Identifier: ancienthistoricl00phil (find matches)
Title: Ancient and historic landmarks in the Lebanon Valley
Year: 1895 (1890s)
Authors: Croll, P. C. (Philip Columbus), 1852-1949
Subjects:
Publisher: Philadelphia : Lutheran Publication Society
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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he hand ofman. I want to point out the ineffaceable relic of bar-baric America, when the elements, the wild beasts andthe red men held exclusive sway over this valley. In-deed, this landmark is older than man or beast. Itpoints to primitive time. It is the gap in the SouthMountain, just south of the village last visited, throughwhich pass, or Kluft (as the villagers prefer to callit), led the old trail of the savages from their village orsettlement on the forks of the Susquehanna, whereSunbury is now located, to the Penn treaty groundson the banks of the Delaware. When the first settlers came to this valley from Scho- (81) 82 LANDMARKS IN THE LEBANON VALLEY. harie County, N. Y., in 1723, there were Indian villagesor traces of them all through this valley. But the mostsignificant local settlement or centre of the aboriginesthen was beyond the Kittatinny at Shamokin, now Sun-bury, from whence led this trail in an almost direct lineto the settlement of the peaceful Quaker and hs friendly
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THE KLUFT JNJ.AR AJ<<\\ MANSTOWN. neighbors, these red-skinned brethren. This trail ledthrough the Kittatinny or Blue Mountain range, at theSwatara gap, and from thence in a direct line to theSouth Mountain pass or gap. Along this route, almost identical with the pipe-linewhich the Standard Oil Trust has since drawn trans- AN OLD INDIAN TRAIL. 83 versely across our valley, carrying another kind of fireand in liquid form—that representing the civilization ofour day—the journeys on foot or on the backs of Indianponies, were taken to and fro by these first monarchs ofour then measureless forests. What an army of unlet-tered barbarians passed up and down this grand oldmountain pass! What generations of unprogressive free-men here preceded us! What restless hordes prowledabout this old landmark of nature when the day of civili-zation dawned upon this western hemisphere, as so manyowls and bats flutter to their holes, or so many prowlingpanthers to their cavernous lairs at the app

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