Shamokin Dam: Place of Eels, Crossroads of Nations

The name Shamokin comes from a Lenape word that translates roughly as place of eels , a reference to the abundant American eels that once ran thick in these waters where Shamokin Creek met the Susquehanna River. The village stood at the forks of the Susquehanna, in what is now Sunbury, a place that gives almost no hint of the extraordinary role this location once played in the colonial world.

From roughly seventeen twenty-seven to seventeen fifty-six, Shamokin was one of the largest and most significant Native American settlements in Pennsylvania , possibly in all of British North America east of the Alleghenies. The village at the confluence was home to Delaware, Shawnee, Conoy, Nanticoke, and other peoples who had been pushed west from their original territories by the expansion of European settlement. Many of them had arrived under pressure after the Walking Purchase of seventeen thirty-seven, a fraudulent land deal in which Pennsylvania officials claimed an enormous tract of Delaware territory by having runners race for a day and a half rather than walk, as the agreement had specified.

Shamokin was a diplomatic crossroads as well as a refugee settlement. Iroquois representatives exercised significant influence here, and colonial Pennsylvania sent ambassadors to the village to negotiate, to exchange goods, and to manage an increasingly tense frontier. The missionary Conrad Weiser made multiple visits, as did Christian Frederic Post, who tried to draw Shamokin's residents away from French alliance during the Seven Years' War.

The multiethnic world of colonial Shamokin collapsed in the violence of the French and Indian War after seventeen fifty-five, when the village dispersed and the survivors scattered. A European settlement took shape afterward , founded as Keensville in seventeen forty-five by George Keen , but the depth of the Native history here runs far beneath the surface of the present-day borough.