hiked through the small Okehocking Preserve yesterday, originally a part of the 1682 William Penn land grant, that became Chester, Philadelphia and Bucks Counties.Â
This was Native American land (well, what wasn’t) and is still beautiful, but wooded areas that are left are mostly covered with a northern version of kudzu and other vines. In need of clean up. Butterflies all over the open fields of queen anne’s lace and clover. A sewage treatment plant is using some of the fields for ‘modification’ zones. The butterflies don’t seem to care.
Penn granted 500 Acres of the preserve to the Lenape Indians in 1685. As in history of all the states, these original Americans were basically marginalized by about 1730. One generation is all it took to decimate a whole race of people. An overview here.
However, some Lenape remained, intermarried and kept their traditions, language and culture alive, in secret.
Actually Penn gave it to the Indians in 1701.
Another native-American artifact here is the Minquas Trail which may run from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna, as far as its route can be established
James Fenoimore Cooper, 1789-1851, captured the desperation of a dying Indian culture as early as 1826 in The Last of the Mohicans. His hero, Prince of the Delawares, a tribe of the Mohicans, is killed at the end, and in the moving funeral scene, the last in the book, all members of the tribe realize they too are doomed. Earlier in the book there is a scene set at Glens Falls, NY, where the company my father worked for owned a paper mill he regularly visited. I later found out the mill was a major polluter of the Hudson River.
Bill–all the history links I found note 1685 for Penn ‘bequeathing’ the land. Can you give a web link?
Thanks-V
Does this help? Here’s a site that suggests no land was exchanged at all; rather, Penn brokered a peace treaty with the Lenapes (which was later broken, forcing most of them to remove to Oklahamo), but it was never recorded.
http://www.penntreatymuseum.org/treaty.php