Walking Purchase
Allen Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Measured 1737, according to a supposed Indian deed of 1686, granting lands extending a day-and-a-half walk. Using picked men to force this measure to its limit, Thomas Penn reversed his father's Indian policy, losing Indian friendship.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1737 Pennsylvania's proprietors invoked a supposed 1686 deed that promised land stretching as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. Rather than an honest stroll, Thomas Penn hired trained runners and cleared paths to push the boundary to its farthest possible limit, seizing far more Lenape land than the tribe expected. In doing so he abandoned the fairer dealings of his father, William Penn, and poisoned relations between the colony and its Native neighbors.
Why it matters
The Walking Purchase is a defining example of how legal fictions were used to dispossess Native nations, and it helped set the stage for a generation of frontier warfare.
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Related people
- · Thomas Penn
Related events
- · Walking Purchase
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Famous Indian Walk - PLAQUE
Allen Township, PA · est. 1925
This marker follows the route of the 1737 "Walking Purchase," the day-and-a-half walk from Wrightstown that Pennsylvania's proprietors used to lay claim to a vast swath of Lenape land. Edward Marshall and his fellow walkers pressed nearly to present Mauch Chunk, passing Hockendauqua Indian Town on the way; a formal survey line was run afterward by Surveyor General Benjamin Eastburn. The lands taken stretched far beyond anything the Delaware believed they had agreed to.
Walking Purchase
Allen Township, PA · est. 1947
In September 1737, colonial officials invoked a disputed deed to claim as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half, and the swift Edward Marshall and his companions covered a startling distance well beyond what the Lenape had expected. Their route carried them past this point, across Hokendauqua Creek, and near a Native town, seizing far more territory than the Lenape believed they had agreed to surrender. The so-called Walking Purchase became infamous as a symbol of colonial deception.
Hockendauqua - PLAQUE
Allen Township, PA · est. 1925
In the tangled early history of Penn's Woods, this ground sat beside an Lenape (Delaware) town near the Lehigh River, home to leaders the colonists knew as Lappawinzo and Tishcohan. Their names are bound to the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737, when Pennsylvania's proprietors used a decades-old, dubiously drawn deed to claim land measured by a day-and-a-half's walk. The colony hired fast, trained walkers like Edward Marshall, who strode far beyond what any ordinary traveler could cover, extending the boundary and stripping the Lenape of vast holdings.
Meniolagomeka Memorial
Eldred Township, PA
In the mid-1700s the Moravians, German-speaking Protestants known for their missions among Native peoples, established a station called Meniolagomeka in the Pennsylvania backcountry that operated from 1749 to 1755. Like other Moravian missions of the era, it drew Indigenous converts into a shared community until frontier tensions in the 1750s brought it to an end. The Moravian Historical Society set this memorial in 1901 to keep the vanished settlement's memory alive.