David Zeisberger — First Through the Upper Allegheny Forests

Near this spot in October seventeen sixty-seven, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger camped on his way from Bethlehem to the mouth of Tionesta Creek, traveling with two Delaware companions, Anthony and Papunhank. The marker credits Zeisberger as the first European to pass through the primeval forests of the upper Allegheny River corridor.

That journey opened the way for a remarkable network of Moravian mission towns among the Delaware Indians in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Zeisberger would spend more than sixty years living among Native communities, learning multiple languages, compiling grammars and dictionaries, and advocating for the Christian Delaware's neutrality during the Revolutionary War. That neutrality would turn fatal: in seventeen eighty-two, American militia massacred ninety-six of his peaceful converts at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, one of the darkest episodes of the Revolutionary frontier.