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Founding population

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

The non-German founders — a minority overlay on the county’s German base, concentrated in the north and in commercial Pottsville. This is the thinnest-documented of the founding groups, and the profile is candid about where the record runs out. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview, with a necessary honesty

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 the foundation of this profile — and it is essentially an argument from place-names and surnames, not a population count. This must be said plainly: of the four founding groups, the Scots-Irish/Yankee element leaves the thinnest documentary trace. Where the German pioneer record is dense and named, the non-German founding record survives mostly as (a) a handful of explicit primary statements, (b) surname and place-name residue, and (c) one well-documented institution — the First Presbyterian Church of Pottsville. The honest framing throughout is that this was a real but minority overlay on a German agricultural base, plus a disproportionately influential commercial-professional class in Pottsville — not a discrete settler colony with its own documented founding families.

✎ 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 Yankee presence is asserted but not itemized. 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 that the record does not support: that these Yankees were overflow from the Connecticut / Susquehanna Company Yankee settlements of the Wyoming Valley, just north over Broad Mountain. 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. State it as 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.” ⚑ But as the documentary record shows, the campfire discovery (~1790) and the Vermont origin are tradition, not documented biography; Allen enters the record reliably only as a War-of-1812 coal-marketing partner of Col. George Shoemaker. Use him as a cultural emblem of the Yankee element, not as a sourced life.

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 is, in the primary record, almost entirely a surname-and-place-name phenomenon sitting atop German founding families:

  • Barry Township (settled c. 1808): German founders (Clauntz, Heter, Shupert from Berks) alongside the McKown family (the McKown House inn) and the village of McKeansburg — the McKeans being a prominent Pennsylvania Scots-Irish family. ★
  • Union Township: German founders (Eisenhauer, Fruhr, Trexler), but Munsell’s landmark landowners include the Scots-Irish Nesbitt and Crawford and the New England Hazeltine — i.e., a thin Anglo-Celtic overlay appearing largely as the second-generation owners of German-cleared farms. ★
  • A lock on the Schuylkill Canal near Auburn was long known as “the Scotchman’s Lock,” preserving the memory of a Scots presence on the waterway. ★

✎ Candid bottom line: the “Scots-Irish founding families with dates” that one might expect from a Cumberland or Northampton County do not exist in that form in Schuylkill. The northern townships were founded by Germans; the Scots-Irish appear as place-names (New England, McKeansburg, Scotchman’s Lock), as later landowners, and as the Pottsville commercial class — not as a discrete colony. That absence is itself a finding worth stating.

Sources: Munsell — Barry Twp. & Middleport; Munsell — Schuylkill/Walker/Union/Auburn.

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

The cleanest evidence of the non-German element is religious — and it confirms the cultural geography precisely. While the German 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. Ernse, Elisha Warne, Alexander Graham — a telling mix of New England (Safford, Warne), Scots (Graham), and a single German (Ernse) 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 sometimes absorbed into the German matrix — at Middleport, a Presbyterian congregation built a stone church in 1852 but, “becoming financially weak,” ended up holding services “mostly in the German language.” ★ Even Presbyterianism bent toward Deitsch in the coal belt.

Sources: Munsell — Pottsville section (First Presbyterian); Munsell — Middleport.

Punching above their numbers: the commercial Pottsville

Where the non-German element mattered most was not the farm but the counting-house. The pattern is clear: German families owned the founding farmland; New England, Scots, and Anglo capital, engineering, and the 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 on top of a German-founded 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 ran it for 40 years as the dominant editorial voice of the coal region. ★
  • The earliest coal-marketers were Yankee/Anglo (William Morris, 1800; Allen and Shoemaker, War of 1812); the engineering and geology were Anglo-staffed (P. W. Sheafer wrote the geological matter in the 1881 history); and Pottsville’s early architecture drew on Philadelphia capital and designers (John Haviland’s cast-iron Miners’ Bank façade, 1830). ★

The county histories sum it up: “The Potts, Pattersons and Eckharts made Pottsville a center of wealth.” The founding farmers (German) and the founding coal entrepreneurs and professionals (German Potts plus Anglo-Celtic Pattersons, Bannans, and Sheafers, backed by outside capital) were largely different populations — and the northern farm townships, by contrast, stayed overwhelmingly German.

Sources: ExplorePAhistory — Schuylkill County marker; PA Markers — Burd Patterson; Wikipedia — Benjamin Bannan; Beers — the Pott family (1916).

People

PersonRoleOriginNote
Necho AllenLegendary discoverer of anthracite (~1790)“New England-born” (tradition: Vermont)Emblem, not documented biography ⚑
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 ⚑

There is no Schuylkill County analogue to the richly-biographied Scots-Irish founding patriarch of the southern-Pennsylvania frontier. That absence, again, is part of the story.

Legacy

The Scots-Irish/Yankee imprint is faint on the land but real in the institutions of power. It survives in place-names (New England, McKeansburg, Scotchman’s Lock), in surnames scattered through the northern townships, in the First Presbyterian Church tradition in Pottsville, and — most substantially — in the commercial, editorial, and engineering class that built the coal capital’s early institutions. It is a profile defined as much by its documented limits as by its content: a minority founding stream whose true weight lay not in numbers but in the offices, churches, and newspapers of Pottsville.

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 non-German founders of Schuylkill County?
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. It was a real but minority overlay on a German agricultural base, plus a disproportionately influential commercial-professional class in Pottsville — not 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 northern townships were founded by Germans; the Scots-Irish appear as place-names (New England, McKeansburg, Scotchman's Lock), as later (second-generation) landowners of German-cleared farms, and as the Pottsville commercial class — a real but minority overlay on a German agricultural base, not a discrete colony.
Where is the 'New England' village in Schuylkill County?
It is in Walker Township, just south of Tamaqua — not Rush Township (Rush's own pioneers were German). 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

People: Benjamin Bannan (1807–1875), Burd Patterson (1788–1867)

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