Daniel Boone's Birthplace: The Oley Valley and the Frontiersman's First Home
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
About twelve miles east of Reading, just past the town of Birdsboro, a state historic site marks the place where one of the most famous figures in American frontier mythology was born. The Daniel Boone Homestead sits in the Oley Valley, a pocket of especially fertile farmland in southern Berks County, and it is the actual log cabin site where Boone came into the world on October twenty-second, seventeen thirty-four.
His father, Squire Boone, built the original cabin in seventeen thirty on land in what the Penns were selling off to newly arrived settlers. Squire was a Quaker by faith, a blacksmith and weaver by trade, and an ambitious farmer who expanded his holdings as his family grew. Daniel was the sixth of eleven children. As a boy, his job was tending the family's dairy cattle on pastureland at the edge of the forest, a responsibility that meant spending summer months in a rough shelter at the wood's edge, watching for bear and bobcat and mountain lion.
The Boone family's time in the Oley Valley ended in circumstances that reveal something about the tight community pressures of colonial Quaker life. When Daniel's older siblings married outside the Quaker faith, the meeting pressed the parents to publicly answer for it. Squire Boone stood by his children rather than his meeting, and by seventeen fifty the family had sold their land and moved south, eventually settling on the Yadkin River in what is now North Carolina.
Daniel Boone was about sixteen when he left Berks County. He would become one of the great symbolic figures of American westward expansion, the explorer of Kentucky, the builder of the Wilderness Road. That story begins here, in a log cabin in the Oley Valley, where a blacksmith's son watched the tree line and learned to read the woods.
