THE HISTORY OF SMITHTON, PENNSYLVANIA FROM 1800 TO 1950
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By Ethelclaire Rhodes Smith
It is probable that no white man had set foot in western Pennsylvania before 1750. Here was the hunting ground of the Iroquois, and there is ample evidence to prove that an Indian village once occupied this very spot. The Indians built their homes of poles and skins. Their diet of game and fish required many thousands of acres to sustain one small tribe, and when game became scarce, it was necessary for them to move to a new location. They liked to locate their temporary villages either in the shelter of a hill, or in a valley, and always near a good stream of water. They preferred to plant their small patches of corn and other vegetables, and their tobacco, in the alluvial bottomlands along the larger streams. This site was ideal for their purposes and to prove that they found it so, we can offer as evidence the flint arrow heads, parts of stone tomahawks, and scalping knives that the plows of the early settlers turned out of the soil, and that generations of small boys have picked up in their play on the hill that overlooks the town from the southeast. Braddock’s Expedition to Fort Duquesne, and later General Forbe’s road from Bedford across fifty miles of mountains to this side of Laurel Hill, during the French and Indian War (1755) opened Westmoreland County to settlers. There was a great clamor for land in Western Pennsylvania. The East, they said, was overpopulated, and their ambitious young men who wanted more land could not find it there. The use of coal had not been discovered, and every land owner thought he should have enough timber to furnish fuel for him and his descendants forever. Besides, they still cherished to a large extent the English idea of great estates. Westmoreland County was formed April 6, 1773. Three months later, July 1773, according to a legal parchment in the possession of the pioneer Smith family, the Penns granted to Christopher Hays a large part of both Rostraver and South Huntingdon Townships. Christopher Hays, in October 1773, was elected one of six assessors in the county, later he served in the Revolutionary War, and at some time in his career was a member of the Colonial Legislature. He built, where Smithton now stands, a blockhouse, which was probably one of the first houses in the County. (A blockhouse was a kind of fort where soldiers were usually stationed, and to which the settlers flocked for protection when the Indians were on the warpath).
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