Hockendauqua Indian Town, Northampton, Northampton County

This is an odd one, which is part of why it's taken me so long to put it together. The borough of Hokendauqua as we know it today is in Lehigh County. However, this marker - like the original settlement by that name - is in Northampton County, although very close to the border.

This marker located right next to one of the (many, many) markers for the Walking Purchase, which is going to be a ridiculously long blog post. It's taking me forever to collect them all and I might end up skipping some, depending on my mood. This marker is clearly at least somewhat associated with the same thing. I know that in part, the situation is the way that it is because this marker is a plaque, and dates from back when the PHMC was just called the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, so it's a lot older than the standard blue and gold collection and the wording is, shall we say, less politically correct.

The marker stands near the intersection
of Nor-Bath Boulevard and Horner Road.

Hokendauqua's history is really a two-part story, only the first half of which is mentioned on this marker. I'll touch on the second half briefly, as it's important, but it's not connected to the marker at all.

First, if you're not from around here, you might be wondering exactly how to pronounce the name. It's "Hock-en-DOCK-wa." Like the name of my hometown of Catasauqua, it comes from the Lenape Native American language. Apparently, it's a combination of two words in that language, hackiun and dochwe, which together form a phrase that more or less translates as "searching for land." Locals frequently tend to shorten it to Hokey, pronounced like the sport hockey. You might also have noticed that the spelling of the modern borough is a little different from what's on this plaque, and I have no idea at what point the C was dropped from the first syllable, or why.

The village from which the name derives was apparently called Hockyondocquay. As near as I can figure, that would be pronounced "hockey-on-dock-way," but I don't know for sure. I've referenced Charles Rhoads Roberts in a number of my past blog posts; he was an eminent Lehigh Valley historian in the early 20th century, and the lead author of one of the foremost history books about the region. In 1936 he presented a paper to the Lehigh County Historical Society in which he spoke of the existence of Hockyondocquay. European settlers first referenced it in their records in 1737. It was also the name of a small body of water in the vicinity, a creek which empties into the Lehigh River near where the village was located, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this was what locals today know as the Hokey Creek.

The village's significance starts with a meeting held by John and Thomas, the sons of William Penn, in the family home at Pennsbury in 1735. Our commonwealth's founding father was well respected by Native Americans and dealt with them both fairly and kindly. His sons... eh, not so much. They arranged welcomed the two chiefs mentioned on the marker, Lappawinzo and Tishcohan, and a few other high-ranking Lenape tribesmen. Interestingly, portraits were painted at or around that time of the two chiefs by Gustavus Hesselius, which were kept by the Penn family and later presented to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The one seen here, courtesy of WikiCommons, shows Chief Lappawinzo as he appeared during the meeting at Pennsbury.

William Penn's original 1686 agreement with the Lenape was discarded in favor of this new Walking Purchase agreement. The Lenape thought they were signing a document in which they agreed that the Penns' representatives would stroll through their tribal lands and set up a western boundary at the limit of what an average man could walk in a day and a half, hence the name of the deal. 

What actually happened was that Thomas and John hired a trio of extremely quick men - James Yates, Solomon Jennings, and the "fleet-footed youth" Edward Marshall (as described on the marker) - to cover way, way more territory than the Lenape anticipated. By using a falsified map, they misrepresented the area the walkers were expected to cover, which was approximately 40 square miles. They set out from Bucks County and headed north, and at the end of the first day spent the night in an encampment near the village of Hockyondocquay. This Native settlement was not situated where modern Hokendauqua is found, nor was it where the marker stands. Like the marker says, it lay almost a mile to the northwest along the banks of the Lehigh River, which would put it in what today is the borough of Northampton. From there, Marshall and his cronies continued making their way north, with the walk ending near what is now Jim Thorpe in Carbon County.

This story will continue when I talk more about the Walking Purchase, but in shortest form, what the Lenape expected to be about 40 square miles of ceded land instead turned out to be more than a million square acres. It encompassed territory which is found in the modern counties of Bucks, Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Schuylkill, Pike, and Monroe. If you know anything about Pennsylvania's geography, you know that's a pretty big chunk. To put it in perspective, the land claimed in the Walking Purchase was a tract only a little bit smaller than the entire state of Rhode Island. Historians today recognize that the Lenape were severely cheated, but for a long time the participants of the Walking Purchase were practically regarded as heroic. Even the wording on the plaque makes them sound good.

As for what we call Hokendauqua these days, that was established in 1854 a couple of miles west of the Native settlement which gave it the name. It was actually established by David Thomas, the founder of Catasauqua, in order to expand the Crane Iron Works. He developed a second branch, the Thomas Iron Company, and made Hokendauqua the company headquarters, laying out the community plan personally. It was filled with company housing; Thomas believed that his workers deserved a good place to live, so every home was situated on enough land to provide it with a vegetable garden, and he also believed that access to clean drinking water would keep people from consuming alcohol, so he made sure that Hokey had running water. There was also a company store, two iron furnaces, and a Presbyterian church, which is still active today.

The Thomas Iron Company was shut down in the 1920s, but Hokendauqua remains a small census-designated municipality in Lehigh County. And the Walking Purchase, which passed through it, remains a point of contention in the history books.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Whelan, Frank. "Catasauqua and Hokendauqua are Lenape words." The Allentown Morning Call, February 22, 2006.

Buck, William J. "Lappawinzo and Tishcohan, Chiefs of the Lenni Lenape." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1883. Reproduced at Jstor.org.

Hockendauqua Indian Town at the Historical Marker Database (page is pending - I had to submit this marker for their records and I will add the link once it gets approved)

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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.