Queonemysing: The Lenape Land Sale to William Penn
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
Across Brandywine Creek from this spot once stood Queonemysing, a village of the Unami group of the Lenni-Lenape, also known as the Delaware people. Their totem was the tortoise. Chief Secetareus and his people lived here, connected to Wilmington by the ancient Rattlesnake Trail over Point Lookout.
In sixteen eighty-three, Secetareus signed a deed selling William Penn land in this region. It was one of Penn's celebrated land purchases, negotiated with more ceremony than most colonial land transactions of the era, though the long-term consequences for the Lenape were the same as elsewhere: dispossession, displacement, and the erasure of villages like this one from the map.
