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Founding population

The Early Scots-Irish & New England (Yankee) Settlers of Schuylkill County

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The county’s other founders — Scots-Irish and New England families whose mark survives in place-names, the First Presbyterian Church, and Pottsville’s early commercial class. The thinnest-documented of the founding groups. Markers: verified · confirmed · corrects a common error · open/caution.

Overview

Alongside the dominant Pennsylvania Germans, a second, smaller stream of founding settlers reached Schuylkill County: Scots-Irish (Ulster Presbyterian) and New England “Yankee” families, concentrated in the northern half of the county and, later and more consequentially, in the commercial life of Pottsville. The authoritative statement is SAH Archipedia’s:

“German-named townships… attest to the county’s roots in German Berks County to the south, while names in the northern half of the county reveal Scots and Irish settlers with some New Englanders added to the mix. ‘New England’ is even the name of a village just south of Tamaqua.”

That sentence is essentially an argument from place-names and surnames, not a population count — and of the four founding groups, this one leaves the thinnest documentary trace. What survives is a handful of explicit primary statements, surname and place-name residue, and one well-documented institution, the First Presbyterian Church of Pottsville. Together they describe a real but small founding stream whose weight was carried less by farms than by a disproportionately influential commercial-professional class in the county seat.

Two corrections at the outset. First, the “New England” village is in Walker Township, just south of Tamaqua — not Rush Township (Rush’s own pioneers were German). Second, keep these Protestant Scots-Irish/Yankee founders firmly separate from the Catholic Irish famine miners of the 1840s+ — a different people, a different religion, a different era, treated in their own Irish profile.

Sources: SAH Archipedia — Schuylkill County; Rush Township — history.

The New England (Yankee) element

The firmest primary anchor is a single sentence in Munsell’s 1881 chapter on Schuylkill and Walker townships:

“The first settlement in the two townships was made in the Lewistown valley (now in Walker), about 1802. The settlers were Germans and New Englanders, and the well cultivated farms in that section attest their thrift and energy.”

This is the only explicit primary statement naming New Englanders as a founding cohort in the county — and notably, Munsell names no individual Yankee families, no town of origin, and no migration mechanism. The “New England” locality survives on the map today: the New England Fire Company in Walker Township near Tamaqua, plus a New England Valley and School on the Tamaqua quad.

An attractive hypothesis the record does not support: that these Yankees were overflow from the Connecticut / Susquehanna Company settlements of the Wyoming Valley, just north over Broad Mountain. It is geographically plausible — and Union Township’s odd northern “tab” does break through the mountains toward that next tier of counties — but no documentary chain connects Schuylkill’s New Englanders to the Susquehanna Company, and the c. 1802 date is later than the main Susquehanna Company pushes. It remains an open question, not a finding.

The county’s emblematic Yankee is its coal-discovery legend himself: SAH calls Necho Allen “a New England-born hunter… credited with the discovery of coal.” The campfire discovery is tradition, not documented biography — the ExplorePAhistory marker gives it no date, only that “local tradition usually credits” him. The man is another matter: his own page sets the legend against the record he does leave — the censuses, the state land warrants, and the deeds.

Sources: Munsell — Schuylkill/Walker/Union township text; New England Fire Company (Walker Twp.); ExplorePAhistory — Necho Allen marker.

The Scots-Irish, as surname and place-name

Here the documentary limit is hardest: Munsell’s township texts do not use the word “Scotch-Irish,” and name no congregation as an Ulster Presbyterian foundation. The Scots-Irish presence in the northern county survives almost entirely in surnames and place-names:

  • Barry Township (settled c. 1808): the McKown family kept the McKown House inn, and the village of McKeansburg carries the name of a prominent Pennsylvania Scots-Irish family.
  • Union Township: Munsell’s landmark landowners include the Scots-Irish Nesbitt and Crawford and the New England Hazeltine — largely the second-generation owners of already-cleared farms.
  • A lock on the Schuylkill Canal within present Auburn was long known as “the Scotchman’s Lock” — the locality kept that name until the railroad arrived and the station took the name Auburn in 1842 — preserving the memory of a Scots presence on the waterway.

The “Scots-Irish founding families with dates” one might expect from a Cumberland or Northampton County do not exist in that form in Schuylkill. That absence is itself a finding.

Sources: Munsell — Barry Twp. & Middleport; Munsell — Schuylkill/Walker/Union/Auburn; Munsell (1881) — Auburn & “the Scotchman’s lock”, archive.org scan.

The institutional signature: the First Presbyterian Church of Pottsville (1832)

The cleanest evidence of this founding stream is religious — and it confirms the cultural geography precisely. While the county’s south worshiped in union Lutheran-Reformed stone churches, the Yankee/Scots element built a Presbyterian church, in English, planted from outside, in the new commercial county seat. Munsell records it in detail:

  • First movement, autumn 1831; Rev. Sylvanus Haight sent in March 1832 as a missionary of the American Home Missionary Society of New York — the Congregational-Presbyterian engine of New England’s cultural expansion.
  • Organized with sixteen members on July 13, 1832; church built at Third and Market streets.
  • First elders: Erwin Safford, John C. Ernst, Elisha Warne, Alexander Graham — a telling mix of New England (Safford, Warne), Scots (Graham), and a single German (Ernst) surname.

This is the precise religious counterpart to the Yankee/Scots merchant-professional class: an English-speaking church, financed and staffed from New York and Philadelphia, in the coal-county seat. Lesser Presbyterian footholds elsewhere were weak and were absorbed by their surroundings — at Middleport, a Presbyterian congregation built a stone church in 1852 but, “becoming financially weak,” ended up holding services “mostly in the German language.”

Sources: Munsell — Pottsville section (First Presbyterian); Munsell (1881) — First Presbyterian Church, archive.org scan; Munsell — Middleport.

The Pottsville commercial class

Where the Scots-Irish and Yankee element mattered most was not the farm but the counting-house: their capital, engineering, and professions clustered in Pottsville and the coal trade.

A correction worth keeping straight: the town-founding Pott family was itself German (the immigrant Pott brothers arrived in 1734; John Pott bought the furnace in 1806 and laid out Pottsville in 1816). The Yankee/Anglo contribution was the layer of commerce, capital, and the professions that rose over the young town:

  • Burd Patterson — the archetypal early developer (born 1788 in Scots-Irish-settled Juniata County, so Pennsylvania-born rather than literally a New Englander): he drove Pottsville’s 1828 incorporation, promoted its railroads, and helped plan Ashland and Mahanoy City.
  • Benjamin Bannan — bought the Miners’ Journal in 1829 and owned and edited it for over forty years.
  • The earliest marketers of anthracite were Yankee/Anglo (William Morris, who carted a wagonload to Philadelphia around 1800 and found no buyers; Allen and Shoemaker, War of 1812); the engineering and geology were Anglo-staffed (P. W. Sheafer wrote the county’s geological chapter in Munsell’s 1881 history); and Pottsville’s early architecture drew on Philadelphia capital and designers (John Haviland’s Miners’ Bank, 1830–31).

ExplorePAhistory sums it up: “The Potts, Pattersons and Eckharts made Pottsville a center of wealth.” The county’s founding farmers and its coal-trade class were largely different populations — and the Pattersons, Bannans, and Sheafers, backed by outside capital, belonged squarely to the second.

Sources: ExplorePAhistory — Schuylkill County marker; PA Markers — Burd Patterson; Wikipedia — Benjamin Bannan; Wikipedia — John Haviland (works: Miner’s Bank, Pottsville, 1830–31); Munsell (1881) — the coal trade (William Morris, 1800); Beers — the Pott family (1916).

People

PersonRoleOriginNote
Necho AllenLegendary discoverer of anthracite”New England-born” (per SAH)Discovery is tradition; the man is documented
Rev. Sylvanus HaightFounded First Presbyterian, Pottsville, 1832Sent by the American Home Missionary Society, New YorkWell documented
Burd PattersonPottsville developer; railroad & town promoterJuniata Co., PA (Scots-Irish region)Pennsylvania-born, not a New Englander
Benjamin BannanMiners’ Journal editor, regional power-brokerAnglo
The McKean family / James McKownNamesake of McKeansburg; Barry Twp. innkeeperScots-IrishPlace-name evidence
Nesbitt, Crawford, HazeltineSecond-generation Union Twp. landownersScots-Irish / New EnglandSurname evidence only

Documented lives here are few: most of these figures survive as a name on a map, a church roll, or a masthead.

Legacy

The Scots-Irish/Yankee imprint is faint on the land but real in the institutions of power: a few enduring place-names, scattered surnames in the northern townships, the First Presbyterian tradition in Pottsville, and — most substantially — the commercial, editorial, and engineering class that built the coal capital’s early institutions. It was a founding stream whose weight lay not in numbers but in the offices, churches, and newspapers of the county seat.

Open questions

  • Whether church and cemetery records can put names and dates to the “Germans and New Englanders” of the Lewistown Valley (c. 1802).
  • Any documentable Connecticut/Susquehanna Company link for the Yankee settlers (currently unsupported).
  • A fuller prosopography of Pottsville’s early Anglo-Celtic commercial class (Pattersons, Bannans, Eckharts, Sheafers) from Munsell and the Miners’ Journal.
  • Named families of the First Presbyterian Church and Pottsville’s Yankee society, from newspaper and church records.

Sources

Frequently asked

Who were the county's Scots-Irish and New England founders?
Alongside the dominant Pennsylvania Germans, a smaller stream of Scots-Irish (Ulster Presbyterian) and New England 'Yankee' families settled the county — concentrated in the northern half and, later and more consequentially, in the commercial life of Pottsville. They were a thin founding stream, most visible in the county seat's commerce and professions, and never a discrete settler colony with its own documented founding families.
Were the Scots-Irish a discrete founding colony with their own settler families?
No. The 'Scots-Irish founding families with dates' one might expect from a Cumberland or Northampton County do not exist in that form in Schuylkill. The Scots-Irish appear instead as place-names (New England, McKeansburg, Scotchman's Lock), as second-generation landowners, and as the Pottsville commercial class.
Where is the 'New England' village in Schuylkill County?
It is in Walker Township, just south of Tamaqua — not Rush Township. The locality survives on the map today as the New England Fire Company in Walker Township near Tamaqua, plus a New England Valley and School on the Tamaqua quad.

Towns: Pottsville, Tamaqua, Middleport, Auburn, Ashland, Mahanoy City

Related peoples: Pennsylvania Germans, Irish

People: Necho Allen and the Discovery of Anthracite, Benjamin Bannan (1807–1875), Burd Patterson (1788–1867)

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