Kittanning: Heart of Delaware Country

By seventeen twenty-seven this river flat along the Allegheny was already well established as the chief settlement of the Lenni-Lenape, the Delaware people, as they moved westward from the Susquehanna Valley under pressure from colonial expansion. Kittanning became the most important Indigenous center west of the Allegheny Mountains, a hub for trade, diplomacy, and, as relations with colonists deteriorated, a base for raids into the Pennsylvania frontier. During the French and Indian War the village sheltered captives taken from Pennsylvania settlements and coordinated with French-allied forces to the north.

On September eighth, seventeen fifty-six, Colonel John Armstrong led three hundred frontier soldiers from the Cumberland Valley in a dawn assault that destroyed the town and freed some captives, though others died in the attack. The Lenape rebuilt elsewhere, continuing westward, eventually removed beyond the Ohio. Armstrong County and the city of Kittanning preserve the name of both the colonel and the people he displaced.