The Walking Purchase of Seventeen Thirty-Seven
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
In September of seventeen thirty-seven, Pennsylvania's Penn proprietors staged one of colonial America's most notorious land swindles. Under an old document of uncertain authenticity, they claimed rights to all the land a man could walk in a day and a half from Wrightstown in Bucks County. They hired Edward Marshall and two other athletes, cleared a path in advance, and had the walkers run rather than walk.
Marshall covered roughly seventy miles in a day and a half, reaching near present-day Jim Thorpe, far beyond what a normal walk would have covered. The Lenape, who expected a modest claim, lost more than a million acres. A survey line was run a half-mile east of this spot by surveyor general Benjamin Eastburn.
The Walking Purchase became a lasting symbol of colonial treaty fraud and fueled Lenape alliance with the French in the coming Seven Years War.
