Conestoga Indian Town

This land along the lower Susquehanna was home to the Conestoga people, survivors of the ancient Susquehannock nation who had once controlled trade across much of the mid-Atlantic. By the early seventeen hundreds, disease and war had reduced them to a small peaceful community on William Penn's Proprietary Manor of Conestoga. Penn himself visited in seventeen oh one and concluded a treaty of friendship with them.

For six more decades they lived quietly here. Then on December fourteenth, seventeen sixty-three, a mob of Scots-Irish settlers known as the Paxton Boys rode to the Conestoga town and murdered six people. Two weeks later the Paxton Boys tracked the remaining fourteen survivors to a Lancaster workhouse where they had been placed for protection, broke down the doors, and killed everyone inside.

The Conestoga people were gone. Not one member of the nation survived.