not just to farmland but to a way of life they carried with them across the ocean.
Among the earliest to put down roots here were settlers of Dutch descent, part of the broader stream of northern European Protestants who spread through the mid-Atlantic colonies in the colonial era. They came looking for land and the freedom to worship as they pleased, and in colonial Pennsylvania — founded on a promise of religious tolerance — they found room to do both.
This was a time when a settlement's first permanent building of consequence was often its house of worship. Before there were towns, there were congregations; before there were courthouses, there were meetinghouses. A church raised in the backcountry was a statement that people meant to stay.
People & events
The story here is not of a famous name but of a community and the modest log building it raised. According to the marker, this church is believed to have been the first of four early churches built by the region's Dutch settlers — a striking detail, because it suggests a people determined enough in their faith to build not once but repeatedly as their numbers grew and shifted across the land.
The structure itself was humble: a log building, set below the road on the slope toward the river. Inside, a Dutch Reformed congregation gathered — the transplanted branch of a Protestant tradition with deep roots in the Netherlands. For the families who worshipped here, the meetinghouse would have been the center of the week, the place where births, marriages, and deaths were marked and where a scattered community became, for a few hours, one body.
Around 1752 the congregation moved on, relocating to the Old Stone Church in Shawnee. The shift from a log building to a stone one traces a familiar frontier arc: a first, quickly-built shelter of logs giving way to something more permanent as a community matured and could afford to build in stone.
Its place in the American story
The larger American story is written in thousands of small congregations like this one. Long before the founding of the nation, the peopling of the colonial backcountry was carried out by families who brought their faiths with them and planted them in the soil of the frontier. Their churches were among the first institutions to bind isolated households into communities.
Colonial Pennsylvania holds a special place in that story. Its founding commitment to religious liberty drew a remarkable mix of Protestant traditions — English, German, Scots-Irish, Dutch, and more — each free to organize its own congregations. The result was a patchwork of faiths that helped make the region one of the most religiously diverse places in the early colonies, and set an example the young United States would later enshrine as a national principle.
A log church that no longer stands may seem a small thing to remember. But it marks a beginning — the moment a group of newcomers decided this valley would be home, and built accordingly.
If you visit
Come to this spot in Smithfield Township expecting quiet rather than spectacle. The original log church is long gone, and what you are really visiting is a place in the landscape — the ground where one of the region's earliest congregations first gathered.
Give yourself a moment to read the land the way the settlers would have. The marker notes the church stood below the road, on the slope toward the river. Picture the pull of that water: in the colonial frontier, rivers were the roads, and a congregation set near one was a congregation within reach of its neighbors.
This makes a rewarding stop for travelers drawn to the deep, pre-Revolutionary layers of Pennsylvania history. Pair it with a slow drive through the surrounding countryside and, if you like following a thread, a look toward Shawnee — where the congregation moved around 1752 — to trace how one community's spiritual home shifted across the land as it grew.
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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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nicholas Dupuy (1682-1762) - PLAQUE
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1930
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.
Dutch Settlers
Middle Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2000
Long before Pennsylvania's roads and railroads, Dutch colonists pushed inland from the Hudson River valley toward the Delaware, following the rugged trace known as the Old Mine Road. Crossing at Walpack Bend, these early settlers opened up this corner of the Pocono region, making the route the oldest road in Monroe County. Their arrival marked the first sustained European presence in a landscape then largely shaped by Native peoples.
Colonel Jacob Stroud - PLAQUE
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1931
This graveyard began as the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury, a Moravian outpost started in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. The mission chapel was destroyed during the Indian uprising of 1755 amid the French and Indian War, then rebuilt. Colonel Jacob Stroud — the frontier officer and founder of Stroudsburg — lies buried here.
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