USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Luzerne > History of the Presbytery of Luzerne, state of Pennsylvania > Part 2
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II.
THE TERRITORY OCCUPIED.
T HIS territory and its occupancy by the white man demands more than a passing notice. The largest of the counties, as comprising the limits of the Presbytery indicated above, gave its name to the new ecclesiastical body. Luzerne county had been much larger, but, from time to time, new counties had been established. Its territory, in 1843, was greatly reduced; and during the existence of the Presbytery the county of Wyoming was taken from its limits and, of course, still remained in the Presbytery. No changes in the limits of the Schuylkill and Carbon counties were made between 1843 and 1870.
These counties are mountainous, and generally of irregular surface, yet having several elevated plateaus or surfaces more nearly approximating the plain. They are watered by the North Branch of the Susquehanna, the Lackawanna, Lehigh and Schuylkill rivers, and a number of smaller streams which are tributaries to these rivers.
The valleys of all these streams, while often narrow and originally covered with dense, heavy timber through which it was difficult to pass, afforded much land which attracted the early settlers, notwithstanding the difficulty of reaching it.
The irregular and obstructive topography of many parts of our country are often found to have been a wise and beneficent arrangement, that ultimately magnifies
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the great Creator, and wonderfully benefits His rational creatures. A remarkable illustration of this is afforded in the territory covered by this Presbytery. Much of it was so secluded that, until recently, it was literally unknown ; yet, in these hidden valleys, and on and under these unproductive mountains untold wealth had been stored by the beneficent Creator.
The boundaries of the Presbytery and those of the great anthracite coal field in Pennsylvania are almost co-terminous. The history of the Presbytery proper runs parallel with the real development of the anthracite coal trade in this country, and kindred industries, which, by its enlargement, were developed in the communities where coal was produced or mined.
These new or more perfectly developed industries attracted to this part of Pennsylvania a vast increase of population, and radically changed the relations of this part of the State to the great cities on every side, and, indeed, to the rest of the civilized world.
Up to about the time Luzerne Presbytery was constituted the people were only learning how to use anthracite coal; that problem having been settled, the question had been raised, but not fully settled, as to how it could be transported to the places where it was hoped it would be wanted. In view of the previous seclusion, and the obstacles to be overcome, much had been done towards preparing means for transporting coal from different parts of the territory which we are describing; but much more was demanded at the time of our Presby- tery's organization.
Coal had been floated down the Susquehanna on arks, and used to some extent by blacksmiths at the
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government barracks at Carlisle in 1776; but does not seem to have been in very general demand, and during the first quarter of the present century does not seem to have been used to any great extent, even by the smiths. The people had not learned to use it for domestic purposes.
Messrs. White, Hazard, and Company, in Philadel- phia, successfully used anthracite coal in the manufacture of iron in 1826. This company had leased, in 1817, the original "Coal Mine Company's" property near Mauch Chunk for one ear of corn, annually,* and subsequently bought all the stock of said Company, which consisted of Messrs. Robert Morris, J. Anthony Morris, Cist, Weist, Hillegas, and others, who had secured six thousand acres of land and opened a quarry in 1792 to test the character and value of the coal. In 1798, this Company obtained a charter for a sluice navigation, and this also became the property of Messrs. White, Hazard and Company, which corporation finally became the famous "Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company," that has done so much to develop the coal trade and to promote the prosperity of the country generally.
The term 'quarry' is applied to the production of coal, as just mentioned, because the method at first pursued in this part of the general coal field, was to remove the earth from the strata and then remove the coal. This, at the original mine at Summit Hill, was more easily done than almost anywhere else, and exhibited a wealth of deposit which has never been excelled, if ever equalled, in the entire anthracite field.
*They were, however, bound to deliver in Philadelphia 40,000 bushels of coal for their own benefit.
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If all the coal strata had been allowed to lie as far below the surface as the great majority of them do, they would have been much longer undisturbed, and we would have been longer without the benefits they bring. But the benevolent Creator, as in this case, wisely gives us clues to the discovery of undeveloped treasures, whether material or those of greater value,-not many, indeed, but always enough. The stratum on Summit Hill in Carbon county has led many through the deep superin- cumbent earth and rock to the black diamond beneath.
In 1820 the Lehigh navigation was so far improved that 365 tons of coal were sent through it to Philadelphia. To the same market, from the Schuylkill region, 1480 tons of coal went through the canal on the Schuylkill river in 1822; the canal had been projected in 1814.
The famous "Switch-back railroad" from the Lehigh at Mauch Chunk, to the mines at Summit Hill, nine miles distant, was completed in 1827, the cars of which were drawn up the steep mountain side by stationary engines on two different summits as our cable street cars, and were arranged for passengers, affording the tourist, for whose accommodation especially these cars were pro- vided, a thrilling ride and a magnificent view of the striking scenery unfolding to his vision. The return behind a long train of coal cars, by gravity, and over a circuitous and longer course on the mountain side, is not less exciting, and is more dangerous. This unique railroad, built for the purpose of moving the coal from the mines to the river, was, with the exception of the railroad in Quincy, Massachusetts, the first built in the country. It is a monument of the skill and enterprise of the Lehigh company.
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PRESBYTERY OF LUZERNE.
The Carbondale field, or Upper Lackawanna valley, was opened up to the markets in 1829 by the Delaware and Hudson Canal and Railroad, the latter running towards the Delaware river by gravity.
The region of Scranton was not reached by railroad till 1854, but that part of the great coal field has since overtaken all competitors in every part of the State.
The Pennsylvania canal was opened to Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, and the mouth of the Lackawanna, in 1843.
The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had fully opened up the Schuylkill region in 1841.
Thus the facilities for the more rapid and certain development of the new and profitable industries which Providence was bringing to light were being secured, and increased in accordance with the expectations of sagacious men, one of whom had entered upon a career of useful- ness in the moral upbuilding of the growing communities for which the Luzerne Presbytery was designed to provide. Before its erection, he had publicly said to his brethren, "All the railroads in the United States will enter in this Wyoming Valley," and of course traverse the other parts of the great coal field .*
We find that while the material interests of the anthracite coal region were advancing, God was preparing the men who were to devote themselves to the moral and spiritual interests of the increasing population, and to the counteracting of new and stronger temptations to world- liness and vice, that were also coming in. Quite a number of these devoted men were already on the ground and in training for their important work. They were the representatives of the various evangelical churches,
*Rev. T. P. Hunt.
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working and expecting to work in their own chosen divisions of the great army of salvation.
As, however, these pages are especially designed to recount the character and achievements of those who were engaged on foundation work in connection with the career of the Luzerne Presbytery, they will claim our exclusive attention, and exhaust our space and time.
III.
EARLY SETTLEMENTS.
T' HE territory above described had marked peculiari- ties, and so the original settlers have a history which is unique. This is especially true -with regard to the early settlers, and to the settlements made in the county of Luzerne, and the northern part of the field to be occupied by our Presbytery.
The motives which first brought the white man thither, and gave shape, in some good measure, to the institutions which were subsequently established, were altogether dissimilar to the motives which afterwards so greatly increased the population of the same localities, and modified the pursuits of the people. The first settlers in this part of Pennsylvania came thither to find quiet homes, and to devote themselves to agricultural pursuits. They came from the then colony of Connec- ticut. They regarded themselves as simply moving to parts of its more western territory, granted them in their charter from the King of England, and acquired by purchase from "the Six Nations" in 1754, by an association formed in Connecticut, called "The Connec- ticut and Susquehanna Company." No settlement how-
ever, was attempted till 1762. The next year these settlers were dispersed by the Indians, and many of them slain. In 1769 a body of forty Connecticut pioneers was sent thither by the "Connecticut and Susquehanna
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Company," but found themselves forestalled by some Pennsylvanians, the Six Nations having the previous year sold again this territory to the proprietaries of Pennsylvania .*
The above reference indicates the beginning of the conflict which lasted six years, and was fiercely waged, between the Connecticut and Pennsylvanian settlers. The former obtained the mastery so far as to establish their settlement, and several considerable towns, as "West- moreland," which had in 1778 a population of two thousand. This was the principal town in the charming valley of Wyoming. The name was afterwards changed to Wilkes-Barre, in honor of two British statesmen who warmly advocated the cause of the Americans, to which both Connecticut and Pennsylvania were signally loyal, from the first movement in the direction of American independence. The Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimants seemed to forget their rivalry in their mutual resistance to what they regarded the injustice and oppression of the British Ministry, and they bravely withstood the hostile forces that had found their way to their secluded homes among the mountains, on the 30th of June, 1778. From these homes there had already been many responses to the colonial call, aud many of the leading settlers had bravely fallen in the conflict, so that when Col. John Butler led four hundred British soldiers, and seven hundred Indians against the colony, it was with greatly reduced numbers that the remaining settlers, under the leadership of Col, Zebulon Butler, courageously withstood the enemy, when called to surrender the fort, called "Forty Fort," from
*See American Encyclopedia. Article, Wyoming.
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the forty original Connecticut settlers. With less than a third of the force coming against them, Col. Zebulon Butler, a Continental officer, then in command of the home Fort, decided to risk a battle, and on the 3rd of July marched his command against the invaders. The battle was lost; the remnant retreated to the Fort which they were obliged to surrender, after having obtained a promise from the British commander of hon- orable treatment for the prisoners, which promise was shamefully disregarded. The "Massacre of Wyoming" need not be described here; its horrors are familiar to every student of the general history of our country.
IV.
ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE SETT- LERS.
T "HE lull which prevailed in the strife between the Con- necticut and Pennsylvania people was again broken. In 1782 a congressional commission, appointed to consider the title to the territory in dispute, reported in favor of Pennsylvania. But that State found it difficult to dispossess the Connecticut soldiers of their claims, which they defended with arms, and the old conflict was renewed for several years longer. The Legislature of Pennsylvania, 1787, confirmed the titles of the Connecti- cut claimants; but it seems that more or less conflict with reference to the claims continued to the beginning of the present century. The permanent and major part of the settlers north of Hanover, on the bank of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers, were Connecticut or New England people. Therefore, as they gave shape to the rising institutions in these settlements, which embraced a large majority of the early citizens of Luzerne county, we are more deeply interested in their antece- dents; and in order to understand these, we must briefly refer to the history of the Connecticut colony.
Settlements were made on the Connecticut river by people from Massachusetts colony as early as 1631, occupying several points near Hartford, New Haven and New Belgium. These settlements grew so rapidly that they
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soon overpowered the Dutch who had attempted to es- tablish trading posts in the same vicinity.
The character of the English population, the close affiliation which they ever maintained with Roger Williams and his colony, and the fact that Quakers, and others not welcomed in Massachusetts, were cordially received in the new settlements of the Connecticut valley, indicate a rebound from the intolerance of the mother colony. This early indication became a demonstrated fact by the charter which was secured from England, dictated in the colony itself, and which so long and so happily shaped the administration of its government, both as a colony and as " a sovereign State," continuing to be the fundamental law till 1818.
The one man who, above all others, made Connecti- cut a model colony, combining all its settlements under one charter, and who exerted such a wise and helpful influence as to make it felt immediately and generally, not only in the Connecticut colony, but in other colonies as well, and whose salutary influence is still felt throughout the great nation whose foundations were then being laid,-that man was the younger Winthrop.
His father had been, and still was, devoting his life and energies toward making Massachusetts what that great colony became. The son, a man of much more culture and breadth of view, and of equal piety and devotion to human advancement, fully identified himself with the upbuilding of Connecticut.
In addition to his godly and careful training in his Puritan home, John Winthrop had received a liberal education in Cambridge and Dublin. Of him Bancroft says, "Even as a child he had been the pride of his
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father's house;" and, that his scholastic education "had been perfected by visiting, in part at least, in the public service, not France and Holland only in the days of Prince Maurice and Richelieu, but Venice and Constanti- nople." "From boyhood his manners had been spotless, and the purity of his soul added lustre and beauty to the gifts of nature and industry." This was the man whose personal agency secured from Charles II, soon after the restoration of the Monarchy, in England, his sanction to that liberal and comprehensive charter under which Connecticut lived so long, having sedulously protected it from revocation by James II. The famous Con- necticut charter, most liberal in terms and providing for complete autonomy, with no provision for submitting the acts of the colony to the revision of the crown, granted to the colony all the territory from the Narragan- sett river westward and to cover the 42nd degree of latitude to the Pacific ocean ; excepting only such lands as were then occupied by prior settlers ; namely, New York and New Jersey .*
Winthrop's personal approach to Charles II, in behalf of Connecticut, which he represented, was during the year 1662, which was soon after the adoption of the Westminster Assembly's Confession, Catechism and Church Directory by the British Parliament. The preponderating party in said Assembly had been Presby- terian, and that religious body (especially in Scotland) had been active and influential in the restoration of the Monarchy. The Connecticut colony, too, had at once sanctioned the restoration of Charles II, and was evidently in sympathy with the Presbyterian party in its
*See Mr. Platt's Reminiscences of Scranton.
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course, rather than the Massachusetts colony, understood to be with the Independents, and which hesitated about recognizing the new king. In addition to these consid- erations, we find Winthrop aided in his work by the Presbyterian officials, who still surrounded the person of the king, and readily received by Charles himself. It is plain, therefore, that Presbyterian influence contri- buted largely to Winthrop's success; nor was the impression without foundation, that what was being granted was bestowed on Presbyterians; as it is probable that the major part of the early settlers in Connecticut were of that faith. Mr. Pierson, who led the Presbyterian movement in the early part of the 18th century, was from Connecticut. Indeed, they were accustomed to be called, and called themselves, Presbyterians. Trumbull says of the Assembly that drew up the Saybrook platform subsequently adopted :* "Though the Council were unanimous in passing the platform of discipline, yet they were not all of one opinion. Some were for high con-associational government, and their sentiments nearly Presbyterian ; others were much more moderate, verging on independency." Dr. Hodge adds: "The result of their labors proves that the former class had greatly the ascendency."
"The influence of Presbyterian principles in New England is, however, much more satisfactorily proved by the nature of the ecclesiastical systems which were there adopted than by any statement of isolated facts. These systems were evidently the result of compromise between the two parties, and they show that the Presbyterian was much stronger than the Independent element." This is
*Hodge's History of the Presbyterian Church in U. S.
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also abundantly evident so far as the settlers from Connecticut in Pennsylvania were concerned.
Charles II, whom Winthrop seems to have known and approached personally, still felt the obligations he was under to Presbyterian influence in his restoration to what he and they regarded his hereditary right to the crown of England. This, together with his careless and impulsive habits, led him to sanction without examination on his part, or that of his secretaries, the charter which had been drawn in the Connecticut colony and to which he was asked to set the royal seal. This he did in 1662. Not long afterwards, however, Charles sanctioned "the Act of Uniformity" by which two thousand of the most godly and learned ministers in England were deprived of their churches and support, very many of them Presby- terians. Their style and teachings did not suit "a gentleman" of his type, therefore he soon forgot his recognized obligations to them.
When William Penn, 19 years after the date of the Connecticut charter, obtained a liberal charter for his colony in Pennsylvania, Lord North carefully revised that instrument to protect the prerogatives of the king, before the seal was applied, although Penn was a favorite at court. It is perhaps due to this fact that more definite statements and limitations were secured in Penn's charter; and this subsequently gave Pennsylvania the advantage in the final settlement of the boundaries between that State and Connecticut. However this may have been, Win- throp was a wise and far-seeing statesman. What he secured for Connecticut as the residuum of her western claim, granted in the charter from Charles II, was that in ceding to the General Government (afterwards
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established) her western lands, she retained that part of Ohio which is known to us as "The Western Reserve" and which became the source of Connecticut's princely school fund, which has done so much for the cause of education, not only in Connecticut and Ohio, but through the country generally. A debt of gratitude is due from us all, not only to Winthrop, who obtained such a liberal charter for his colony, but to the sturdy colonist as well who successfully concealed it in a hollow oak when the agents of the king sought to revoke it.
The schools and churches established and fostered in Connecticut secured to that colony prosperity, liberty, order and happiness. Bancroft says, "There never existed a persecuting spirit in Connecticut, while it had a scholar to its minister in every town or village." Edu- cation was cherished, religious knowledge was carried to the highest degree of refinement, alike in the application to moral duties, and to the mysterious questions on the nature of God, of liberty and the soul. A hardy race multiplied along the alluvial streams, and subdued the more rocky and less inviting fields; its population doubled once in twenty years, in spite of considerable emigration. And if, as has often been said, the ratio of the increase of population is the surest criterion of public happiness, Connecticut was long the happiest state in the world. Religion, united with the pursuit of agriculture, gave the land the aspect of salubrity .*
It was a part of this Connecticut that made the first settlements in the valley of the north branch of the Susquehanna and the Lackawanna rivers, which the people of that state then regarded as watering a part of
*See Bancroft, Vol. 2, pp. 56-57.
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their western domain. True, these valleys were widely separated from the valley of the Connecticut or the main western settlement of the colony, and to reach their new homes was no very easy task; but it was a task heroically undertaken. Long after this, when the dense forests had been penetrated by roads made from almost every direction into these valleys and into the valley of the Lehigh; when the forests had been in some measure subdued, the mountain sides graded down, the natural gorges among the mountains well known, and the passes graded through them, even after all this had been done, the illustrious Dr. Nicholas Murray, who, in 1828 or 9, came into the valley of Wyoming, which had been immortalized by Campbell's "Gertrude of Wyoming," cherished by its citizens as the place above all others, and greatly admired by Dr. Murray himself,-was accustomed to say of it, that it resembled the Catholic heaven which he regarded as owing its charms to the fact that purgatory had been previously passed through, thus intimating that, to reach the paradise of Wyoming Valley you must approach it through a tract of country of purgatorial difficulty and hardship. Some of us who entered it at a much later day have thought the illustration an apt one. Now we can only imagine the toils, trials and dangers of the region to be traversed by the settlers from the east an hundred years earlier, in order to reach their destination in the valley. They could follow no streams in this part of Pennsylvania without making a very circuitous course. Some of the first settlers from Connecticut, we learn, crossed both the Hudson and Delaware rivers, and leaving the Delaware at the mouth of the Shohola creek, they moved westward till they
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reached Roaring Brook, which runs into the Lackawanna near Scranton; then they followed down the Lackawanna to its confluence with the Susquehanna at the base of the lofty ledge which still bears the name of "Campbell's Ledge," from the summit of which the poet is supposed to have looked down on "the fair Susquehanna and the beautiful Wyoming" valley, when he conceived the idea of writing "Gertrude." The whole valley towards the south was before him. This valley was the point of destination sought by the Connecticut pioneers ; but as they approached it, the Susquehanna must be crossed.
The Connecticut people, who had worked their way to the banks of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna across rivers and through dense forests, marking out the course for roads, or actually constructing them, were brave men, patriotic and resolute, seeking the means by which they might honestly provide for their own subsistence and build up new communities. They dared to encounter danger in the work they had undertaken.
To people, animated by the principles inculcated in Winthrop's colony, and possessing the courage and perseverance of these pioneers, there have been prepared, through their labors, and those of like character, in the early history of our country, similar opportunities to find homes and build up new communities for all who need homes and a wider sphere of enterprise, with now vastly increased facilities to reach such locations, in almost every direction. These patient, uncomplaining, God- fearing people from Connecticut had been called upon to pass through severe trials in their former homes. They had wisely made efforts to conciliate the Indians. In these efforts that wonderful man, Roger Williams, had
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