Wilkes-Barre
Wilkes-Barre Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Laid out 1770 by a group of Connecticut settlers, on land claimed by that state. Seat of "County of Westmoreland," erected 1776. Near here took place the Wyoming Massacre, 1778, and the "Pennamite Wars" of 1769-72 and 1784.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this Susquehanna valley land under their colony's sea-to-sea charter—a claim Pennsylvania hotly disputed. The rival claims erupted into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and again in 1784, while the Revolution brought the brutal Wyoming Massacre of 1778 nearby. Organized as the seat of Connecticut's "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the town sat at the center of one of early America's fiercest boundary struggles.
Why it matters
Wilkes-Barre's tangled origins reveal how fragile colonial borders and competing land claims could turn violent, and how the Revolution's frontier warfare reached deep into the Pennsylvania backcountry.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades before the Revolution, the Susquehanna valley was a frontier in the fullest sense of the word: forested, contested, and only lightly settled by Europeans. When the first Connecticut families laid out their town here in 1770, they were pushing into country far from the Atlantic settlements, on land that two colonies both insisted belonged to them.
The root of the trouble was old colonial geography. Several early English charters granted land in broad bands stretching, on paper, from sea to sea — long before anyone knew what lay in between. Connecticut read its charter as reaching clear across the continent, and so claimed a strip of northeastern Pennsylvania hundreds of miles from its own coast. Pennsylvania, with its own royal grant, regarded the same ground as plainly its own.
That overlap was not an abstraction to the people who lived it. It meant two sets of land titles, two sets of officials, and two communities each convinced the other were trespassers. A settler could clear a field, build a cabin, and still not know whose law protected it. That uncertainty is the backdrop against which this settlement was founded and fought over.
People & events
The Connecticut settlers who arrived in 1770 came to stay, and they organized their new home with the confidence of people who believed the land was rightfully theirs. In 1776 they went further, establishing it as the seat of a county — Westmoreland — created under Connecticut's authority, a bold assertion that this valley belonged to a colony a long way to the east.
But the years around the founding were violent ones. The inscription remembers the "Pennamite Wars" — bouts of armed struggle between the Connecticut settlers and Pennsylvania claimants, the first flaring in 1769–72 and another erupting in 1784. These were not grand battles so much as a smoldering frontier feud fought with muskets, fortifications, evictions, and reprisals, as each side tried to hold the ground by force when courts and charters could not settle the question.
Then came the darkest day. In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the surrounding valley suffered the notorious Wyoming Massacre — a devastating attack that fell on the frontier settlements while the young United States was fighting for its life. The marker sets these events side by side because they happened, in effect, to the same community: a place caught between rival colonies and then swept into the wider war.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the American Revolution as a contest fought in the streets of Boston and on the fields of Virginia. This place is a reminder that the young nation's edges were just as much a part of the story — and that the edges were bloody, tangled, and far from settled.
The boundary quarrel here is a vivid case of a problem the whole country would have to solve: what happens when overlapping colonial claims, drawn in ignorance of the actual land, finally collide with people living on it? The disputes could not be wished away; they had to be argued, fought, and eventually adjudicated. Working out who owned what — and by whose authority — was part of the hard, unglamorous labor of becoming a single nation rather than a patchwork of competing claims.
And the wartime violence that reached this valley shows how the Revolution engulfed ordinary frontier families. The fight for independence was not only a war of armies and declarations; it was also a war that came home to remote settlements, where survival itself could hang on the outcome.
If you visit
Stand here and let the geography do its work. The valley you're in was worth two colonies fighting over precisely because it was good country — river bottom, farmland, a route into the interior. What looks peaceful now was, in its founding years, one of the most bitterly contested pieces of ground in the colonies.
As you read the marker, hold two very different kinds of conflict in mind at once. One was a neighbors' war between rival settlers over who held the deed to the land itself; the other was the Revolution, arriving here as sudden, terrible violence. This single valley knew both within a handful of years.
If you're building a road trip, treat this as a doorway into Pennsylvania's frontier past. The larger Wyoming Valley around you carries this layered history everywhere you turn, and the marker is best appreciated as an invitation to slow down and imagine a place where the map itself was still being argued over.
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 events
- · Wyoming Massacre
- · Pennamite Wars
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Wyoming
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947
Pennsylvania built Fort Wyoming in 1771 to press its claim in the Wyoming Valley, only to have it seized by the Connecticut settlers it was meant to check. Rebuilt in 1778, it served the following year as a mustering point for General John Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois during the Revolution. The garrison held until 1784, when Continental and Pennsylvania troops withdrew and the works were destroyed.
Wilkes-Barre
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1949
Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this stretch of the Susquehanna under their colony's charter in defiance of Pennsylvania. The dispute boiled over into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and 1784, and in 1778 the surrounding Wyoming Valley suffered the infamous Wyoming Massacre during the Revolution. Made the seat of the Connecticut-created "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the settlement stood at the heart of a bitter contest over who owned the land itself.
Forty Fort
Forty Fort, PA · est. 1947
Forty Fort took its name from the forty Connecticut pioneers who came to the Wyoming Valley in 1769 and began the stockade the next year. It is remembered above all for the aftermath of July 3, 1778, when its surrender to a British, Loyalist, and Native force under Major John Butler was followed by the Wyoming Massacre, one of the war's bloodiest frontier episodes. The killing of settlers and prisoners shocked the young nation and hardened resolve against the Iroquois allies of the Crown.
Jacob Stroud (1735-1806)
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1991
Jacob Stroud (1735-1806) was a militia colonel and Revolutionary patriot who fortified his home on this frontier as Fort Penn during the dangerous years of the war. He served in Pennsylvania's 1776 constitutional convention and later in the state legislature, then in 1799 founded the town that bears his name, laying out its streets with his son Daniel. His life spans the transformation of this Pocono country from exposed frontier to settled community.