RETROSPECT

I was interested in seeing exactly where Sullivan County is in respect to Newburgh. I couldn't figure out how to put the map on here so I am adding a link to it. The article talks about it being in the wild frontier. You might want to look at the map to see its location. You might find it interesting.
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1600&bih=775&q=sullivan+county+new+york&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x89dca49abba0966b:0x417fa944979acd8c,Sullivan,+NY&gl=us&ei=hwt6T-qyA6vMsQKWmY2hBA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=4&ved=0CG4Q8gEwAw

This is the newest of John Conway's weekly columns in the Sullivan County Democrat.  It gives a good feel for the lives of the earliest settlers in the region, some of whom are responsible for us being here.  Goes to show that we all have pioneer ancestors.

SRF

The Fort Delaware Museum of
Colonial History in Narrowsburg
is a replica of the 18th Century
Cushetunk settlement. 

RETROSPECTby John Conway
March 30, 2012

THE WOMEN OF THE CUSHETUNK SETTLEMENT

Sullivan County’s rich and colorful history is replete with stories of women of great strength and courage and determination, of women of great accomplishment and those with unusual legacies.  Perhaps no women in the region’s past have gone so unrecognized as the group of hearty unnamed heroines who stared down adversity and helped save the Cushetunk settlement from an avenging war party of Lenape in the fall of 1763.

The upper Delaware River valley was still a rugged frontier wilderness at the time, but western Connecticut was becoming overpopulated and farmland there was becoming scarce.  Some of the Connecticut residents who were feeling squeezed out of their home colony began to form companies for the purpose of purchasing lands elsewhere.  A group calling itself the Delaware Company, and led by hardy men named Skinner and Thomas and Tyler, purchased a tract of land along the Delaware River and by 1757 had formed a small settlement on the new property.  The place became known as Cushetunk.

Within a few years, the Delaware Company was soliciting additional settlers through a prospectus that claimed they had established three separate communities, each extending ten miles along the Delaware River and eight miles westward.  These new communities consisted of thirty cabins, three log houses, a grist mill and a saw mill.  Because of the hostile nature of the frontier at the time, a portion of Cushetunk was surrounded by a stockade for protection, and looked every bit as much a fort as it did a peaceful community. 

The protection of the fortification was largely unneeded until the uprising of the Lenape, or Delaware following the death of the elderly sachem and self-proclaimed king, Teedyuscong under mysterious circumstances in April of 1763.  Six months later, an avenging war party under the command of Teedyuscong’s son, Captain Bull, swooped through the Wyoming Valley and into the Delaware Valley, attacking every settlement along the way.  The riverfront community at Ten Mile River was destroyed, and the 22 inhabitants massacred.  The warriors then made their way upriver to Cushetunk, at one time a revered place where their ancestors had held green-corn dances and dog festivals, and ballgames, and where, according to their oral tradition, their sainted chieftain Tammanend, or Tammany, had spent much of his life.

The Delaware under Captain Bull had every intention of destroying Cushetunk and vanquishing those living there just as they had done downriver, but the stockade made their task a bit more difficult.  The Cushetunk settlers caught site of the marauders as they approached, and many were able to gather inside the blockhouse.  Two of the men, Moses Thomas and Jedidiah Willis, were killed by the war party before they could enter the fortification, and that left only one man, Ezra Witter, in defense of the settlement.   Fortunately for Witter, he had the assistance of a number of women who took up arms to aid in defense of their community.

Writing in “Life in Colonial America,” Henry J. Sage notes that the women of that era “had to sew, cook, take care of domestic animals, make many of the necessities used in the household such as soap, candles, clothing, and other necessities, the men were busy building, plowing, repairing tools, harvesting crops, hunting, fishing, and protecting the family from whatever threat might come, from wild animals to Indians…Women were expected to defer to their husbands and be obedient to them without question.  Husbands, in turn, were expected to protect their wives against all threats, even at the cost of their own lives if necessary.”

On this particular occasion, those traditional roles were exactly reversed, and it was the women of Cushetunk who risked their lives in response to the threat.

The women were armed with muskets and under Witter’s direction fired at the opportune time, killing one of the war party and intimidating the others by convincing them that the stockade was well defended.  This deception worked, and the raiding party left without further incident, taking their lone casualty with them.

The upper Delaware remained a hostile place for another few decades.  “There was not a wilder, lonelier place on the whole frontier,” historian Isabel Thompson Kelsay writes in “Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds,” “a place where wolves gathered by night but men were seldom seen.”  Still, the stockade at Cushetunk was never put to the test again.

Despite the fact that it was forced to withstand just the one raid, the fortification represents an important part of the history of the upper Delaware, and of Sullivan County.  Fittingly, it is preserved today, at least in spirit, in the form of Fort Delaware, a replica constructed in 1957 at Narrowsburg, just a few miles downriver from the original stockade.  The fort is now run by Sullivan County’s Division of Public Works, and besides serving as a museum of colonial history, provides narrated tours of the replicated community and re-enactments by some of the crafts people one would have likely found there.

The Fort will be open beginning Memorial Day weekend from 10AM to 5 PM on Saturday and Monday and from 12 noon to 5 PM on Sunday.  Weekend hours continue through the month of June. 
John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. E-mail him at jconway52@hotmail.com .