It was an ordinary day. Just discovered a special piece of writing accomplished by Lancastrian John Earl Hambright. John has a special knack for writing and he recently published a story that I found amazing. Just had to share it with you. I'm sure that you will find his writing as interesting and remarkable as I do. Thank you so much for sharing your work with me, John. I hope you do't mind that I am sharing it with people all over the world. LDub
LOVE ALONG THE PEQUEA: HOW LANCASTER COUNTY BEGAN
If you’re a Pequea lover now – or ever have been – here’s a story you should know. It’s about the spot where Lancaster County history took off. Call it a rom com. Once upon a midnight, a decade or so after William Penn sketched out the city plan for Philadelphia, another Englishman snuck out to the banks of the Susquehanna. He was on the lam. A fugitive. Condemned in London to be hanged – perhaps for no more than stealing an apple for an ailing relative – young William Sherrill was not long for this world. He escaped the gallows, but received a death sentence nonetheless – working tobacco in the killing heat of the Caribbean. Then the fun began. The larky lad managed to escape again. We don’t know where. How. We’ll leave that action scene to Hollywood stunt men. What we can authenticate is that William Sherrill made it to the Chesapeake Bay. And soon put Pequea, Pennsylvania on the map. The earliest map of Lancaster County shows the settlers at the mouth of the Pequea in 1717. Look closely and you’ll find William Sherrill there. The red arrow points to the garden spot where his wife planted their corn, beans and squash. Did the apple thief also plant an apple tree? Does Pequea mean apple? It’s a Shawnee Indian word. Remember the Shawnee? Tecumseh? Tippecanoe? Whether we think of those folks as a band, a tribe or a nation, the Shaawanas, Sanawanooks or Shawanees wandered far and pretty much constantly. They left their names all over the eastern United States. There are towns called Shawnee in Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. A variant of Shawnee remains today as Savannah in Georgia; and perhaps you’ve heard of the Swanee River. Or Swanee College, the University of the South. That fits well; in the Algonquin tongue, the word Shawnee means “southerner.” As for Pequea, did you know our little river resort has at least two sister cities out west? One is Piqua in Ohio. Another, in Illinois, is called Pickaway. Why the different spellings? Because no Shawnee ever wrote their place names down. Nor their own given names. Native Americans had no written language. European arrivals spelled out words as they heard them – the French with Latin ears, the English with Anglo-Saxon. Even the geographical name most beloved to Lancastrians may be mis-spelled. Conestoga is what William Penn heard his Indian friends say. But French fur traders wrote the name down as Gandastogue. Or Gandaste. Says Wikipedia today: “Gandastogue is possibly the closest to what the Susquehannock called themselves.” The white man’s name Conestoga may never have been known to them. Even frontiersmen like William Sherrill of Pequea might have called Lancaster County’s largest river the Gandaste. Most of those trappers and traders lived with indigenous women. Had children with them. Their descendants are among us today. How many Lancastrians know they carry in their veins the blood of the Gandastogue? Or the Shawnee? Or the Lenni Lenape, whom white folk called the Delaware. Only in this age of DNA testing are we beginning to learn how widely and weirdly our ancestries range. Yet for centuries Pennsylvanians have spoken of certain neighbors and in-laws as “Black Dutch.” Do you have cousins with good tans year-round? Straight black hair. Aquiline noses. Did they like playing bows and arrows? BROKEN ARROW is the name of a movie I saw at Lancaster’s Colonial Theatre on North Queen Street at the age of 9. James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords, an American scout in a bloody war with the Apache that has gone on for more than decade with no end in sight. Jeffords decides on a bold move. Alone, he rides to the enemy seeking peace and forms a special bond with the Apache leader Cochise. He falls in love with Cochise’s sister. In a ceremony set to sweet music, the white man and Indian maid marry. For a moment there’s peace in the valley. Did such history happen along the Pequea? We’d like to think so. Romantic love was a rare commodity in the valleys of early Pennsylvania. Back in the late 1690s and early 1700s, most marriages in totally white communities were arranged without the partners’ knowledge or consent. No film crew will ever make a rom com about our region’s first white settlers. A hearthrob Hans Herr will never be portrayed by George Clooney. Or Ryan Gosling. As a matter of convenience, Martin Kendig of Zurich was married to the sister of Hans Herr of Bern only days before the young people – barely out of their teens – set sail for the destination they call the Pequea Tract. Today’s Lancastrians know the area where the newlyweds settled as Willow Street. Wherever Mennonite descendants of Swiss-German traditionalists settled – on the Pequea Tract, in the Groffdale or out in Weaverland – it’s likely most marriages did not originate in flirtations and courtships. Rather, parents got together with grandparents, bishops, neighbors and – maybe even a community matchmaker – just as they did back in Bern, Zurich, or the Rhineland Palatinate. Among the plain folk – with land and livestock at stake – love was too important to be left to the kids. Only after lengthy – and probably heated – diplomacy between competing farmers and ambitious neighbors, did boy meet girl. Lacks romance, you say? Ah, there was an app for that – almost as good as the Wildcat at Rocky Springs. You’ve heard of bundling? Consider it fact-checking for feelings. But if there was one spot in our fertile acres where true love may have bonded two people as surely and securely as it does at the end of a Hollywood romance, the mouth of the Pequea was that place. One of the oldest records LancasterHistory.com possesses shows tax assessments of folks living on the lower Pequea Creek. William Sherrill’s on the list. Along with Catholic French fur trappers, wealthy Quaker merchants and a sprinkling of Dutch farmers. But where are the Shawnee? Mrs. Sherrill’s parents? No record gives us the name of William Sherrill’s in-laws. Nor do we have a clue about the family Conrad Rutter married into. My ancestor is remembered as the first settler on the upper Pequea. He was given a fine monument in my father’s youth by rich Main Line cousins. It says Conrad Rutter was born in Germany in 1650 and calls him a pioneer of the Pequea Valley. But read the plaque today not far from where the Pequea Creek bubbles up in a cow pasture out back of Intercourse, and you’ll find no mention of the bride Conrad Rutter took home to his cabin. Her name was Jane, some family records suggest. Or was it Margaret, as others say? As for her maiden surname, forget about it. Like William Sherrill’s wife, she may well have been a woman of color. We’re just beginning to learn about the Lancaster County wives and mothers whose names and identities have long been forgotten. A woman known only as Indian Hannah has recently been celebrated in Chester County. Perhaps you’ve seen her monument near Longwood Gardens. Hannah’s name in the Lenni Lenape language means “River.” Susquehanna, as you may have learned at Pequea Tavern trivia nights, means “Muddy River.” I Indian Hannah was born before George Washington and lived to within a few years of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. But the lady never married because – like her father who ran off to Shamokin when too many white settlers came to the banks of the Brandywine – marriageable Indian males had fled west in great numbers to fight and die another day. Left behind with her mother and sisters, Indian Hannah grew up without a proper English surname. She became known as a Pow Wow practitioner. She survived by healing. Mrs. William Sherrill of Pequea fared better. From her, cousins of mine today in North Carolina can proudly claim descent because she married that white Londoner who escaped certain death when he fled to the Susquehanna in the 1690s. Let me tell you finally about my Sherrill cousins in North Carolina. They’re descended from fugitive William Sherrill’s firstborn son Adam Sherrill, the first pioneer to cross the Catawba River and settle on its western shore. Described by researchers today as a “half-breed,” Adam Sherrill – half Brit, half Shawnee – once owned much of the land between Asheville NC and Hendersonville NC. Before the United States had yet become one country, he was cheated out of his extensive property by a member of the Continental Congress. Tench Coxe was the fancy man’s name. Philadelphia-born to wealthy, aristocratic parents, Penn grad Tench Coxe was one of our nation’s earliest real estate tycoons. If you’re suspicious of developers – as well as Congressmen and women – let’s just say both breeds have been at it for a long time. Rich and powerful conquerors, plunderers, their European names still litter American history books. Our indigenous ancestors remain obscure. Gone is the Gandastogues’ language, their religion. The Shawnee dances, Conoy and Nanticoke songs. Who can speak to the love those people had for our county’s land? Though they gardened within Lancaster’s current city limits for three thousand years – on Cabbage Hill, on College Hill – the streams they drew water from – along Water Street, Ross Street – run through sewer pipes now. But not all was lost. The Gandastogue’s trail from the Susquhanna to the jasper hills where they mined for arrowhead flints is still there. Southwest to northeast, it still follows the Milky Way – as Manor Avenue and the New Holland Pike. Peter’s Road, too, remains. Named for a neighbor of William Sherrill’s – the French Indian trader Peter Bezaillion – it runs southeast to northwest as the border between West Earl and Earl Township, crossing the New Holland Pike at Groffdale. The Bezaillions knew my Rutter ancestors as well. When Peter died, his widow Martha presented a gift in his memory to the Indian mission high atop the Welsh Mountains. Where my people once sang “God Save the King”, today the silver communion set still serves St John’s Episcopal Church at Compass. Today, my North Carolina cousins, descendants of William Sherrill, are sweet, loving, and lively people with careers that range from forest ranger to airplane pilot to working for the Society of Colonial Dames in Washington. They love horses, dogs, cats; and in recent years, they’ve been a great support to me through emails, Facebook messages, cards and flowers as I cared for an invalid wife and suffered the grief of losing her. Caring. Is that an Indian thing? No more than it’s a German thing – or a Scots-Irish, Greek, Polish, or African thing. Let’s say it’s an American thing. A human thing! Amen!
And so the story ends. What a wonderful piece of writing. I only wish I could write as well as Mr. Hambright can write. Hope you enjoyed his story. I most certainly did. And, I hope he doesn't mind that I shared it with you, for a piece of writing such as this just has to be shared. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
