Sorry for having missed last week! The weather has been quite ungovernable lately, and I'm at the mercy of it more often than not, so I ended up not feeling well enough to complete research on a post. Toss in my work getting busy, and all that kind of fun stuff, and you get the idea. But we're here this time.
I know (or at least am acquainted with) a lot of very cool people who do a lot of very cool things. For example, I recently met up with Jonathan Edward Durham, a fellow Lehigh Valley author, for a signing of his book Winterset Hollow. If you're into horror-fantasy types of stories, you're going to want to check it out. The signing was in Lititz, at the absolutely delightful Aaron's Books, and I got to interact with a bunch of other lovely people besides the author himself. This event also gave me a terrific excuse to go collect some more markers for the upcoming winter months and handle a bit of prep work for the second MQ book, since I'm (finally) nearly finished with the first one. Also, Jonathan is very tall, or I'm very short, take your pick.
In similar news, congrats to another Lehigh Valley author (and longtime friend of this blog) - Scott Morro will be releasing his latest novel, Cooped Up, next week. It looks like it's going to be a fun read and, like much of his work, is set in our beloved Valley region, so I'm looking forward to it.
Speaking of cool people who do cool things, longtime MQ contributor Kaylee Lindenmuth once again went gallivanting on the far side of the state from where I am and sent me some images from Fulton County, allowing me to debut it on the blog! Join me for a look at the unincorporated community of Burnt Cabins, and find out why it has such a peculiar name.
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The marker is located near the intersection of Great Cove
Road (US 522) and PA 76. Image courtesy of
Kaylee Lindenmuth. |
The first question you might have is, are there burnt cabins in Burnt Cabins? And the answer is no - or rather, not anymore. But there were.
It was originally a little hamlet called Sidneyville, comprised of exactly eleven cabins belonging to European colonists who, technically speaking, had no legal right to be there. This was in 1750, at which time the land was still occupied by Native inhabitants, and they weren't any too pleased with the existence of squatters on their ancestral lands.
How this happened is fairly easy to understand. We weren't a state yet, of course, and the French and Indian War had been raging. Also, this "Sidneyville" was situated in the portion of Pennsylvania that was then being claimed as belonging to Maryland. Just like we once were at odds with Connecticut over part of the Wyoming Valley, we were also arguing with Maryland about the Juniata Valley. The provincial governor was kind of distracted by the war and other matters, so a handful of illegal squatters in an otherwise relatively isolated part of Pennsylvania wasn't attracting a lot of attention from him. However, he did send lawmen out to remind these settlers that it wasn't a safe place to live, the boundaries were uncertain, and oh yeah, they had never actually purchased the land they were occupying so they really had no business being there. They apparently didn't care.
The settlers continued to creep farther and farther into Shikellamy Native territory, much to their annoyance, as they found their hunting grounds increasingly compromised and their new neighbors a bit impertinent. The Natives lodged a complaint with the government, who decided to take the matter a bit more seriously. They didn't want to risk the friendship treaty which William Penn had arranged with the Natives decades earlier. So a small expedition was dispatched to the Juniata Valley consisting of the local sheriff, three magistrates, and Conrad Weiser, the official British agent to the Natives. The magistrates were Benjamin Chambers, George Croghan, and Richard Peters. Peters wrote a detailed account of the whole thing for the government, which is how we have many of the details that we do, and it's quoted extensively in the book I've cited in my sources by U. J. Jones.
In any case, off they went to confront the squatters, and in largest part they were successful. Most of these settlers were convinced of the need to relocate. Peters wrote that he himself gave them money if they needed it, and they were urged to pack up and move to the two million acres of land which the government had purchased from the Natives, since it was safer and gave them a more legal situation. He even, according to his report, invited some of the larger families to move onto his own properties and live there rent-free until they could make their own way. "There was no kindness in my power which I did not do for the offenders," he said.
There were, however, a couple of holdouts. The chief one was a man named Andrew Lycon, who welcomed the expedition with a loaded gun. He said that if anyone came any closer than they already had, he'd shoot them. Fortunately, he was quickly disarmed and cuffed, and the sheriff took him into custody. A group of the Shikellamy happened to be on hand for this, and were genuinely offended by Lycon's actions. They insisted that the cabins of "Sidneyville" should be burned to the ground, as proof that the people who had been convinced to leave would not be coming back. To appease the Natives, Weiser and the magistrates agreed to this plan, though they did allow Lycon's family to first remove all of their belongings from their cabin. Peters made a point of noting that the cabins themselves were of very limited value, since they were the kind that could be easily built within a day, so torching them wasn't difficult and eased the minds of the Natives. At least one record says that they actually only burned three cabins, not the entire settlement.
Jones, in his account, follows his quoting of the Peters report from 1750 by saying that this was how the area came to be known as Burnt Cabins. He also notes, wryly, that the eviction wasn't a terribly permanent one because within just a few generations, some descendants of the original squatters had returned and settled the Juniata Valley once again. In fact, people were starting to creep back within as little as five years from the date of the burning. But rather than retake the name Sidneyville, or New Sidneyville, or anything of that sort, the settlement came to be known as Burnt Cabins in memory of what had happened there.
Its situation along a long-established Native trail led to its redevelopment within a matter of years, especially once the trail was expanded to provide easier access to Fort Duquesne. By 1771, Burnt Cabins was populous enough that the Three Mountains Road was created to give it a more direct connection to Shippensburg. A few decades later, when the Chambersburg and Fort Bedford Turnpike opened in 1815, it bypassed Burnt Cabins and the cattle drovers found the old road (which was still free) a better way to reach the markets. So as odd as it sounds, being skipped by the turnpike was to the settlement's benefit. A grist mill was added to Burnt Cabins in 1840, which is among the oldest surviving buildings in the area today and which in fact is still in operation. They sell pancake and waffle mixes as well as flour, and the property also offers tours and provides camping facilities.
Apart from the story behind its name, Burnt Cabins has just a couple of other footnotes in history. A novel written in 1964, Bread-and-Butter Indian by Anne Colver, takes place in Burnt Cabins in 1783 and is based on the true story of a Pennsylvania Dutch woman, Barbara Baum. Two years later, in May of 1966, local teenager Peggy Ann Bradnick was kidnapped, and Burnt Cabins came briefly to international attention as the seat of operations for the ensuing manhunt. (She was rescued mostly unharmed, and is still alive as of this writing.) The grist mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and the settlement itself received the same honor in 1998.
Burnt Cabins today measures roughly fifty acres. It's what's known as an unincorporated community, being part of the larger Dublin Township area. The historic Lincoln Highway passes nearby, enabling those who are exploring its length to stop and have a look. Anyone who passes through Fulton County is encouraged to visit Burnt Cabins, to tour the grist mill and see where colonial homes were once put to the torch in order to try and maintain a grip on the crumbling frontier peace.
Sources and Further Reading:
Jones, U. J.
Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley: Embracing an Account of the Early Pioneers, and the Trials and Privations Incident to the Settlement of the Valley. Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1889.
Reproduced as a PDF on WikiCommons.
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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