The Great Shamokin Path

The road running past this marker follows, more or less, one of the most important Native American travel corridors in colonial Pennsylvania. The Great Shamokin Path linked the Susquehanna River Valley to the Allegheny River, connecting the great systems of the east and west. Long before European contact, Delaware and Shawnee peoples used it for hunting and trade.

During the French and Indian War in the seventeen fifties, warriors traveling this path carried the conflict deep into the Pennsylvania frontier. The path also served peaceful purposes. In July seventeen seventy-two, the Moravian bishop John Ettwein led a remarkable procession along this section: two hundred Native American converts traveling with their cows from the Susquehanna country westward to the mission town of Friedensstadt. The highway you drive today, like so many roads in Pennsylvania, began as a footpath worn smooth by generations of travelers long before the first colonist arrived.