First Town West of the Susquehanna

Stand at the intersection of George Street and Market Street in downtown York and you are standing at the exact center of a city that Thomas Cookson surveyed in seventeen forty-one. Cookson was a deputy surveyor for Lancaster County, dispatched by the Penn family with a simple mandate: lay out a town on grid lines west of the Susquehanna River. The location was chosen with care.

The Codorus Creek ran nearby, powering grist mills and tanneries. The Monocacy Trail, an old Native American trading path, crossed through what would become Market Street, connecting the backcountry to the river crossings. On November twenty-third of seventeen forty-one, the first lot holders signed their agreements, paying seven shillings a year for parcels measuring two hundred thirty feet deep and sixty-five feet wide, pledging to raise substantial dwellings on the land within a fixed number of years.

The settlers who came were largely German. The Pennsylvania Dutch, as they came to be called, were craftsmen and farmers who had moved inland from the older settlements along the Delaware coast. They built in half-timber Germanic style, spoke their own dialect, and organized their town around craft guilds and a central market square.

The first permanent structure was a tavern, the Golden Plough, raised by Martin Eichelberger on the corner of West Market and Pershing Avenue in that same founding year of seventeen forty-one. It is still standing today, making it one of the oldest surviving buildings in Pennsylvania. Within a generation, York had grown from a surveyed grid of empty lots into a working market town of several thousand souls, the largest settlement in Pennsylvania west of the great river.