Picture Rocks — A Lenape Village and Its Vanished Art

The borough of Picture Rocks takes its name from something that no longer exists. Before European settlers arrived in seventeen seventy-three, this bend of Muncy Creek was a Munsee Lenape village, and settlers later found pictographs on the rocks above the creek. Those pictographs were the defining feature of the place.

The first settlers named the location for what they saw on the stone. The borough was formally incorporated in eighteen seventy-five, and the pictographs are no longer visible, leaving the name as the main evidence they were ever there. The first Pennsylvania land warrant for property here was issued in seventeen seventy-three.

The land passed through several hands before eighteen forty-eight, when founders Sprout and Burrows laid out the town as a small milling community on the creek. The Lenape artwork that named the town is gone, but the name it left behind has lasted two and a half centuries.