Conoy Indian Town: A People Between Empires
Near York, Pennsylvania
In the early seventeen hundreds, the Conoy tribe maintained a village slightly west of here along the Susquehanna River. The Conoy had originally lived around Chesapeake Bay, closely related to the Piscataway and Nanticoke peoples of the tidewater. Pressure from English colonial settlement and regional warfare pushed them northward into Pennsylvania, where they settled under a loose arrangement with the Iroquois Confederacy.
Their town here became one of a string of displaced native communities clinging to the Susquehanna corridor, people caught between expanding colonial powers and the political demands of the Six Nations. The Conoy later moved on again, and the tribe eventually left Pennsylvania. The marker here is one of a handful of reminders that this stretch of the Pennsylvania interior was, not long ago, a contested borderland where older peoples tried to hold on.
