Chadwick Wildlife Preserve

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This is a contributing entry for Chadwick Wildlife Preserve and only appears as part of that tour.Learn More.

Continue about 30 yards on the Long Point Trail from C8 Pawpaw Patch until the next crossing signpost. The trail to the left is the Great Minquas Path. The 17th-century Native American trade route crossed Ridley Creek near this point. It ran 80 miles, from the palisaded towns of the Susquehannock Nation along the lower Susquehanna through the Lenape Nation to the Schuylkill near its confluence with the Delaware.


Plant, Plant community, Natural landscape, Wood

EAC Volunteer Cleaning Up the Minquas Trail

EAC Volunteer Cleaning Up the Minquas Trail

The Susquehannock used the trail to trade beaver pelts, first with Dutch, then Swedish, then English merchants, for metal tools and cookware. The Dutch began the fur trade in the 1620s from ships anchored in the Schuylkill. They named the trail Beversreede, or Beaver Road. In the 1630s they built Fort Beversreede at the trail’s eastern terminus.

The Susquehannock used the path in their attempted conquest of part of the Lenape Nation, Lenapehoking, which included most of present-day eastern Pennsylvania and parts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. “Minquas,” meaning despicable ones, was the local Lenape name for the Susquehannock.

Swedish settlers founded the New Sweden colony in 1638 near present-day Wilmington. Six years later they built a fort where the path crossed Cobbs Creek, in an attempt to siphon off the Native American fur trade from the Dutch. In 1655 the Dutch conquered New Sweden, renaming it New Netherland. In 1664 the English conquered New Netherland, and in 1681 the colony was absorbed into William Penn’s land grant, the province of Pennsylvania. Another English name for the Susquehannock was Conestoga, after their largest town on the Susquehanna River. The Susquehannock were decimated by smallpox and by long conflicts with European settlers and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Many moved or intermarried with other tribes. In 1763 a frontier terrorist gang, the Paxtang Boys, massacred the last twenty Conestoga.

Rose Valley’s remnant of the Great Minquas Path is a reminder of our forebears on this land—the Lenape, whose members still have a vibrant presence here as the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, and the Susquehannock, whose voices are lost to history.

Latham, Dr. Roger. The Great Minquas Trail. Notes for the Chadwick Preserve. August 17th, 2023.

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