Okehocking: Penn's Only Indian Reservation

William Penn is remembered for treating the Lenape more fairly than most colonial proprietors, and this spot is the most concrete evidence of that reputation. In seventeen oh one, Penn set aside five hundred acres on the north side of this road, east of Ridley Creek, for a group of Lenape of the Unami branch, whose chiefs were Pokhais, Sepopawny, and Muttagooppa. Their clan totem was the tortoise.

Penn had moved them here from their earlier lands along Lower Ridley and Crum Creeks. This is often described as the only formal Indian reservation William Penn established in his colony. It did not last, the pressures of colonial expansion were too great, and the Lenape eventually moved westward, then northward, and ultimately out of Pennsylvania altogether.

But the Okehocking tract, brief as it was, stands as a singular moment when a colonial proprietor put a land boundary on paper for Indigenous people rather than against them.