First Huguenot Settlement — Paradise, Lancaster County, seventeen ten

In September seventeen ten, William Penn granted two thousand acres here to Daniel Fiere and Isaac Lefever, refugees from France who had fled religious persecution as Huguenots. They arrived with their mother, Madam Mary Fiere, and established what became the first white settlement in this part of Lancaster County.

The Huguenots were French Protestants driven from France by Louis the Fourteenth's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in sixteen eighty-five, scattering tens of thousands across Protestant Europe and the American colonies. Penn's Pennsylvania actively welcomed religious dissenters, and the Fiere-Lefever family joined a wave of Huguenot, German, and Welsh settlers reshaping the mid-Atlantic frontier. Near this very marker, Daniel Lefever, son of Isaac and Catharine Fiere, is said to have been the first white child born in the settlement, a small human footnote in the story of a colony built on radical toleration.