The Walking Purchase of Seventeen Thirty-Seven

Here in the meadow of a farm along Cook's Creek, the walkers paused for their midday meal on the first day of the infamous Walking Purchase of seventeen thirty-seven. The Penn proprietors had a deed, possibly forged, granting them land equal to a day and a half's walk from Wrightstown. They hired the three fastest runners in Pennsylvania, trained them in advance, cleared brush along the route, and set them sprinting rather than walking.

Edward Marshall and his associates covered roughly sixty-five miles, far more than the Lenape had imagined possible. The Lenape called it a swindle. The purchase dispossessed them of hundreds of thousands of acres, by some counts over a million, in the Delaware River valley and became one of the most notorious frauds in colonial American history.

This meadow, once the farm of widow Mary Wilson, was the walkers' noon rest stop.