The Great Trail - Minquas or Susquehanna Indians- PLAQUE
West Goshen Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
From the Susquehanna to the Schuylkill. Crossed the present road about this point. It was the path prior to 1670 for their conquest of the Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians and for trade with the first Dutch and Swedish settlers on the Delaware River. Thousands of Beaver skins yearly being carried down over this "Beversrede" or Beaver Road to Fort Beversrede. On the site of Philadelphia and to other neighboring trading posts.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Long before roads crossed this country, a great Indian path ran from the Susquehanna to the Schuylkill, carrying the Minquas or Susquehannock people on their wars and their commerce. Along it flowed a fortune in beaver pelts, thousands each year hauled down the "Beversrede" to the Dutch and Swedish traders on the Delaware. The trail was a highway of the fur trade that first tied the interior nations to European markets on the coast.
Why it matters
The beaver trade that moved along paths like this one drove the earliest European economy of the mid-Atlantic and reshaped the balance of power among its Native nations.
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Related events
- · fur trade
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Great Minquas Path
West Goshen Township, PA · est. 1951
In the 1600s, before English rule was secure, the Great Minquas Path was one of the most valuable trails in the region — the key artery of the fur trade linking Native towns of the interior with trading posts on the lower Schuylkill. Along it flowed the beaver pelts that made the Delaware Valley a prize, and the Dutch, Swedes, and English each struggled to control it. The path crossed near this spot, a quiet reminder of a contest for commerce and empire.
Minquas' Path
Rose Valley, PA · est. 1947
Long before roads crossed this part of Pennsylvania, an Indian trading path ran west from the Delaware to the country of the Susquehannock — called Minquas by the Dutch and Swedes — and forded Ridley Creek near this spot. Along it moved one of the most valuable commodities of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world: beaver pelts, carried east by the thousands each year to the small Dutch and Swedish trading posts on the Delaware. This single artery tied the fur-rich interior to a global market hungry for felt hats, and helped decide which European power would prosper on the river.
Okehocking Indian Town - PLAQUE
Willistown Township, PA · est. 1924
In 1701 William Penn set aside a 500-acre square along Ridley Creek for the Okehocking band of the Unami Lenni-Lenape, moving the chiefs Pokhais, Sepopawny, and Muttagooppa and their people here from the lower Ridley and Crum Creek country. Penn's records describe it as the only formal Indian reservation the proprietor ever established. The tract offered a brief, protected refuge as European settlement steadily pressed in around it.
Indian Hannah (1730-1802) - PLAQUE
East Marlborough Township, PA · est. 1925
Indian Hannah, born nearby around 1730, is remembered as the last of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians of Chester County, descended through her mother and grandmother from the Unami people of the Turtle clan. She lived out her long life under the protection of the Quaker assemblyman William Webb, in a county from which nearly all her people had already been displaced. Her story is that of a Native community's twilight in a corner of Penn's colony.