I can't believe it's already November! Only a handful more blog posts before I do my annual retrospective post and look ahead to 2022. Hopefully I have enough material to get me through the winter months, especially if the snow is heavy and I can't go looking for more, although it would be nice if I can manage one more marker collecting quest before the days get too cold.
This blog is sort of a cross between a hobby and a job. It's both and it's neither all at once. I take it very seriously, because much of my personal identity is bound up in being a writer; but at the same time, I can't take it too seriously or I'll never have any fun with it, and life has enough things in it that aren't fun without volunteering for more.
(On that note, thank you for the kind remarks I received following last week's post, with regards to the passing of my dear friend Jessica. I am very appreciative of all my readers who reached out to offer their condolences; it meant a lot.)
Today's post is one of those with which I've had a bit of fun. The subject itself isn't particularly amusing or anything, but the wording of the marker kind of is. See, almost without fail, the wording of the historical markers is sensible and easy to understand; this is a good thing, because otherwise most people would ignore them more than they already do. But today's marker is a little different - I kept reading the text and just sort of blinking at it. Why would Pennsylvania have had a fort which protected the courthouse of a county in Connecticut? On what map does that make any kind of sense?
Well, as it turns out, there was once a series of minor wars between Pennsylvania and Connecticut. If this is the first you're hearing of such a thing, don't feel bad, because I never heard about it either.
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| The marker stands in Wilkes-Barre's Public Square, near the intersection of Main and Market Streets |
Of course it wasn't Penn's fault that he was claiming something which had already been given to someone else; he probably didn't even have any idea of it, and he was just going along with what the king had written for him. For the first few decades, the land was so sparsely settled by both groups that there was little conflict between them, focused as they were on the fact that the Susquehannocks didn't want either of them there. A Connecticut settlement had already been established in the region, but was destroyed through a Native uprising which was part of a plot to kill the Delaware chief Teedyuscung. The chief has his own marker and I'll go into more detail about that whole situation when I manage to get a picture of it.
But in 1768, a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut formed a group called the Susquehanna Company, which was dispatched down to Pennsylvania to settle the area known as the Wyoming Valley. The plan was to divide that portion of Connecticut's claim into five townships; one of these was to be called Wilkes-Barre. It was named for John Wilkes and Isaac Barre, a pair of gentlemen in the English Parliament who were in favor of greater independence for the colonies, and we'll talk more about them when we get to the Wilkes-Barre city marker.
Well, the Susquehanna Company got to the Wyoming Valley and found that there were already settlers farming the land, having answered the call to come and live in Penn's utopia of religious freedom. Needless to say, this did not go over particularly well with the Connecticut delegation, and to be fair, theirs was the older claim to the land. Fighting broke out, and this became known as the first Yankee-Pennamite War. During this time, the Yankees (that is, the Connecticut side) established a pair of forts, with which they managed to hold their claim, and each of these has a marker of its own which I'll be covering later. One was Fort Durkee, which stood near the present-day site of Wilkes University; the other was known as Forty Fort, which sounds a bit absurd - it reminds me of Boaty McBoatface - but it was given that name because it was built by the first forty settlers from Connecticut. There followed a series of skirmishes between the two sides, and following the Battle of Nanticoke, the Yankees held their claim.
My sources disagree on whether there were two or three Yankee-Pennamite Wars. I guess it depends on your perspective, but either there were two - one from 1769-1770 and another in 1774 - or that was all just one long war with a number of quiet periods between battles. Adding fuel to the fire, King George III made a ruling in 1771 which upheld the Connecticut claim.
In any case, the whole thing got suspended in 1776 when independence was declared and the American Revolution got started. There wasn't time for the settlers to be arguing among themselves about who owned what when they had a common enemy. Despite this, however, the Yankees had determined that what is now Wilkes-Barre was part of the Connecticut county of Westmoreland, and they accordingly built a courthouse and jail for governing said county. Fort Wilkes-Barre, or Wilkes-Barre Fort as it's called on the marker, was then built around the courthouse to protect it from Pennamites, Natives, and anyone else who might cause a problem.
This monument was erected by the Wyoming Valley chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, assisted by Sons of the Revolution, to mark the spot where Fort Wilkes-Barre stood in 1778 at the time of the Wyoming Massacre. The fort was named in honor of John Wilkes and Isaac Barre, two prominent Englishmen members of the British Parliament who strongly opposed the policy of their government toward the American colonies.
As for the Yankee-Pennamite conflict, I'll finish that story when I talk about the origins of Luzerne County, because it's all tied together. But since Wilkes-Barre is part of Pennsylvania, I'm sure you have at least some idea of how the story ends.
Sources and Further Reading:
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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