Settlement of Southwest Pennsylvania

By Olin L. Hupp

Braddock Road
to Ten Mile Creek

Land for the Taking

State Land Claims

Beyond Germanna
Notes

The decade of 1758 through 1768 was not a time of open settlement in southwest Pennsylvania. However, despite Indian danger and en treaties of the Pennsylvania provincial government, squatters, traders and even a few legitimate settlers came to the Monongahela River. Many were from Virginia. The Braddock road opened across the mountains in 1755 to present Brownsville. That same year, Braddock built Fort Burd. The site of Brownsville was a major jumping off place for exploration and settlement up and down the Monongahela River and to the west.

Indian uprisings (Delaware and Shawnee) closed the Braddock Road in 1763 and subsequently forced settlers to leave the area several times. Pennsylvania and Virginia were both issuing proclamations against settlement in the region. Despite threats of the death penalty from the Pennsylvania Provincial government in 1768, settlers continued to enter the "Forbidden" region. Finally late in 1768, the region would be legally opened to settlement. By 1774, one estimate has 50,000 families living west of the Allegheny Ridge and south of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers in Pennsylvania.

In those early years it was a common practice in the spring for male members of a family to travel on foot or horseback across the mountains in search of better lands. Although not legal, they "tomahawked" land claims, perhaps built a shelter such as a lean-to and often planted some grain in a clearing. They would then return home to their families. In the fall when the grain would be ready, the family would pack their few simple belongings on a horse or their backs and travel to the new homestead. A food supply was ready and there was time to improve the shelter. On early recorded land claims the lean-to or crop was listed as "improvements". These land claims were frequently sold and traded for goods.

Some settlers, often with young children, brought their families with them. Crossing in the spring, they carried corn meal over the mountains to make bread, which supplemented their diet of fish, venison, turkey, and bear. The corn meal usually ran out six to eight weeks before the crops were ready for harvest, causing the settlers to live off the very lean meat. After living this way for sometime, many would become sickly, and tormented with a sense of hunger. They could do nothing but wait for the crops to become ready.

Southwest Pennsylvania was claimed by the districts of West Augusta, Virginia and by Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. In 1776 West Augusta became Ohio, Yohogania and Monongalia Counties, in Virginia. By 1780 Virginia and Pennsylvania settled their boundary dispute placing most of the Yohogania County region in Westmoreland County. In 1781 Washington County was created from Westmoreland County. Greene County was created in 1796.

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(The above article was first published in Beyond Germanna Volume 5, number 3; May 1993. The following comments were added by John Blankenbaker the Editor of Beyond Germanna.)
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I have been pleased to have had the recent articles about southwest Pennsylvania. This area has been under recognized as a destination, if even temporary, for Culpeper County, Virginia families. The articles by Mr. Hupp have given us the Hupp, Rowe and Ault families as primary families but he has also mentioned George Bumgarner and Margaret Thomas.

Margaret Thomas was mentioned by Mr. Hupp as "the first white woman west of the Monongahela." Klaus Wust, at the First Germanna Seminar, highlighted the importance of the intra-European migrations prior to the trans-Atlantic migration as a selection factor for the pioneering and adventuring spirit found in America. Margaret Thomas Hupp's ancestors, a bare century earlier, started the westward trek from Greston, Austria. She was a continuation of this spirit.

Members of the Culpeper Bumgarners went to Pennsylvania (Beyond Germanna, v.1, n.5). Abraham Thomas, brother to Margaret Thomas, gave us the story in his words of his move from Culpeper County to southwest Pennsylvania. His words, "when I was a chuck of a boy, sent out by my father, in company with an older brotherto drive a flock of sheep to land purchased by my father at the mouth of Ten Mile Creek", appear in a new light when read with the southwest Pennsylvania history above (Beyond Germanna, v.4, n.1).

Since Abraham Thomas married Susannah Smith of Culpeper and since others of the Smiths moved to Kentucky, it may be that the Smiths were temporary sojourners in Pennsylvania.