Indian Hannah, Last of the Lenape in Chester County
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
Somewhere in a vale about three hundred yards east of this marker, a woman named Hannah was born in seventeen thirty-one. Her mother was Indian Sarah; her grandmother, Indian Jane. All three belonged to the Unami band of the Lenni-Lenape, the Delaware people whose totem was the Tortoise.
By the time of Hannah's birth, most of the Lenape had already been pushed west by land pressures and treaty losses. Hannah remained, living on land claimed by William Webb, a Quaker assemblyman. She outlived her entire community.
When Hannah died in eighteen oh two at about seventy-one, she was widely regarded as the last Indigenous person living in Chester County. The marker erected here in nineteen twenty-five is one of the earliest Pennsylvania historical markers and stands as acknowledgment of an entire people's erasure from land their ancestors had held for centuries.
