by Ted Lienhart
1: Early Pennsylvania, & Origins of the French & Indian War
The Colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 when the King of England made a land grant to William Penn. Penn’s father had been an aristocrat and leading admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, and the King owed him a large sum of money. When Admiral Penn died, his son William, who was a deeply committed Quaker, offered to accept wilderness land in America in lieu of the money the King owed. The King gladly agreed and surprised Penn by giving him an enormous tract that today constitutes the entire state of Pennsylvania.
The Colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 when the King of England made a land grant to William Penn. Penn’s father had been an aristocrat and leading admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, and the King owed him a large sum of money. When Admiral Penn died, his son William, who was a deeply committed Quaker, offered to accept wilderness land in America in lieu of the money the King owed. The King gladly agreed and surprised Penn by giving him an enormous tract that today constitutes the entire state of Pennsylvania.
William Penn soon established the city of Philadelphia in the southeast corner of the land grant; an area on the Delaware River that already contained small settlements. The location was excellent for a transportation hub, with a harbor that could accommodate ocean-going ships. Penn had intended the colony primarily for persecuted English Quakers, but he was a progressive and open-minded man, and he welcomed immigrants of other faiths and nationalities.
The Colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 when the King of England made a land grant to William Penn. Penn’s father had been an aristocrat and leading admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, and the King owed him a large sum of money. When Admiral Penn died, his son William, who was a deeply committed Quaker, offered to accept wilderness land in America in lieu of the money the King owed. The King gladly agreed and surprised Penn by giving him an enormous tract that today constitutes the entire state of Pennsylvania.
The Colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 when the King of England made a land grant to William Penn. Penn’s father had been an aristocrat and leading admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, and the King owed him a large sum of money. When Admiral Penn died, his son William, who was a deeply committed Quaker, offered to accept wilderness land in America in lieu of the money the King owed. The King gladly agreed and surprised Penn by giving him an enormous tract that today constitutes the entire state of Pennsylvania.
Penn took pride in maintaining good relations and a prosperous fur trade with the area’s Native Americans. He encouraged tribes to settle in villages near Philadelphia, and he tried to ensure that Pennsylvanians dealt fairly with them. He insisted on paying a fair price to the tribes for any land the colony needed for farms and villages, even though that land had already been granted to him by the British government. Until Penn left Pennsylvania in 1701, the colony was, for the most part, a model of ethnic harmony among Native Americans and the various settler groups.
After William Penn departed, the colony was run by his sons, who were heavily influenced by the Quaker business elite. Their Quaker belief in non-violence prevented the colony from building an effective a military force, but their religious beliefs did not prevent them from engaging in questionable business practices. They were far less scrupulous than William Penn had been in dealing with the Indians. An increasing demand for land for white settlement, along with the growing popularity of land speculation among the wealthier classes, led to a number of very shady land acquisitions by the colonial government, starting in 1718. In less than twenty years, the area opened to white ownership and settlement expanded from about the size of today’s metropolitan Philadelphia to about one-third of Pennsylvania. As will be seen below, the colonial government’s main tactic was to bring the chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy into negotiations for the purchase of land used by other tribes.
Animal furs, particularly those of beavers, were central to the economy of Canada from the mid-1600s until about 1800 and were also important in northern British colonies such as Pennsylvania and New York. They were valuable mainly because they were widely used in Europe for making fashionable hats. The commerce called simply the ‘fur trade’ had a huge impact on northern Indian tribes.
Indians diligently hunted or trapped animals for the furs they could use to buy manufactured goods from Europe, which gradually became essential to their lifestyles. The most popular items were blankets, cloth, iron cookware, axes, knives, farm tools and – especially critical for hunting and defense – firearms, gunpowder and lead for bullets. Some tribes completely discontinued producing stone tools.
In the 1600s, Indians living in the vicinity of white settlements with trading posts soon decimated the fur-bearing animals in the vicinity, so both Indians and traders had to look further west for furs.
Indian tribes frequently went to war with neighboring tribes to gain control of profitable fur-bearing regions, or to become middle-men in the trade between white fur buyers and distant fur-hunting tribes. These wars, together with repeated epidemics of European diseases among Indians who had no immunity to them, reduced Indian populations during the 1600s in areas now in the northeastern U.S. by at least 70 per cent.
Throughout most of the 1600s the five tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy fought wars with several tribes who initially lived in the present-day province of Ottawa, up-state New York, northern Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio. The Iroquois tribes, better organized and with an extremely martial culture, vanquished all opponents while simultaneously carrying on a decades-long war against the French in Canada.
Some of the losing tribes evacuated their traditional lands and migrated west into the Great Lakes region to get out of reach of Iroquois raiding parties. Other tribes were allowed by the Iroquois to remain in the area under agreements that gave the New York-based Iroquois chiefs a number of privileges, including the authority to intervene in any treaty negotiations of these ‘subject’ tribes.
The Colony of Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 when the King of England made a land grant to William Penn. Penn’s father had been an aristocrat and leading admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, and the King owed him a large sum of money. When Admiral Penn died, his son William, who was a deeply committed Quaker, offered to accept wilderness land in America in lieu of the money the King owed. The King gladly agreed and surprised Penn by giving him an enormous tract that today constitutes the entire state of Pennsylvania.
By the 1730s the colonial government of Pennsylvania had learned to use this diplomatic privilege of the Iroquois chiefs to their own advantage. When the colonial government wanted more land in Pennsylvania that was still inhabited by Native Americans, the government’s representatives would deal directly with the Confederacy chiefs rather than with the Indians who lived on that land. These Iroquois chiefs were softened up with expensive gifts and elaborate demonstrations of respect. They would soon agree to sell a huge tract of land for a pittance, and the Iroquois overlords would complete the deal by ordering the other tribes – usually Delawares or Shawnees – off the land.
By the late 1740s these Pennsylvania land sales were one ingredient of an explosive mix that would soon ignite history’s first world-wide war. This ingredient was a growing number of displaced Indians who moved into independent villages in northwestern Pennsylvania and westward along the south coast of Lake Erie. They harbored bitter grievances against the settlers who were pushing north and west into their lands.
Many of these Indians ceased to recognize the authority of their own tribal leaders, who had failed to defend the interests of their people. When war came in 1755 these displaced and independent Indians would be among the deadliest weapons pointed at the Pennsylvania frontier settlements by ruthless French-Canadian military commanders.
Besides the radicalization of displaced Indians, there were other developments at the end of the 1740s that would lead to war. Virginia’s Governor Lord Dunmore asserted a claim that all the land west of Virginia and Pennsylvania, clear to the Mississippi River, was in Virginia’s original land grant from the British crown. In 1748 a group of Virginia’s elite, led by George Washington’s older brother Lawrence, proposed to the Governor that they create and fund a company (the ‘Ohio Company’) that would establish settlers on as much as 500,000 acres near the stretch of the Ohio River that is now the eastern border of Ohio.
The company proposed to build and staff trading posts to buy furs from Indians throughout the Great Lakes region. The company’s trading posts would provide the Indians the manufactured goods they needed, using this commerce as leverage to establish military alliances between Virginia and the tribes. The company would provide at its expense the settlers and soldiers for implementation if the British government would grant at least 200,000 acres to start. Once the company met some specified conditions, it would receive 300,000 more acres. Although the British government had for decades assured the Indian tribes that white settlement would never approach the Ohio River, Virginia was now proposing to sponsor a large white settlement beyond the river, although an exact location had not yet been selected.
The British government liked the plan, with the condition that the Ohio Company also build a fort. The French had dominated the fur trade in the Great Lakes for nearly a century, raking in profits and establishing military alliances with the tribes there. Great Britain and France had fought each other repeatedly, most recently in the 1740s. Both the British and French knew their Indian alliances would play a critical part in their next war. As the British believed they could provide better-quality trade goods to the Indians than the French, they were confident that their traders could win a competition with the French for the favor of the region’s tribes. If the Ohio Company could deliver on its promises, the British government could earn revenue from the fur trade, strengthen its military position with Indian alliances, and prepare for eventual westward expansion of the colonies.
The French-Canadian government had thus far dominated the fur trade in the Great Lakes region with only a handful of scattered and thinly staffed military and trading posts. Officials there realized that this proposed British push into the region threatened French profits and Indian alliances. Also, the Ohio River and other rivers further west provided water routes that were used to move military forces and supplies from French towns on the southern Mississippi River into French Canada, which was mostly east of Lake Huron. Quebec, Montreal and other significant Canadian towns were located on the St. Lawrence River, which was their main supply route. However, the river iced over during the winter and could in other seasons be blocked at its mouth by the British navy. The security of France’s North American empire depended on having an alternative route to the sea, via the Mississippi River.
As the British and Americans moved west, ever closer to the Ohio River, the French government was concerned about losing a portion of the fur trade to competition, and feared that their traditional enemy, Great Britain, would establish a military presence on the Ohio River and other rivers in the region that would cut off Canada’s access to the Mississippi River.
In the late 1740s the French Canadians saw the Ohio Company and a number of New York and Pennsylvania fur traders setting up, or preparing to, along the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, and also further west in Ohio country. The French-Canadian government chose this moment to make a bold statement. In the summer of 1749 a 250-man military expedition, led by colonial official Celeron de Bienville, traveled from Lake Erie down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. De Bienville stopped at the Indian villages along the way, informing the Indians that only French traders were allowed to do business in the region. He threatened serious consequences for villages who did business with the British.
Wherever they found traders from the British colonies, the French force burned their buildings, confiscated their inventory, and ejected or imprisoned the traders. Moreover, de Bienville declared, the Ohio River valley and all the land west of it as far as the Mississippi River was owned by the King of France, because France had explored and occupied the region first. Periodically, a number of lead plates were buried along the Ohio River carrying the same message. That is why De Bienville’s voyage is often called the ‘Lead-Plate Expedition’.
It was now obvious that both the French and British governments badly wanted to control the Ohio country and the rest of the Great Lakes region; wilderness that had not previously seemed important. In the early 1750s the French began building a string of forts from Lake Erie south along the Allegheny River, with Fort Duquesne at the site of present-day Pittsburgh being at the southern end. The Virginia governor decided upon a military response to this challenge, which resulted in July 1754 in a small battle in which young Lt. Col. George Washington and his Virginia militia fought a mixed force of French-Canadians and French-allied Indians. This battle at ‘Fort Necessity’, ending in Washington’s surrender, took place ten miles southeast of present-day Uniontown, PA. It is generally considered the first battle of the war known to Americans as the ‘French and Indian War’, and to the rest of the world as the ‘Seven Years War’.
The war got underway in earnest in western Pennsylvania in 1755 with an expedition led by British General Edward Braddock. Braddock brought a heavily laden army of British regulars and colonial militia that was equipped to lay siege to French forts. The soldiers slowly hacked a road through the wilderness of southwestern Pennsylvania in the direction of Fort Duquesne, which Braddock expected to conquer first. In July 1755, shortly before it reached the fort, Braddock’s army met total defeat in an ambush by a combined force of French regulars and Canadian militia and Indians.
This battle would be a disastrous turning point for the Pennsylvanians who lived near the frontier. Many of the Indians pushed out of Pennsylvania over the years now allied with the French army. Partly they did this for practical reasons; the French now controlled trade where the Indians lived, so only through military alliance could the Indians obtain essential supplies, including gunpowder and ammunition. Besides, many were eager to sign on to the French side for the chance to gain revenge against the Pennsylvanians. They hoped too, that if the French won the war their lands in Pennsylvania would be restored. Unfortunately for the members of the first Wolf family in this family history, they were living in a frontier area of Pennsylvania that would soon be in the crosshairs of the Indians.
2: Peter Wolf and Family: Pennsylvania at War
Johann Peter Wolff (hereafter called Peter Wolf) arrived by ship in Philadelphia on 25 Nov 1740 from his home in Germany. Pennsylvania, at that time one of Great Britain’s 13 American colonies, welcomed German protestant immigrants, and there were already some small, scattered German communities in and outside Philadelphia. It did not take long for this young man to find his way to a community of German pioneers well outside the city.
One tract of land that the Pennsylvania government had acquired from the Indians in about 1720 stretched from present-day Harrisburg, on the Susquehanna River, eastward to present-day Reading, on the Schuylkill River. Among the first settlers in this new frontier area were some German farmers who had previously settled near Albany, NY, but had somehow been deprived of title to their lands there. In 1723 they traveled on rafts down the Susquehanna River into Pennsylvania and then traveled up the Tulpehocken Creek until they found unsettled land in present-day Lebanon County. Here they decided to begin again the back-breaking task of turning forest into farms. Conrad Weiser, who would play a major role in Pennsylvania’s Indian and military affairs for decades, joined the Tulpehocken German community as a young man in 1729. His historic home in the small town of Womelsdorf can still be toured today. Probably this community and its farms near the northern edge of the Pennsylvania frontier were well-developed by the time young Peter Wolf arrived there in 1741 or 1742.
Peter Wolf had left his home in 1739 or 1740 in Gangloff, Rhineland-Pfalz. The tiny village of Gangloff, which still exists, is located about 25 miles north of the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany, about one-half mile northeast of the village of Becherbach, and 40 miles west of the Rhine River. 25-year-old Peter, along with John Wolff, aged 23, and Jacob Wolff, aged 20 (presumably his brothers) arrived in Philadelphia on 25 Nov 1740. They had sailed from the Port of Rotterdam, at the mouth of the Rhine River, aboard the Loyal Judith.
At some point in his life, probably during his youth in Germany, Peter learned the skills of a blacksmith, a trade always in demand throughout the frontier settlements. Peter had moved northwest to the German Tulpehocken Valley within about one year of his arrival in America, and he remained there at least long enough to meet and marry 25-year-old Hannah. A marriage record shows that on August 8 1742, Peter Wolf married Hannah Wolf in Tulpehocken. Possibly her maiden name was also Wolf, or possibly the Lutheran minister (John Caspar Stoever) erred on this entry, writing her married name where he normally wrote the maiden name. Hannah was born in 1717 in Vigourie, Elsass (Alsace).
Alsace is a region of northeastern France close to the German border. At the time Hanna was born there, most Alsatians spoke German. Vigourie, where she was born, has not yet been found on a map. No further information has been found regarding Hannah’s parents or her early life.
Peter and Hanna Wolf are believed to have moved around at least twice within a small area west of Lebanon, PA. In 1744 they were members of the Hill (Lutheran) Church, which had been founded in 1733 by Pastor John Caspar Stoever. The church still exists and is located in Cleona, two miles west of the city of Lebanon. Their son John (their 4th child) was baptized there on 31 Mar 1747. These were the years (1744-1748) of King George’s War. Although residents of some of the British colonies served in that war, it did not have much of an impact on the Wolf’s region in Pennsylvania.
In 1750 the family was living in Lebanon Township, according to tax records. In 1752 Peter Wolf ‘warranted’ 125 acres in the adjacent township of Hanover, to the west of Lebanon. It was 2 1/2 miles north of present-day Hershey, bordered on the south side by Swatara Creek and on the east by Bow Creek. ‘Warranting’ was a preliminary step in completing a purchase, and likely indicates that Peter then had a legal claim to that land and was living on it.
In the early 1750s these townships of Lebanon and East Hanover were sparsely populated frontier areas where nearly all the residents were recent arrivals. This area, that would much later become Dauphin County, contained about 500 households by 1750. No doubt most of the residents were relatively poor young families living in log cabins. Peter and Hannah Wolf, with their expanding brood, were probably typical of these pioneer families, working relentlessly to launch farms and settlements where there had been nothing but wilderness.
When they registered their land warrant in 1752, Peter and Hannah probably celebrated, expecting this farm to be the happy home of their growing young family for many years to come. Unfortunately, as we saw in the previous chapter, the colonial governments of Virginia and French Canada were both taking aggressive actions to take control of the Ohio country and the area of western Pennsylvania near the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. Their actions would lead to General Braddock’s expedition to Fort Duquesne and defeat in July 1755. That battle would in turn, within a few months, turn the settlers’ border areas into battlefields. The pioneer families who were trying to scratch out livings and build communities would suddenly find themselves in mortal danger.
Small war parties of Indians who were allied with the French began raiding border areas in October 1755 in several Pennsylvania counties, including the area where Peter and Hannah Wolf lived. Area resident Conrad Weiser wrote on Oct. 26, 1755, “About an hour ago I received the news of the enemy having crossed the Susquehanna, and killed a great many people, from Thomas McKee’s down to Hunter’s Mill.” Attacks were vicious and shocking, with people of all ages, including even babies, murdered and scalped. Over the next few years hundreds of settlers and family members were taken into captivity and enslavement. The Indian raiders also looted and burned homes, slaughtered livestock and burned crops in the fields when that was possible. It isn’t clear what the French-Canadian government hoped to accomplish through organizing and supporting such terrorism, but there was no doubt the Indians were acting out their hatred.
John Harris of Paxton (about 15 miles west of Peter Wolf’s farm) wrote on Oct 29, 1755,
“We expect the enemy upon us every day, and the inhabitants are abandoning their plantations, being greatly discouraged at the approach of such a number of cruel savages, and no present sign of assistance. I had a certain account of fifteen hundred French and Indians being on the march against us and Virginia, and now close upon our borders, their scouts scalping our families on our frontiers daily…. I have this day cut loop-holes in my house, and am determined to hold out to the last extremity, if I can get some men to stand by me.”
Peter and Hanna Wolf had a special reason to fear the possibility of attack. The Indians traveled through this wild area mainly by river. John Harris feared the worst for his home because he lived on the broad Susquehanna River. Peter Wolf lived on Swatara Creek, which provided the Indians a convenient canoe route east from the Susquehanna.
Although there were reports of more attacks in the region in late 1755, the immediate area of the Wolf farm was apparently spared until late in the summer of 1756. A letter from an area resident of 10 Aug. 1756 says: “There is nothing here, almost every day, but murder by the Indians in some parts or other. About five miles above me, at Manada Gap [five miles north of Wolf’s farm], there were two of the Province soldiers killed and one wounded. There were but three Indians, and they came in among ten of our men and committed the murder and went off safe. The name, or sight of an Indian, makes almost all in these parts tremble – their barbarity is so cruel where they are masters …”
Again in October 1756 there were attacks in Hanover Township, where the Wolfs lived, “where they murdered, under circumstances of much cruelty, several families, among whom was one Andrew Berryhill. On the 22nd of October they killed John Craig and his wife, scalped them both, burned several houses, and carried off Samuel Ainsworth, a lad about thirteen years old. The next day they scalped a German, whose name has not been given.”
Adam Reed of Hanover, in a letter of Oct 14, wrote, “Last Tuesday, the 12th, ten Indians came to Noah Frederick while ploughing, killed and scalped him, and carried away three of his children that were with him – the oldest but nine years old – and plundered his house, and carried away everything that suited their purpose; such as clothes, bread, butter, a saddle, and a good rifle gun …”
After more accounts of local attacks in the first few days, Reed went on to explain how the frontier people were, “employed in nothing else than carrying off their effects.” All of the people in his area were packing up wagons and abandoning their farms. Peter Wolf also abandoned his farm some time in 1756. He appears to have moved his family to the nearby village of Lebanon and may have remained there for several years. Possibly Peter supported the family by working as a blacksmith.
The attacks continued in Wolf’s vicinity in 1757. On May 16, 1757, Paxton was again raided, with 11 persons killed. On Aug 19, 1757, 14 people were killed or captured from one congregation. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported later that month that,
“… on the 17th of August, one Beatty was killed in Paxton – that the next day James Mackey was murdered in Hanover, and William and Joseph Barnett wounded. That on the same day were taken prisoners a son of James Mackey, a son of Joseph Barnett, Elizabeth Dickey and her child, and the wife of Samuel Young and her child, and that ninety-four men, women and children were seen flying from their places in one body, and a great many more in smaller parties. So that it was feared the settlements would be entirely forsaken.”
“Our accounts in general from the frontiers, are most dismal; all agree that some of the inhabitants are killed or carried off – houses burned and cattle destroyed daily – and at the same time, they are afflicted with severe sickness and die fast. So that in many places, they are neither able to defend themselves when attacked, nor to run away.
“By the spring of 1758 Harris’s Ferry (present-day Harrisburg), on the east edge of the Susquehanna about 15 miles west of Wolf’s farm, represented the western edge of settlement. All the farms and homes west of the river had been abandoned, with the inhabitants living as refugees in Lancaster and Philadelphia. “Years later John Heckewelder (a Moravian missionary) passed through Carlisle (west of the Susquehanna) and entered a “howling wilderness” where, in every direction, the “blackened ruins of houses and barns, and remnants of chimneys” confronted him.”
After 1758 the attacks in Pennsylvania began to wind down. The French were losing the war in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the British were taking their forts. Indians were no longer able to obtain supplies from French traders, especially gunpowder and ammunition. Those Pennsylvania settlers who could afford to were beginning to move back to their land, although often their buildings had been destroyed by fire and their livestock had been killed or stolen. Probably the home of Peter and Hanna Wolf had been burnt by the Indians. Their son William said many years later that, “the bible in which his father recorded the ages of his children was unfortunately burnt together with his father’s house and other property in Lancaster County.”
Peter Wolf again appears in local records in 1759, when he mortgaged (sold) his farm and his blacksmith tools. In 1761 he appeared in records again when he travelled to Philadelphia to become a naturalized citizen of Pennsylvania.
With the French out of the Ohio country and northwestern Pennsylvania, and British soldiers manning the forts, Pennsylvanians probably expected their troubles from Indians were behind them. Indian raids became much less frequent.
Although the French and Indian War would not formally end with a treaty until 1763, it became clear that the French had lost when the British took Montreal in September 1760. It was widely expected on the frontier that the British military forces stationed throughout Canada and the Great Lakes area would be able to maintain the peace. However, the British military failed badly in establishing trade and diplomatic relations with the Indians. The Indian wars against the frontier people would soon be revived with the beginning of ‘Pontiac’s War’ against the British.
In May 1763, Indians from a loose coalition of tribes throughout the Great Lakes region began attacking the British forts in an effort to dislodge the British. They hoped to enable the return of the French, although in reality it was highly unlikely that the French could return. Most attacks were ‘surprise attacks’, and the Indians succeeded in taking eight forts, including three in northwest Pennsylvania and the strategically important Fort Michilimackinac at the northern point of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. At Fort Detroit the British commander was warned, and the surprise attack, led personally by Chief Pontiac, was thwarted. Instead, the tribes laid siege to that fort for six months before Pontiac decided to withdraw. At the same time that the tribes began attacking the forts, they renewed their raids on Pennsylvania frontier communities.
Some historians believe that relations between Native Americans and British colonists reached a new low during Pontiac’s War, which did not formally end until a treaty-signing in July 1766. One wrote that “Pontiac’s War was unprecedented for its awful violence, as both sides seemed intoxicated with genocidal fanaticism.”
In an infamous series of incidents in December 1763, a group of over 50 Scotch-Irish vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys, from the frontier area near the Wolfs’ home, marched on a nearby village of peaceful Christian Indians and slaughtered those they found there. When authorities locked up the village survivors for their own protection, the Paxton boys attacked the jail and slaughtered those Indians too.
The Paxton boys then marched to Philadelphia to present their grievances to the legislature. They represented the views of many of the frontiersmen who had suffered through eight years of brutal Indian attacks. In their view, the Pennsylvania government was indifferent to their welfare, and had made only feeble attempts to support or protect them. The Philadelphia Quakers who dominated Pennsylvania government seemed to them more concerned about the safety of the Indians still living in villages throughout Pennsylvania than with the frontier people who had been under attack, and their pacifist religious principles had prevented the colony’s government from taking any effective military action throughout the war.
Prior to 1755, relations between Native Americans and frontiersmen had been peaceful, but after so many years of warfare most frontier people were extremely bitter toward the Indians. Many agreed with the Paxton boys that no Indian could be trusted, and any Indians still in Pennsylvania must be removed, one way or another. A ‘pamphlet war’ ensued (a typical form of political debate in the 18th century) that comprised more than one-fifth of all Pennsylvania’s printed material in 1764.
No records have been found indicating how Peter Wolf and his family felt about the Indians, nor is it known whether Peter or his sons had helped with military defense. In 1764 it appears the family was still living in Lebanon. In that year Peter was named ‘Overseer of the Poor’ in Lebanon Township. Since foreign immigrants did not easily achieve positions like this in local government, it seems that Peter was a respected member of his community.
In 1765 Peter applied for a warrant for 200 acres of land that adjoined, on the eastern boundary, his previous 125-acre parcel. This new 200-acre property, for which he received the warrant in 1768, he called “Wolf Hole”. By that time, in 1768, three of his sons were in their 20s and the fourth, Christian, was in his late teens. Probably Peter and his sons were working this new 200-acre farm in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Records show that Peter paid taxes on the property in 1772 and 1773.
By 1773 the family had begun implementing a major new scheme that would over several years result in the relocation of nearly the entire Wolf family, as well as some friends and neighbors, to a new frontier in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. In 1775 Peter and Hanna, now around 60 years old and grandparents, sold their 200-acre farm and probably followed their adult children west (no record has been found showing their whereabouts after 1775). This marked the end of the family’s residence in central Pennsylvania. Probably the whole family fervently hoped their move west would bring them the peace that had eluded them during a decade of war. However, these hopes would soon be dashed, as they jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
3: The Wolf 2nd Generation: Washington County & Military Service
By the early 1770s several of Peter and Hannah’s children were reaching adulthood and were beginning families of their own. But even while these individual families were getting established in their new homes and farms in Dauphin County, they were thinking of pressing on to a new frontier. Genealogist and historian Raymond Bell thought that Lawrence Stricker, husband of Peter and Hannah’s daughter Maria Barbara, may have taken the lead on planning. That would seem reasonable, as Lawrence was about 14 years older than the oldest Wolf son, Jacob, who was then in his mid-20s.
Stricker and the Wolfs were looking hopefully at new western lands that were opened for settlement in 1769, after a decade-long chain of events that followed British victories over the French. The French and Indian War had formally ended with a treaty between France and Great Britain in 1763, giving the British vast new lands in North America (French Canada) and erasing French competition for the Great Lakes region. Three years prior to the treaty, British troops had forced the French from most of the Great Lakes area and had taken over their forts. As the war wound down, the British military continued to be concerned about the threat from hostile Indian tribes. They tried to reconcile the Indian tribes to British rule in the region. However, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the outbreak of Pontiac’s War in the summer of 1763 showed that the efforts of British commanders to improve relations with the Indians had failed spectacularly.
In another effort to soothe the Indians, the British government issued a new law, the Proclamation of 1763, which set a western boundary beyond which the colonists were prohibited from moving. This proclamation was meant to keep colonists out of Indian lands and was expected to have three benefits for the British; (1) reduce Indian agitation, (2) minimize the military cost of guarding the frontier, and (3) keep colonists east of the mountains, where the colonial governments could control and tax them.
The Proclamation angered frontiersmen who had planned to move west, as well as veterans of the French & Indian War who had been pledged land in lieu of wages for their military service. Some prominent colonial leaders who were speculating in western lands, including Benjamin Franklin, also had their plans spoiled. Over the next several years the British responded to the colonists’ anger by easing the restrictions somewhat. Many frontiersmen moved west of the mountains despite the ban. From the mid-1760s Virginia began registering claims of these settlers, but Pennsylvania held to its policy of not recognizing settler claims to land that the colony had not purchased from the Indians. It was the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in November 1768, that triggered a flood of ‘legal’ migration of Pennsylvanians to the region between the mountains and the Ohio River.
This treaty was the result of negotiations between the British Indian Agent William Johnson and the New York Iroquois chiefs who still had authority, through historical treaties with other tribes, to dispense of Indian lands in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix established a new boundary between colonists and Indian lands, running from the NY-Canada border down to the Tennessee River. Between Lake Erie and Kentucky, the new boundary was the Ohio River. That opened for white settlement the area that is now southwest Pennsylvania and the panhandle of West Virginia.
News of that treaty and of the new wilderness area now being opened for settlement must have set the Wolfs to dreaming of huge new farms at bargain prices. Probably a couple of the young men in the family were sent to the area to look it over. They selected a region west of present-day Washington, PA on Buffalo Creek, about 30 miles southwest of Pittsburg. By 1773 the Wolfs were moving in and building their log cabins in the forests of what was then Westmoreland County, PA. In 1781 this very large county would be subdivided into several smaller counties, making the Wolfs residents of Washington County.
Unfortunately, there were problems lurking for the pioneers in this wilderness. The Indians who had resided or hunted there had not agreed to part with their lands. As had happened repeatedly in Pennsylvania for some 50 years during treaty negotiations with colony representatives, Iroquois chiefs had sold this land by over-ruling chiefs of the tribes who lived or hunted there. Adding insult to injury, the Iroquois kept the money paid by the British, sharing virtually nothing with the resident tribes. The embittered Indians affected by the new treaty joined the tribes already in the Ohio country; many of whom had been raiding colonists during the French and Indian War.
Sporadic violence in areas near the Ohio River, of whites against Indians as well as Indians against whites, increased as settlers moved into western Pennsylvania, northwestern Virginia, and the new territory of Kentucky. Although Indian raids in the early 1770s seem not to have been as frequent or as well-organized as during the period 1755-1764, they were often deadly for settlers living near the Ohio River, from which raiders could easily attack and escape. The raids were much like those of the French & Indian War: massacres of families, burning of homes, killing of livestock, and captive-taking. At least one of the Wolfs, William, would be forced to leave his claim temporarily due to the Indian threat. Jacob Wolf and Laurence Stricker would respond to the danger of Indians by transforming their cabins into forts.
Besides the danger from Indians, a second worry for early settlers was the difficulty of obtaining title to the lands upon which they settled. The colonial governments didn’t agree on which colony owned these frontier regions. Virginia claimed a vast area to the west and northwest of her present-day borders, stretching all the way to the Mississippi River and including much of the new territory recently opened for settlement. Pennsylvania’s claim was far more modest, consisting only of the region that today includes the panhandle of West Virginia and the modern Pennsylvania counties of Greene and Washington in the southwestern corner of the state. Because this land was now available for settlement, the question of which colony owned it caused a heated controversy between the governments of the two colonies, and between the new settlers who had been citizens of these two colonies.
Virginia and Pennsylvania had competed since the 1840s to monopolize the Indian trade in the Ohio country, to the extent that relations between the two colonies were strained. Probably that was a reason that this new conflict over borders so quickly turned bitter. The issue might have resulted in an armed conflict if both colonies had not, beginning in 1775, been more focused on the rebellion against the mother country.
For pioneers settling on their claims on the western frontier in the 1770s, the uncertainty over which colony had jurisdiction, followed by the disruption of the Revolutionary War, would prevent them from gaining title to their new farms until the 1780s. This must have been a constant worry, as families invested years of hard work transforming forest wilderness into productive farmland. Without legal title there was little to prevent a land speculator from buying the improved property directly from the government, and having the original settlers ejected. Nevertheless, the Wolfs stuck to their plan of settling on their new claims in the mid-1770s; only making their ownership official in the 1880s after the new U.S. states of Virginia and Pennsylvania came to agreement on borders and legal jurisdiction.
In about 1773 Laurence Stricker and Jacob Wolf led the way into the new lands. Over the next few years they were joined by younger brothers John, Peter, Christian and William, along with brothers-in-law Michael Ely Jr. and Michael Dennis. Because the move of the extended family took so long, individual families may have opted to send the men ahead to build cabins and get established, with spouses and children joining later.
Jacob Wolf claimed and settled on 200 acres of land near Buffalo Creek in Donegal Township, about five miles west of present-day Washington, PA. In legal documents the property is called “Wolf’s Grove”. Brother William and brothers-in-law Stricker and Ely claimed land close by. At a point where the tracts of Stricker, Ely and neighbor Hardman Horn touched, they each donated a small plot of land that became ‘Wolf’s Meeting House’, for church services and other gatherings. There would soon be a cemetery there as well. Resting on that plot today is the East Buffalo Presbyterian Church, and in the old cemetery can be found headstones of some of the early settlers, including Jacob Wolf and his wife Elizabeth.
In the 1770s the new settlers sometimes handled the confusion about which colony they lived in by trying to register their claims in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. For several years the Virginia government considered the Wolfs’ area to be within the jurisdiction of Virginia’s Ohio County, and in 1778 they were required to pay Virginia taxes. The Wolfs may not have minded paying taxes that year, because that could help them solidify their precarious legal claims to their properties.
In April 1774, just at the time the arriving Wolfs were getting established, three violent incidents between whites and Indians took place along the Ohio River in the vicinity of where Wheeling Creek emptied into the river: the location of the future town of Wheeling, VA. This stretch of the Ohio was 25 miles west of Jacob Wolf’s new claim. The last and most severe of those incidents was a massacre of a small group of peaceful Indians by several white men. Among the victims were the sister and brother of a Mingo chief, Logan. Chief Logan had until then used his considerable influence with Ohio tribes to restrain them from violence, but now he sought revenge and urged war against the settlers. The pace and extent of Indian raids on settlers east of the Ohio River ramped up as the summer of 1774 progressed and included incursions into the area where the Wolfs were settling.
1775 would be even more momentous for frontier settlers, as it was for people all over the 13 colonies. Settlers in western Pennsylvania had not generally been involved in the widening political split between radical patriots and British colonial officials in the early 1770s. The Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and most of the other events and radical meetings had been confined mainly to cities and towns close to the Atlantic coast. However, when events led in April 1775 to the battles in Lexington and Concord, remote areas including Pittsburg were contacted by Patriot correspondence committees, who asked for assistance. Prominent Pittsburgh residents called meetings to decide whether this frontier region would stand with the British or the Patriots. The decision was made to support the Revolution and a regiment of volunteers was quickly formed and sent east to join General Washington.
Meanwhile, Indian raids on settlers persisted and grew worse. The British military commander for the Great Lakes region, Colonel Henry Hamilton, was based at Fort Detroit. He did not take long to adopt the same tactics that the French had employed in the recent French and Indian War. Colonel Hamilton sent out his Indian agents to area tribal chiefs to entice them with gifts or to strong-arm them with threats. His objective was to obtain commitments from the tribes for joint military action against American rebels. Hamilton’s British regular soldiers were too few to have much of an impact against the Americans, but with the right inducements he could activate a few thousand native warriors. Many of the area’s Indians did not, by this time, need much persuasion to go to war against the settlers.
The settlers along the frontier near the Ohio River experienced the Revolutionary War as a guerilla war against their families. Detroit’s Colonel Hamilton became known throughout the region as “The Hair Buyer” because he offered generous bounties for the scalps of settlers. He also provided allied tribes with weapons and other supplies. He hoped to instill fear in American settlers through indiscriminate killing or capture of non-combatants, as well as the destruction of settlers’ homes, livestock and crops; actions that today would be termed ‘sponsoring terrorism’. His objective seems to have been to keep American fighting men pinned down on the frontier defending their families and neighbors, preventing them from joining Patriot armies.
Most of the raiders were Indians from tribes allied with the British. Often the Indians operated by themselves in small groups of about five to ten warriors. Sometimes the British organized much larger raids, with more than 100 warriors accompanied and led by British soldiers. The largest actions were attacks on forts. For example, mixed units of about 300 to 400 Indians and British soldiers made unsuccessful attempts to conquer Fort Henry at Wheeling in September 1777 and again in September 1782.
Despite Virginia collecting taxes in the area, it was Pennsylvania that organized the militia in Westmoreland County, in 1777. The Wolf brothers and their neighbors enrolled. Militia service became the usual form of recognized military service for men living in the western frontier regions during the war, although some men continued to go east to serve in the continental army under General Washington or other generals. American revolutionary generals would not assign scarce regular army units to this frontier region, remote from most of the war, so settlers had to depend on themselves for their own defense.
The purpose of the militia was to defend against Indian raids in the areas where the members lived, or to respond after raids by tracking down and killing raiders and rescuing their captives. Militia units occasionally were called upon to participate in organized expeditions into ‘Indian country’, in Ohio. However, the rolls of participants in these expeditions contain only a fraction of the area’s militia members. Most members remained at home. Possibly they were needed to defend their neighborhoods, but it seems that most members only served occasionally. The brothers Jacob, Peter, William and Christian were all on the rolls of Pennsylvania militias during the Revolutionary War.
William Wolf described his service in some detail to Washington’s Court of Common Pleas, when, in old age, he applied for a military pension. An act of 1832 made small pensions available to any surviving men who could prove their military service in the Revolution. Surviving widows of such men also qualified. Applying veterans and their witnesses had to appear in county courts to make sworn statements providing the details of their service.
According to William Wolf’s statement to the court, he entered service in 1776 in the Pennsylvania militia where his position was ‘Spy’. In later times the role might have been termed ‘Scout’. He was in active service for three years, except winters, in frontier areas of present-day Washington and Green counties, and around Fort Henry, at today’s Wheeling, WV. His declaration states:
“His first term of service was for six months commencing the first day of April 1776. He was a volunteer under the command of Col. David Williamson. Maj. Henry Dickenson & Captain Jacob Miller and Charles Bonner and Zachariah Biggs and Eleazar Williamson & Capt. Brady were also in the same service. We were all engaged as “Indian Spies” traversing the country from Washington, PA to and along the Ohio River as low down as the mouth of Grave Creek in Virginia. Some part of this tour he was stationed in “Biggs’ fort’, where West Liberty now stands but generally he was under arms scouring the country and defending the frontiers from the incursions of the savages.”…
“My second term of service commenced about the first of April 1777 and ended the ensuing fall, on commencement of winter when the weather became so cold and severe that there was no longer any danger to be apprehended to the settlement from the inroads of the Indians. My third tour of duty commenced at the breaking up of winter about the last of March 1778 and continued ‘till the snow covered the ground in the autumn. For the last two terms I was drafted and served under the command of Col. David Williamson, who was the commandant of all the troops in this service from Washington County.”
“During the campaign of 1778 I was under the immediate command of Capt. Eleazar Williamson and marched with him to the fort situated near the mouth of Captina or “Indian Wheeling” Creek in Virginia. From there we marched to a fort commanded by Col. Stryker situated on Wheeling Creek about 5 miles above the place where the town of Wheeling now stands. I also spent a part of this summer in and about “Zane’s fort” which was situated on the very ground where Wheeling is located. Some part of this summer I also spent at “Bigg’s fort” where West Liberty now stands – at “Miller fort” on Buffalo Creek in this county, – at Ryerson’s station in Greene County and at Mason’s station on the waters of Buffalo and at Major Dickenson’s fort on the waters of Chartiers Creek.”“At none of these places I stayed more than a few days at once. We were almost constantly on foot traversing that rugged country lying between the headwaters of Chartiers Creek and the mouth of Grave Creek on the Ohio.
When we did stop it was only for a short time to rest our fatigued bodies and recruit our languishing spirits. To detail my services during the spring, summer and autumn of 1777 [or 1778] would be in effect to repeat what I have already said with regard to the subsequent season with this exception; that I was forted for one whole month at West Liberty without being much on active duty. My whole services during these three seasons amounted to at least eighteen months for which, although I was promised a liberal compensation, I never received a single cent.”
A county history indicated that after the Revolutionary War William Wolf was employed as an Indian scout under Lewis Wetzel, a legendary Indian fighter who grew up about 10 miles southeast of Fort Henry (Wheeling), and who seems to have been based at that fort in the 1780s. However, no evidence of William’s employment there has yet been found.
Peter Wolf Jr. is found on the roll of a militia unit and also on the roll of a ranger company. One source shows a Pvt. ‘Petter’ Wolf in the 2nd Company, 3rd Battalion of the Washington County Militia, 1781-83. This company was commanded by Eleazar Williamson of Donegal Township, and the Battalion was commanded by his brother Col. David Williamson, also of Donegal Township. These were the same officers that his brother William had served under a few years earlier. Both had land near Jacob Wolf’s, and each acquired several other plots. Peter may well have been serving in the late 1770s too, but surviving records of militia rolls are too spotty to confirm that.
Peter Wolf Jr. is also found on the roll of a company of Pennsylvania Frontier Rangers commanded by Cpt. Thomas Stokely, from Donegal Township. The roll for that company seems to include everyone who served at some time between 1778 and 1783, without identifying dates of service for each individual. Rangers were activated for longer periods of time than most militia units, and were probably mounted on horses.
It isn’t possible from the incomplete evidence available to construct a clear picture of Peter’s service in the war. However, Peter’s service in a Ranger unit indicates he served one or more long periods on ‘active duty’. Militia service, on the other hand, could have been similar to William’s full-time commitment for several months per year, or could have been more sporadic ‘on-call’ service.
Christian Wolf was also enrolled in Eleazar Williamson’s company in 1782. Eldest brother Jacob Wolf, who had been appointed (or elected) a lieutenant in 1781, was enrolled in Captain William Leet’s company in 1782. Both of these company commanders were under the command of Col. David Williamson, in Washington County’s regiment.
Revolutionary War veterans who served in Patriot armies nearer to the coast could often cite the campaigns and battles they participated in, but the veterans on the Indian frontier had different experiences. The pension applications that were submitted by the few veterans that lived long enough to qualify generally don’t reveal much about combat experiences. Captain Eleazar Williamson’s pension application may sum up the experiences of the Wolf brothers. Williamson said that most of the fighting in which he was engaged was in skirmishes with small parties of Indians, and these skirmishes were too numerous to describe in an ‘abridgement’ like this.
History textbooks often suggest that the last battle of the Revolutionary War was in October 1781, ending with the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, VA. However, the British commander at Fort Detroit continued to organize attacks in Ohio country well into 1782. The last significant battle in the Great Lakes region took place in September 1782, with an unsuccessful British-Indian attack on Fort Henry at Wheeling. This battle was described in Zane Grey’s novel “Betty Zane”.
In the Paris treaty of 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War, the British government turned over the entire Great Lakes region (covering the present-day states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and the portion of Minnesota east of the Mississippi River) to the new U.S., while the British retained Canada. This expansive new territory in the U.S. would be known as “The Northwest” until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the country a new, more distant Northwest. Then the Great Lakes area was known as the “Old Northwest”.
Even though the British had formally surrendered this Great Lakes region to the U.S. in 1783, British military forces remained in place there, occupying and controlling the region until nearly 1800. British fur traders were well-established there, and the trade was profitable for their companies and for the British government. The British justified the continued presence of British troops in the forts by arguing that the American government had not fulfilled certain conditions laid out in the 1783 peace treaty. Those British forts and trading posts continued to supply tribes with weapons and many other trade goods that the Indians relied upon. That support enabled the Indians to carry on their guerilla war against settlers in the vicinity of the Ohio River throughout the 1780s into the early 1790s.
Several military expeditions from 1774 to 1791, originating from Kentucky, Virginia or Pennsylvania, were organized to invade the Ohio country and crush the Indian insurgents by striking at their villages and food supplies. These American invasion forces were made up mainly of undisciplined militiamen and were under-resourced and poorly organized. Every expedition ended ineffectively or with a humiliating defeat by Indians.
In 1794 President Washington sent a federal army led by General Anthony Wayne to put an end to Indian resistance in Ohio country. This force was better provisioned, better led, and more disciplined than its predecessors. General Wayne’s army fought a major battle against a coalition of tribes in August 1794 at the battle of Fallen Timbers, at present-day Maumee, OH. Wayne achieved a decisive victory, giving him the leverage to impose a treaty on the region’s Indians that brought peace to the Ohio country. That battle also persuaded the British that the time had come to remove their forces from the Great Lakes forts.
With Ohio becoming much less dangerous for settlers in the mid-1790s, the U.S. government was able to begin implementing its plan to formally acquire land west of the Ohio River from the tribes, survey it, and open the land for sale and settlement. Thus began a new era of highly accelerated westward expansion of the U.S. In the next 40 years the area occupied by American farms and towns would approximately double.
4: The Lives of the 2nd Generation in Washington County
A few personal details about some members of the Wolf family in Washington County were gleaned from county histories, papers authored by genealogist Raymond Bell, and various other sources. Unfortunately, nothing has been found about the lives of Peter Wolf Sr. and his wife Hanna after they moved to Washington County. Quite possibly they moved in with one of their children. Because the few official records of that time, such as censuses or tax records, only mentioned the name of the head of household, moving into another person’s home would make them invisible in most of those records.
Jacob Wolf’s home in Donegal (later Buffalo) Township was probably a rough cabin at first but was enlarged into a fort about 1777. Although the details of Wolf’s Fort are not known, a typical fort in the region was a blockhouse of sturdy defensive log construction that contained a second story with firing ports, and a palisade around at least the main building. The palisade was typically a wall of vertical logs placed close together. Rice Fort, about 10 miles to the west, famously survived a sustained Indian attack in September 1782 with only 5 defenders, but apparently Wolf Fort was never attacked. However, it was certainly useful, as there are accounts of at least three occasions when neighboring families fled to Wolf’s Fort for protection.
On one of those occasions Indians attacked a neighbor’s house, killing most of the family. One daughter, Priscilla Peck, escaped and fled on foot to Wolf Fort, but was caught from behind, scalped, and left to die. She managed to crawl on her knees the remaining distance into Wolf’s fort. Priscilla survived, but wore a black cap over her scarred head for the rest of her life. On another occasion two young women, Christiana Clemens and Lydia Boggs, were chased by Indians and fled to the fort for sanctuary, arriving there a step ahead of their pursuers.
William Darby, who would become a well-known American geographer, moved as a small boy to the area of Buffalo Creek with his parents in late 1781. His father was a friend of William Wolf. The family stayed at Jacob Wolfe’s while Darby’s father constructed a cabin on William Wolf’s land nearby. Darby wrote many years later, “We remained in Mr. Wolfe’s house until February 1782, while my father was preparing his cabin, into which we finally entered, but not to rest. In fifteen or twenty days after entering into our log cabin, Martin Jolly came running breathless to tell us that a savage murder had been committed but ten miles distant. In two hours we were in Wolfe’s Fort. From the fort my parents removed to Catfish (the original name of the town of Washington), and spent the remainder of 1782 [there]”.
Jacob Wolf and his wife Elizabeth Kline Wolf lived at that location throughout their lives. In 1780 a road was constructed past their home, from Washington (Catfish) to Claysville. Jacob wasted no time in taking advantage of the new road, which was still very rare throughout southwest Pennsylvania. In the same year the road was built he obtained authorization from the county government to operate an ‘ordinary’, or tavern.
Eventually the road would extend past Claysville to the booming river port of Wheeling. By the 1790s Wheeling would be the principal jumping-off place for west-bound settlers who were crossing or flat-boating down the Ohio River. A tavern of that day was an overnight stopping place for stagecoaches, freight wagons and all sorts of other travelers. The tavern-keeper provided meals and beds for travelers as well as accommodations for horses, oxen and mules. Once the route began to be used by drovers bringing livestock on foot from Ohio, there may have been enclosures to hold herds of cattle and sheep for the night.
This key route between the east coast and the Ohio River would soon be clogged with traffic. It was selected as the route of the first National Road, which was coming over the mountains of northern Maryland into Western Pennsylvania to Wheeling. Construction of the stretch from Uniontown through Washington and past Wolf’s tavern to Wheeling would be finished in 1818. Today that portion of the National Road is U.S. Hwy 40. The State of Pennsylvania has erected a historical marker for Wolf’s Fort along the road.
Jacob Wolf was elected Justice of the Peace (JP) in Donegal Twp in 1793 and served until 1797. Also, in 1793 he was named a Squire. One of his duties as JP was to perform marriages. One local historian wrote, “Jacob Wolf was a very eccentric man, and invariably, after performing a marriage ceremony in the capacity of Justice of the Peace, he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his gown with the interrogatory, “Now, where ish mine dollar?”
William Wolf was an early settler in the portion of Donegal Township that in 1799 would become Buffalo Township, arriving in 1776. His three half-years of military service are described above. He seems to have been driven away from his land temporarily by Indian raids, possibly in 1782 when his friend, William Darby’s father, fled the same land. Raymond Bell wrote that William’s 400 acres, located next to his brother Jacob’s land, was meant to be for both himself and Jacob. But apparently the brothers’ relationship hit a rough patch, as William sued brother Jacob for trespass in 1794. Their joint claim was then divided, and William sold his 200 acres in 1799.
In his 1832 application for a military pension, William said that he lived in Washington County until 1818, when he moved to Ohio and worked as a schoolteacher. This move to Ohio apparently took place immediately after his wife, Susan Ashbaugh Wolf, died. In 1828 he returned to the town of Washington to live out his remaining days. A letter attached to his 1832 pension application asked that consideration be expedited because, “the old man is just now entirely destitute of the necessaries and comforts of existence”.
John Wolf settled on a 355-acre tract called simply “Wolfe” on Chartiers Creek in Strabane Twp (later Canton Twp). In 1793 he took out a warrant for 400 acres, which apparently included the original 355-acre tract. John remained there for the rest of his life, leaving eight sons and three daughters. His wife was Barbara Klein (or Kline), who was the youngest of 11 children born to Henry Klein. Henry had immigrated from Baden-Wurtemberg, Germany in 1732. His tenth child, Elizabeth, married John Wolf’s older brother Jacob. Today the suburb of Wolfdale on Washington’s northwest side includes part of John’s original claim.
The life of Peter Wolf Jr. in this region will be described, to the extent that it is known, in a later chapter.
Christian Wolf, who was often listed as Christly, appeared in local tax lists in 1778. He was in the Pennsylvania militia in 1782 and was taxed in Donegal Twp in 1782-84 and again in 1789. A local history said that he had gone to Ohio, and some online genealogies say he died in 1815 in Shelby, KY. However, insufficient evidence has been found to prove either claim. Records were found for marriages of three children of Christian Wolf, in 1792, 1795 and 1796, in Nelson County, KY, south of Shelby and southeast of Louisville. Also, there was a ‘Christ Wolf’ found in the 1810 census for Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky. There were a number of unrelated Wolf families in the frontier areas at this time, so more evidence would be desirable to ensure that this Christian Wolf in Kentucky was the same man as the one in our Wolf family in Washington County.
Mary Magdalena Wolf, the oldest child of Peter and Hannah Wolf, and elder sister of the previously mentioned Wolf men, married John George Helt in 1761. Helt died in 1767 and Mary remarried in 1768, this time to Christian Bamberger. Records of their children show that Mary and Christian lived in Derry, Dauphin County, PA until at least 1783, so it seems unlikely that Mary Magdalena ever moved to Washington County.
Another brother-in-law, Lawrence Stryker, husband of Maria Barbara Wolf, had been a neighbor of the Wolfs in Hanover, now in Dauphin County, PA. He and Maria Barbara settled in Buffalo in about 1773 on land adjacent to Jacob Wolf’s property. His house was built as a blockhouse and was sometimes referred to as Stryker Fort. In 1791, at age 60, he sold 155 acres to John Devore. It is not known whether he continued to farm the remaining land.Michael Dennis and his wife Rosanna Wolf Dennis also settled in Buffalo on land on the west border of the property of Lawrence Strycker. Michael Dennis (altered from the German Dinges) was probably the son of Philip Dennis of Lebanon, PA. The Dennis cabin in Buffalo became known as a Methodist preaching point in the mid-1780s
No information has yet been found about the lives of siblings Susannah and Daniel Wolf. Genealogist Raymond Bell thought Daniel died young but did not cite evidence.
5: Sabina Wolf & Hugh H. Brackenridge
Sabina Wolf Brackenridge (1771-1845). Painting by Rembrandt Peale, in the collection of the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery.
Nearly all the Wolfs discussed so far, as well as Wolfs of the next two or three generations who are mentioned in later chapters, lived by working family farms. Most were not wealthy and were probably unknown outside their local communities. Sabina Wolf, eldest child of Jacob and Elizabeth Wolf, was a notable exception. When just 18 years old, Sabina became the wife of one of western Pennsylvania’s most prominent citizens, Judge Hugh Henry (H. H.) Brackenridge.
The story of their initial meeting in 1789, told shortly after the event in a book, described how Brackenridge, in the course of visiting his circuit courts, stopped at Jacob Wolfe’s tavern west of Washington to have his horse fed and to escape the rain. When the judge was ready to leave, Jacob called Sabina to bring the horse. Brackenridge, a 41-year-old widower, saw Sabina and was smitten. He went on his way, riding and reflecting for the better part of a day, when he suddenly stopped. Having made his decision, he reversed course and returned to Wolfe’s, where he begged Jacob for permission to marry his daughter.
“Miss Sabina had been employed in shrubbing the old man’s meadow, which saved him the annual expense of about ten dollars. This with him was an insuperable objection to parting with his girl. Mr. Brackenridge obviated the difficulty by paying down a sum of money, obtained the young lady’s consent, married her, and sent her to Philadelphia, where she now is under the governance of a reputable female character, whose business will be to polish the manners, and wipe off the rusticities which Mrs. Brackenridge had acquired while a Wolfe.”
At that time H. H. Brackenridge was becoming well-known for a wide range of achievements. Born on a farm in Scotland and brought to America as a child, he graduated from Princeton College and spent the Revolutionary War as an army chaplain. He then settled in the new town of Pittsburgh, embarking on a career as a lawyer and then as a judge. He helped found Pittsburgh’s first newspaper and contributed numerous articles. He was also a founder of the Pittsburgh Academy, which evolved into the University of Pittsburgh.
In the early 1790s, shortly after marrying Sabina, he became a spokesman for thousands of angry farmers in southwestern Pennsylvania who felt oppressed by the new Federal government’s excise tax on liquor. They were separated from potential markets for their grain by the Allegheny Mountains, and there were few roads into their region. The only way these western farmers could earn money from farming was to distill their grain into whiskey, which they could carry on footpaths over the mountains with packhorses. The ‘whiskey tax’, if enforced, would have wiped out their meager livelihoods. The farmers were reminded of the hated stamp tax and tea tax imposed by the British government some 20 years before. Those taxes had outraged Americans so much that they set off a revolution against an oppressive British government. Many farmers thought these taxes were equally unfair and called for the same radical response.
Resistance to the tax by the farmers and other residents of southwestern Pennsylvania, especially in Washington and Allegheny Counties, gradually became organized. Groups of farmers threatened and then attacked the tax collectors appointed by the federal government. None were killed, but they were tarred and feathered, handled roughly, and had outbuildings on their properties burned. The farmers could be dangerous when riled. Most had been militiamen, and many were experienced Indian-fighters. Government officials were afraid to stand up against them.
President George Washington took this threat to the authority of the new Federal government seriously but bided his time. Finally, in the autumn of 1794 he sent a 13,000-man army to Pittsburgh to stamp out what appeared to be a budding rebellion. When the army arrived, determined to either arrest or shoot the radicals, dozens of men fled the region.
H. H. Brackenridge had just weeks before played a key role in preventing a mob of over four thousand of these malcontents from attacking the federal garrison at Pittsburgh or burning the city. He now mediated between the army command and the rebel leadership to bring a peaceful solution. His efforts succeeded, and he then persuaded the federal government that their wisest course of action was to pardon the men that the army had arrested. In the midst of this dangerous period, one small group of rebels rode to his house at night to assassinate him, but quick intervention by Brackenridge’s neighbors saved him.
While a brief description of the events of the Whiskey Rebellion is included in nearly every textbook of early American history, history-minded residents of Washington County are more familiar than most people with the details. It was that county’s most famous, or infamous, moment in U.S. history.
During the 1976 Bicentennial, Washington County contracted Samuel C. Yahres, a Duquesne University music professor and amateur historian, to write two works about the Whiskey Rebellion. They were essentially the same story; a fictional story and a musical play, set partly in rural Washington County. Both works were entitled “Rifles and Roses”. The story appeared in 16 installments in the Washington “Observer-Reporter” newspaper in May and June, 1976. The musical was a local production with amateur players that followed closely after the newspaper serial, running for two weeks. Sabina and Hugh Brackenridge were key characters.
Throughout his adult life Brackenridge authored many articles and several books. His novel Modern Chivalry is considered by scholars to be the first important literary work written in the ‘western’ U.S., and the first humorous novel published in America. Besides fiction and poetry, he wrote textbooks and articles on the law, and he frequently contributed newspaper articles on current political affairs.
Many colorful observations and anecdotes about Brackenridge can be found.
“Stories of weird behavior abound. He once charged a jury “standing in his bare feet, with his boots beside him, for he had no stocking at that time.” Passengers in a coach saw him out in the rain with nothing on but his hat and boots. He told them he had only one suit and the storm would spoil his clothes. His family life “offered further hints of a personality somewhat loosely wrapped”.
When his [first] wife died in 1787 he practically abandoned his infant son. He tried to force the child to learn to read at 2 by beating him.”No records were found showing how his wife coped with this strange, brilliant man.
Despite her local fame for vaulting from field worker to lady-of-high-society while still a teenager, only a little information has been found about Sabina. Women were rarely mentioned in books and periodicals of the early 19th century. Her husband and stepson wrote extensive histories of the Whiskey Rebellion with full descriptions of H.H. Brackenridge’s personal involvement, without once mentioning his wife Sabina or their children. Such an omission in a biographical work was considered perfectly normal at that time.
Sabina lived with her new husband in Pittsburgh from her completion of the Philadelphia finishing school until 1801; nearly twelve years. They lived on Market Street between 1st and 2nd street, just two blocks north of the Monongahela River and four blocks from Fort Pitt, which sat at the junction of the three rivers. Brackenridge was deeply involved in Pittsburgh politics and local affairs, and the couple’s social life among the Pittsburgh elite must have been very active.
“Market Street was one of the narrowest streets in the town, but was the principal commercial thoroughfare.
Coincidentally it was called “Main Street”. In 1800 the street was bustling with life… Most of the prominent people lived on Market Street.” “Directly across Market Street from Dr. Mowery, Judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge had erected for the “Tree of Liberty” [his newspaper] a one-story office, and behind this a building where the paper was printed. Judge Brackenridge’s dwelling adjoined the office of the “Tree of Liberty” on the south. It was a large and commodious blue frame building which had been, until recently, surrounded by a paling fence. The larger part was now given over to trade. It was the best known house in the town. In it General Lee had made his headquarters while in Pittsburgh during the memorable days of November, 1794.”
Thanks to his professional qualifications as well his status as leader of the Pittsburgh branch of the Democratic-Republican Party, Brackenridge was appointed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court after his party’s candidate, Thomas Jefferson, won the White House in 1800. The family moved to Carlisle, PA in 1801 to begin his term. By that time the couple had had three children, but the third, Hugh, had died in 1800 at the age of 18 months. A fourth child, Cornelia, would be born in Carlisle in November 1801. Brackenridge continued to live there and serve on the court until his death in 1816 at the age of 68.
Sabina, about 23 years younger than Hugh, remained in Carlisle for at least seven years after his death. When Sabina died in 1845 she still owned a stone house on Carlisle’s High Street, which may well have been their old family residence. Possibly it still stands, as Carlisle has preserved a number of original High Street buildings. A few letters from their Carlisle home have been preserved in the archives: short chatty letters from Sabina’s teen-age daughter Cornelia to her older stepbrother Henry.
In her letters Cornelia frequently reminded Henry that he didn’t write or come home enough. It seemed to bother her greatly that Henry was over 30 and still single, so she repeatedly tried to match him up with the unmarried women she knew. She didn’t mention Sabina much, other than in brief reports such as, “Mama is well”.
In one 1820 letter she told Henry that she had recently returned from Harrisburg, where she stayed in the Governor’s mansion. Later the same year Cornelia ominously informed Henry that she had just returned from a stay at a ‘sulphur springs’. She had been ill for two months with symptoms that she said, “induced many to suppose that a consumption was inevitable”. In 1823 Cornelia would die in Carlisle after a long illness, at just 21, apparently from Tuberculosis.
A quick look at Henry’s other letters from the early 1820s shows that he was already playing an important role in affairs of state. Some of his correspondents included Henry Clay (then Speaker of the House of Representatives), Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and soon-to-be President Andrew Jackson. Henry had a fine career in public service. He served as a federal judge and spent one term in the House of Representatives. He was also an accomplished and prolific writer.
It appears that Sabina and her oldest son, Alexander, moved to Pittsburgh after Cornelia’s death. Alexander pursued a career in law, serving as Sabina’s lawyer in several Pittsburgh real estate transactions over the years. He completed his legal career as a judge. Federal censuses of 1830 and 1840 indicate that Sabina lived with or next-door to Alexander and his family, first in Pittsburgh and then in the adjoining suburb of Allegheny.
Sabina’s son William died in 1833. In 1845 Sabina died, aged 74. Of the five children she had raised, only Alexander and her stepson Henry survived her. Property mentioned in her will included the stone house in Carlisle, her home in Allegheny City, rent from a building in downtown Pittsburgh, five lots in nearby McKeesport, an unknown quantity of stock in a bank, and a gold watch. She seems to have been very secure, financially.
Sabina was the only member of the Wolf family from that period for which we have a picture. The University of Pittsburgh still owns a portrait of her that was painted by the famous American painter Rembrandt Peale, sometime between 1810 and 1820.
Sabina’s father Jacob Wolf had also gained fame, of a sort, as a result of Sabina’s marriage. The story of Brackenridge asking Jacob for her hand in marriage (narrated above) was often repeated, with many creative variations. Jacob was portrayed as a greedy and heartless German farmer who sold his daughter to a stranger for a handful of cash. As late as 1950 an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was titled “Pitt Founder’s Wife Cost $200”.
However, Sabina’s stepson, Henry M. Brackenridge, redeemed Jacob’s reputation somewhat in his memoirs. When Henry was just five years old, shortly after his father married Sabina, the father had been convinced that learning languages was essential to the little boy’s education. He arranged for Henry to live with Sabina’s family in order to learn German, which apparently was spoken around their home.
In Henry’s brief description of that early period of his life he noted, “I will here, by way of parenthesis, stop to relate that which does him [Jacob Wolf] much credit. Long before the establishment of temperance societies he shut up his distillery, from a conviction that he could not conscientiously manufacture a liquid which tempts so many to destroy their health and morals”.
In Henry’s brief description of that early period of his life he noted, “I will here, by way of parenthesis, stop to relate that which does him [Jacob Wolf] much credit. Long before the establishment of temperance societies he shut up his distillery, from a conviction that he could not conscientiously manufacture a liquid which tempts so many to destroy their health and morals”.