Shawnee-on-Delaware - Nicholas DePui / Depuy

Fort DePuy Location  

January 25, 2021 by Pete Sauvigne http://pete7a.com/fort.pdf  

Shared with Permission July 12, 2021

Summary  

The DePuy home was stockaded and garrissoned as a fort during the French and Indian War 1755-1763. However the  building we know as Fort DePuy did not exist until after the war, and is about 200 feet outside the old stockade, which  no longer exists. The present building, long known as Manwalamink, was built in 1785 by a later Nicholas DePuy. Below  is a 1896 map showing the relative locations of the old fort and Manwalamink, labelled as Robert DePui's house. 

Until the 20th century, it was never claimed that Manwalamink was within the stockaded fort. The Worthington family  never claimed that. However, after the mid 1900’s it became common belief that Manwalamink was the old fort. “Fort  DePuy” remains another fine name for the structure, to commemorate the events that occurred nearby.  

History  

Nicholas DePuy (1682-1761) was the first permanent European settler of the lower Minisink area. His grandfather, also  named Nicholas DePuy was a French Heugenot refugee who landed in Dutch New Amsterdam (now NYC) in 1662.  Nicholas “the settler” first built a log house in Shawnee  

1725-1727 and purchased much land: first from the  

Lanape, then again through the Penns. He developed a  

prosperous plantation and lived in harmony with the  

Lanape. By 1755 Indian relations had soured and many  

homesteads were attacked as the French and Indian  

War broke out. In 1755 the Depuy house was  

stockaded as a fort by family and neighbors. It was  

soon garrissoned with soldiers. 

As Nicholas “the settler” was in his 70's, most war-time accounts report his son Samuel as head of the family. Military  records describe a spring within the stockade and adequate accommodations for soldiers. The house had been much  improved from the settler's original log house some 30 years earlier, was built of stone, but was never called a mansion.  Another Nicholas was a teenager during the war. To clarify, below is the DePuys' direct line, significant to Shawnee:  

Nicholas DePui c1625-1691 French Huguenot immigrant  

Moses DePui c1657-1754 Ulster County NY  

Nicholas DePuy 1682-1761 FIRST SHAWNEE SETTLER 

Samuel DePuy 1716-1766 French & Indian War  

Nicholas DePuy 1738-1808 Built Manwalamink 1785  

Nicholas DePuy 1788-1816  

Robert R. DePuy 1814-1898 last DePuy in Shawnee  

In 1785 Samuel's son Nicholas built the mansion called Manwalamink near the fort's site. Since peace had prevailed for  years, the stockade had likely been burned for firewood, and stones from the fort site were reused elsewhere.    

Today there are no signs of the old fort site, but the spring still flows, presently through a pipe passing under a gravel  path. The spring is over 300 ft from Manwalamink.  

Evidence of 2 Sites  

1. The map at the top. This was produced for the state government specifically to locate frontier fort sites. 2. The spring location. It is unreasonable that a stockade could surround both Manwalamink and the spring. No other  frontier forts were that large, and this one was built by farmers, not soldiers.  

3. Prior to the 20th century, it was NEVER claimed that Manwalamink was the same house stockaded during the Indian  war. These early references all indicate that it was not:  

 1886 Mathews, Alfred. H "Nicholas (2d) son of Samuel, built the stone house .. at Shawnee in 1785"   1895 Browning, Charles H. " and very near the present house of Robert DePui”  

 1896 Richards, H.M.M "It was about 200 ft. west by south of Mr. Robert Depuy's present farm house"   1925 Brodhead, Luke W. "... near the location of the present stone mansion"  

 1927 Keller, Robert Brown "near the original dwelling, was built by Robert R. De Puy's grandfather, Nicholas" 

This article claims that Manwalamink was on the fort site, but also states that original features were put up in 1785. This could only be true if  the "site" meant more of the DePuy lands, not just the stockade.  

Misconception  

By the early 21st Century almost everyone believed that Manwalamink was the Indian war house. All had heard this  many times. It is easy to see the large building with this historic name and propagate the error. False assumptions could  easily be made about Manwalamink since:  

A. It was built by Nicholas DePuy as the family home. However, this Nicholas was the grandson of the first settler. 

B. It has a small spring behind it. Much too small to support a garrison, especially in dry weather. 

C. It has an iron fireback cast in 1746. These are portable, as it now sits in a room not built until 1907. 

D. It sits on DePuy land along the river across from the upper island, just a little further upstream. 

E. The DePuy family records were destroyed in Robert R. DePuy’s time, as he laments in H.M.M. Richards’ book.  

The first reference yet found that implies that Manwalamink was on the fort site is from a 1946 newspaper article:

This ambiguity evolved into the common  misunderstanding that Manwalamink existed in  1755 and was built by Nicholas Depuy, the first  settler of Shawnee.  Many historians erroneously propagate bad  information. That is why the oldest records are the most reliable. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Chris Francz for startling me about this.  

References  

Richards, H.M.M The Indian Forts of the Blue Mountains, Report of the Commission to Locate the Sites of the Frontier  Forts of Pennsylvania, Vol 1, Clarence M. Busch, State Printer of PA 1896 pages 322-328  http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/1pa/1picts/frontierforts/ff13.html 

Brodhead, Luke W, "The 200th Anniversary of the Settlement of Shawnee" Monroe County Historical Society 1925  

Browning, Charles H. The American Historical Register Sept 1894-Feb 1895, Philadelphia, the Historical Register  Publishing Company p.529  

Keller, Robert Brown, History of Monroe County PA, The Monroe Publishing Co 1927 p.23  https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/digitalbks2/id/18388/ Part_02  

Mathews, Alfred. History of Wayne, Pike, and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania 1938 R. T. Peck and Co. 1886 p. 1054 Sauvigne, Peter C. “DePui lineage related to Shawnee, PA” 2019 http://pete7a.com/DePuiFamilyShawnee.pdf  

Manwalamink  

 ~ 1898  

“FORT DePUY”  2021

The following article was put up previously, and may not be correct with this new research from Pete Sauvigne.  

The Poco..... [Newspaper] Vol. 81, No 240: The Stroudsburgs, PA: [my copy came from correspondence and I do not have date [ 1975], nor full name of the paper. Typed without original newspaper format]

The past is prologue

Early years most dramatic

(Editor's Note: This is one of a weekly series by Bobby Westbrook on some of the historic places in this area, the people who built them and how the years have changed them - a countdown through 1975 toward the Bicentennial year of 1976.)

By Bobby Westbrook

SHAWNEE-On-DELAWARE -- Those who like their American history stereotyped with accounts of Indian raids on frontier forts can find plenty of authenticated material centering around Fort DePui. On its site now stands the lodge for overflow guests from Shawnee Inn behind the Fred Waring home in the village.

To put things in perspective, those few troubled years were not the most important nor the most typical of life in the earliest settlement in this area, where peace, farming, trade and progress were keynotes. But they may well be the most dramatic.

Thanks to research done by Russell Cramer II of Stroudsburg, the story of those troublesome times can be documented from state and military archives.

Certainly the Indian troubles weren't the fault of the first settler, Nicholas DePui who lived with them in peace for many years.

Nicholas DePui, whose French Huguenot grandfather, also Nicholas, had come to the New World in 1662, and was born in Rochester, [Ulster] N. Y. It was in 1725 that, seeking a lost boy or a lost horese, he came down the Delaware River and found the fertile valley on the Pennsylvania side of the river.

Entranced by the prospect, he spent two years preparing the land and building a house before he brought his wife and their 10 children down from Rochester to settle on the banks of the Delaware in 1727.

It may be that white settlers had been before him on that site. Just three years later, in 1730, a team of surveyors sent out from Philadelphia made their way upstream.

"After a fatiguing journey, there being no white inhabitants in the upper part of Northampton Counties", after leading their horses with difficulty through the water gap, they came at last to the DePui plantation where they found "great hospitality and plenty of the necessaries of life".

They also found "a grove of apple trees of size far beyond any near Philadelphia." These may have been planted by the Dutch who worked the copper mines on the Jersey side of the river as early as 1654 and may have cultivated the land here before the Penn Charter.

However, it was Nicholas DePui who came and stayed and his imprint on the area was to make Shawnee at one time the center of trade and hospitality for the whole area.

Nicholas DePui purchased the 3,000 acres of land from the Indians with Delaware chiefs signing the deed of Sept. 18, 1728. However, he found it necessary to repurchase the land from heirs of William Penn in 1733.

In the spacious stone house he built on the banks of the river, he was considered a friend by the Indians, who traded with him, sometimes sought his home as a refuge and some who worked on the plantation.

What sparked the Indian rebellion was the increasing pressure of English settlers coming up newly opened roads to the sough, frustrations arising from the Walking Purchase of 1737, the threat of the Iriquois -British coalition from the north. It all broke out locally when 200 Indians attacked the home of Daniel Broadhead in East Stroudsburg on Dec. 11, 1755.

In Shawnee, the settlers took the initiative in providing for their own protection, selecting the substantial house of Nicholas DePui and erecting around it a roomy stockade.

According to the Provincial Commissioners report of 1755, they found "The country all above this town is evacuated and ruined, excepting only the neighborhood of DePui's, five families which stand ground."

It was a square fort with swivel guns mounted at each corner, but, as an inspection report pointed out, "is open to attack from the hill above." On a navigable river, with its own spring within the stockade, where settlers later dipped their sheep, and well supplied their food, Fort DePui was named by Benjamin Franklin as a commissary base for all the Minisink area forts.

However, it was not Fort DePui but the neighboring home of Nicholas' son, Daniel, built about where Shawnee Inn now stands, which bore the brunt of a full-fledged Indian attack on Jan. 21, 1756.

Captain Salmare, stationed at nearby Fort Van Campen across the river, while scouting with his men on the New Jersey side, saw a fire over the river. "We crossed the river with 25 men", he reported, "and found upwards of 50 Indians attacking the house, who fled when they were fired upon." In Daniel's home he found two men killed, three wounded and 18 survivors. The Indians had burned the bard and fired the house in several places. They returned the next day and burnt the house but its inhabitants had found shelter.

Fort DePui, the home of Nicholas, was never attacked, whether because of his friendship with the Indians or the troops garrisoned there is pure conjecture. The soldiers were charged with protecting isolated farmers during their harvest. Attacks gradually tapered off and peace had returned by 1764.

[Photo in paper, but not included here] Walk-in-fireplace - The fireplace in the oldest part of Fort DePui Lodge, half obscured by the black gas range, still shows traces of the oval bakeoven in the back.

[Top Photo in newspaper, but not included here] Present Fort DePui Lodge - The present Fort DePui Lodge of Shawnee Inn on the banks of the Delaware show the Victorian influence of C. C. Worthington, founder of Buckwood Inn and Golf Course, now Fred Waring's Shawnee Inn, in additions and gables. The original Fort DePui at the left, shows the small door in the first floor section, typical of the earliest houses in this area.

 **Family Note: My Benjamin Depuy Junior served to defend this fort and lived here for one year.

Photos included here were found at www.bedandbreakfast.com

MORE NOTES BY ALLYSON:

I show this Nicholas in my records as the following:

Nicolaes Dupuy, born 12 Mar 1701, Kingston, Ulster, New York.

  Christening: 3 Dec 1682, Kingston Church, Ulster, New York

   Died - 1761, Lower Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania
   Buried - Presbyterian Church, Shawnee, Pennsylvania

wife: Wyntje Roosa

  born in Hurley, Ulster and christened 4 Jun 1682 Kingston, Ulster, New York

  died 1760.

My relationship: Nicolaes is a brother to Moses Jr, making him an uncle to my Benjamin Sr.

My Benjamin Jr. lived in the fort for one year while serving in the military.
Source of Photos:  taken by and of Allyson Hunt Wood and Marsha Lockerby Pilger, 2010 trip to "Uncle Nicholas's"