Luzerne County History

Luzerne County – Rich In History and Heritage

Within Luzerne County, PA exists a splendid part of Northeastern Pennsylvania called the Wyoming Valley because the Delaware Indians referred to the Great Plains on both sides of the river as “Maugh-wau-wa-me,” which the early English settlers, somehow, translated into Wyoming.

Penn’s Grant
In 1681, in settlement of a large debt owed to Penn’s late father, Admiral Penn, the Duke of York arranged for King Charles II to grant to William Penn a charter for a huge area of land west of the Delaware  River; land the English King called Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods) – roughly 350 miles by 160 miles.

Conflicting Grants
Although Penn’s family was not aware of it, the Wyoming Valley, clearly in the area contained in Penn’s grant, was also claimed by Connecticut by right of the charter given to Governor John Winthrop Jr. in 1662. Connecticut’s charter stated that lands from sea-to-sea were all part of Connecticut.  Because the King knew little about his colonies, and nothing at all about geography, Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimed the same territory in what is now Northeastern Pennsylvania. More than a decade before the war with England began; Connecticut adventurers began to explore the Wyoming Valley.

This was the foundation of the Pennamite-Yankee War(s)

This beautiful river valley, from three to six miles wide and with many thousands of acres of relatively flat, fertile farm land, stretching for as many as twenty-five miles between two splendid mountain ranges, was an Eden for the native tribes that occupied the valley, and a splendid “new home” for the settlers from Connecticut.

Because of rapid settlement into Connecticut, and with farm land at a severe premium, settlers and opportunists in Connecticut began to look westward for available lands. Although the logical step for westward expansion for the Connecticut colonists was into New York, New Yorkers quickly said no to that prospective invasion. So, in 1753, private individuals in Connecticut, organized as the Susquehannah Company, persuaded the Connecticut government to support efforts to settle the northern third of the land constituting the colony of Pennsylvania.

Their first tentative settlement was established in 1762, near what is now Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.

These first Connecticut Yankees, perhaps one hundred strong, built a small village, despite protests from others. Since the British, the Indians, and Philadelphia had all warned the Connecticut Yankees against this settlement, things quickly became interesting. The Yankees headed back to Connecticut for the winter of 1762-63, but returned in the spring, but were soon driven out by the native Delaware after they killed 20 settlers in retaliation for a suspicious fire that killed their Chief, Teedyuscung.
The First Yankee-Pennamite War
The Yankees stayed put in Connecticut for five years. In late winter of 1769, shortly after a militia sent by the Penn family (known as Pennamites) arrived to maintain the trading post established by Captain Amos Ogden two years earlier, forty Connecticut Yankees arrived on the banks of the Susquehanna River, followed by three hundred more in April. Those forty Yankees eventually gave their name to the community of Forty Fort (the fort of forty).

By the end of that first summer, the Yankees had established five townships – Pittston, Plymouth, Wilkes-Barre, Nanticoke (later Hanover) and Forty Fort (later Kingston) – and had built Fort Durkee.

Wilkes-Barre was named in honor of John Wilkes and Isaac Barré, two prominent members of the British parliament were “zealous advocates of the American cause.” Not surprisingly, the names chosen by the Yankees for their settlements all honored well-known and influential English, in the hope of support for their cause.

Although the Yankees started out as the larger of the two forces, the Pennamites moved a substantial number of recruits into the area during the summer of 1769.  The Pennamites were moving freely among the settlements, and harassing the Yankee settlers.

On April 2, 1770, the Yankees captured the Pennamite’s Fort Wyoming. That battle marked the conclusion of the First Yankee-Pennamite War. For the next half dozen years, the Connecticut Yankees controlled the Wyoming Valley.

One of the little known facts about this early Wyoming  Valley period was that on June 29, 1774, the entire region (then known as Westmoreland) became a town in Litchfield County Connecticut, though the actual county was located two hundred miles to the east. Following the start of hostilities in the American Revolution, the Battle of Rampart Rocks took place between Pennamite forces and Yankees on December 25, 1775.  With the Yankees once again victorious, Connecticut created a separate Connecticut county in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania – Westmoreland County.

The Revolutionary War and the Battle of Wyoming
Once the Revolutionary War began in 1776, the men of the Wyoming Valley were called upon to serve in the Continental Army. While the men of the valley were away, a contingent of British troops and their Indian partners entered the valley. The famous Battle of Wyoming took place on July 3, 1778.

The Americans were severely routed by the British and their Indian fighters in less than 30 minutes after meeting them on an open field of battle. On July 4, 1778, British Major John Butler demanded the surrender of all forts.  In return for agreeing not to fight for the American side, the settlers were allowed to leave the valley.

During the next summer, in retaliation for the July 4th massacre following the Battle of Wyoming, American forces under the command of General John Sullivan returned to the Wyoming Valley and the upper Susquehanna River and destroyed forty native villages and “ravaged all their farmlands.” General Sullivan’s actions essentially marked the end of the Native American populations in the upper regions of the Susquehanna River.

The Decree of Trenton
At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, both Pennsylvania and Connecticut claimed ownership of the Wyoming Valley. Congress was asked to decide on the legal owner. With the Decree of Trenton on December 30, 1782, the federal government officially decided that the Wyoming Valley belonged to Pennsylvania. With the decision of the Decree of Trenton in their favor, Pennsylvania then ruled that the Yankees were not citizens of the Commonwealth, could not vote, and were to give up their property claims. This in an attempt to provide already established land to “Pennsylvanians.”

Second Yankee-Pennamite War
This action by Pennsylvania led to the start of the Second Yankee-Pennamite War.  In May of 1784, the Yankees were forcibly and very cruelly marched away from the valley.  In November, the Yankees returned with a considerable force and captured and destroyed Fort Dickinson. With that victory, Captain John Franklin proposed a creative solution by suggesting that a new state, separate from Connecticut and Pennsylvania be created.  He proposed to call that new state Westmoreland.

Recognizing that a compromise was required to resolve the considerable disagreements and hostilities, and not wanting to give up any part of Pennsylvania to a new state, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania reversed its earlier decision and agreed that Yankee property claims should be honored. The Yankees accepted this proposal and concluded hostilities permanently.

As part of the compromise that ended the Second Yankee-Pennamite War, Pennsylvania separated a significant new county from what had been Northumberland County (which had included the Wyoming Valley). On September 23, 1786, the Pennsylvania General Assembly created Luzerne County, naming it in honor of Chevalier de la Luzerne, the French minister to the United States during the latter stages of the war. This newly created county encompassed a large area; Lackawanna, Wyoming, Susquehanna, and part of Bradford County would all eventually be separated out as independent counties.

Early Immigration and Settlement
Now that peace and some order had been established by the creation of the new county, life in Northeastern Pennsylvania became rather ordinary, if that term can be used for the settlement of America that was rapidly occurring up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. Luzerne County was rural, and destined to stay that way. It was not inaccessible, but it was certainly not easy to get in or out. The Susquehanna River was a treacherous waterway, and the mountains on all sides were daunting. Once a settler was established in the valley, life was challenging, but it was no more challenging than any other place on the American frontier. Life was tough, but these settlers had come a long way from their homes and villages in Europe to seek opportunity in America. This beautiful Wyoming Valley was just one of hundreds of splendid places filled with opportunity in this new land that welcomed settlers.

Anthracite
Even before significant settlement of the valley began; early explorers had encountered a new form of coal – anthracite – that was abundant along the banks of the Susquehanna River throughout its length in the Wyoming Valley. However, because this “stone coal” was as hard as granite, it simply would not burn or maintain a fire. There was plenty of this ultra hard coal throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania, but no one had yet discovered a way to make any money from it. Yes, blacksmiths were using it to fire their small forges, and some of the coal was used to fire iron forges during the revolutionary war, but for the most part, anthracite was a valuable commodity without a good use.

Judge Jesse Fell
Historians mark the date February 11, 1808 as the day on which Judge Jesse Fell produced his invention of an iron grate that would maintain a fire using anthracite coal – “using air currents in motion by the heat of the fire itself.” Although it is likely that Judge Fell’s invention was not the first grate to successfully burn anthracite, because it was the first iron grate in the Wyoming Valley to successfully burn anthracite, this invention marked the beginning of a new era, and the end of a quiet rural life for everyone who lived in the valley.

Canals
Anthracite coal from Northeastern Pennsylvania first moved to market from the southern coal field and the western middle coal field (primarily in Schuylkill County) via the Schuylkill Canal, which opened in 1825. The northern coal field, running southwest to northeast through the Wyoming Valley and Luzerne County, was tapped with the completion of the North Branch Canal, which opened in stages from 1830 to 1834. From 1834 until the end of the Civil War, the valley’s anthracite headed south to Baltimore and Philadelphia on an ever-increasing series of local and regional canals, often interconnected with some of the first railroads constructed in the Mid- Atlantic region. With the completion in 1858 of the North Branch Extension Canal from Pittston to New York State, the valley’s coal was able to move (at 1.5 to 3 miles per hour in large, heavy barges pulled by mules) into New York State and New England.

By 1875 anthracite coal from the Wyoming Valley/Luzerne County represented half the anthracite produced in the Commonwealth. That dominant place in the market was never challenged through the end of the coal era.

Railroads
With the completion of the Lehigh and Susquehanna River Railroad in 1846, the canal industry, which had existed for no more than one long generation, faced a rapid extinction.

In the short period from 1846 to the end of the 1880s, coal traffic on the Commonwealth’s network of expensively constructed canals came to an end as new railroad systems reached into every corner of the Commonwealth; extracting minerals and timber, and delivering new settlers – immigrants
from Europe – to work in the mines and towns.

Immigration
The Wyoming Valley is a beautiful and inspiring place, but it is remotely situated away from the rest of Pennsylvania and New York. If it had not been for coal and the canal systems that were built to export that coal to market, it is unlikely that this beautiful valley would have attained the prominence and the wealth that occurred here in the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Without coal there was no reason to build the first canals, and without coal there was certainly no reason to extend canals and rail lines into the mountain valleys of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It was the abundance of anthracite coal in the region that created jobs for immigrants. Though it is now accepted that most did not plan on making a career of mining coal, as it was an extremely dangerous and labor intensive profession, it did however afford an opportunity to make a living – something that was not available to most Europeans in their homeland during that time. They earliest immigrants wrote home of work available in the region and more followed. Most often, plans of working until having enough money to return home to Europe never came to fruition. The largest of this immigration group were the Poles.

Dozens of other, new, small villages – traditionally called “mine patches” – were developed in the vicinity of the coal mines. They were almost always “company towns;” authoritatively controlled by the mining company that owned the land and employed the men and boys that worked in the mines.

Eckley Miners Village near Hazleton is an example of what a mine patch looked like. At one time there were dozens of these small villages spread throughout the mountains and valleys.

A Diverse and Dynamic Culture
Because of the immigrants that made this valley their home during this great period of American immigration, Luzerne County has an incredibly rich and diverse culture. The churches, neighborhoods, schools, gathering places, restaurants, and taverns located throughout this county are a lasting testament to the rich mixture of immigration that came into this beautiful valley. For more than a century, those diverse cultures mixed, inter-married, and merged to create a community that has a unique sense of place; a place that began with coal mining, railroading, and manufacturing, and is now a place that is keenly aware of its heritage and the essential reasons for preserving that heritage.

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