A History

OF
OF

BROOKLYN

Susquehanna Co., Penn'a:

ITS HOMES AND ITS PEOPLE.

By

E. A. WESTON.

"With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam,
Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream, "

"Yet sit with me by the homestead hearth,

And stretch the hands of memory forth

To warm them by the olden wood-fire's blaze, "
And hand the present down to future days.

Name and Natural Features.

THE TERRITORY now comprising the township of Brooklyn, in prehistoric times, was doubtless dry land, while the western prairie grounds were yet submerged in water. Ages ago the earth's contracting crust threw up the ridges of the township, with their cliffs of grand old picturesque rocks, forming the valleys through which its winding streams now flow, leaving fantastic shapes in ledges majestically piled, or broken and sundered from corresponding parts which they once evidently joined.

It lay in the track over which the glaciers once pushed their fields of moving ice; and banks and mounds of round smooth water-washed stones are not infrequent, from causes long ago operating, but which have ceased to exist in their locality.

Brook-lyn is therefore an appropriate name. In 1682, when the state of Pennsylvania was founded by Wm. Penn, and for a century after, Brooklyn was in possession of the Indians, who seem to have made little use of its dense but game-filled forests, except as pathways to and from more favorite regions. They may at intervals have made it a hunting ground or battle field, for arrow-heads are sometimes found, but the smoke of their village wigwams doubtless never rose from its surface. So it inherited no Indian names. The Lenni Lenapes or Delawares seem to have been entitled to occupancy, but they had many contests with the Six Nations to whom they finally yielded.

Of the three counties into which Penn divided his province Philadelphia, Chester and Bucks Brooklyn was for 70 years an un-named tract in Bucks. In 1752 it was in Northampton county. In 1772 it was in Northumberland. In 1790, under Pa. jurisdiction, it constituted a part of the large township of Tioga in the county of Luzerne, which was established in 1786. In 1795 it became a part of Nicholson in said county. In 1798 and for a few years after, it was called Dandolo and (the south part of it) Bidwell, by the first New England settlers. Connecticut had surveyed, and claimed jurisdiction and ownership over these townships, ( each six miles square) and over many more in a large town and county called Westmoreland, beginning below Wilkes-Barre and running, 15 miles west of the Susquehanna, to New York State, and extending from this west line to the Delaware on the east, this territory being separated from the rest of Connecticut by the intervening portion of New York along the Hudson river. And though, after a long and bloody contest, Connecticut had by arbitration, relinquished to Pennsylvania all governmental authority over the territory, the settlers still claimed the land (after paying for improvements) under Connecticut title, urging that their right was secured by the earliest charter from the British Sovereign, and by the first purchase from the Indians, while Pennsylvania was second in both these respects;