Penns Creek Massacre: The War Comes to Pennsylvania

In October seventeen fifty-five, the French and Indian War arrived on Pennsylvania's doorstep in the most violent way imaginable. Along Penns Creek, a few miles from here, a raiding party attacked frontier settlers, killing, wounding, or capturing about twenty-six people. It was the first Indian attack within the settled parts of Pennsylvania since William Penn's famous treaty had kept relative peace for more than sixty years.

The trigger was General Edward Braddock's catastrophic defeat that summer near Fort Duquesne. With British military power humiliated, France's Indigenous allies pushed deep into Pennsylvania. The Penns Creek attack sent shockwaves through the colony.

Thousands of settlers fled eastward. The Pennsylvania assembly, dominated by Quakers who had resisted military spending on principle, was forced to take defensive action for the first time. A chain of frontier forts followed, and Pennsylvania's era of peaceful coexistence with the Delaware and Shawnee came to a brutal end.