[Robert S. Grumet (2014)] surname unrelated to the Munsee leader. INDIAN LADDER (Warren County). Indian Ladder Cliff is located at the Delaware Water Gap in Knowlton Township. It first appeared in a reference to an Indian ladder (probably a deeply notched tree trunk) that John Reading, Jr. (1915:41) and his companions propped up on May 19, 1715, to clamber over a 20-foot-high rock blocking their path at a round hill Reading identified as Penungauchongh (see Manunka Chunk below). Although Reading noted other Indian ladders elsewhere during his surveys, the name came to be fixed to a rock formation near Manunka Chunk resembling the kind of improvised tree ladder the surveyor’s party used at the locale in LOCKATONG (Hunterdon County). Whritenour thinks the name 1715. of present-day Lockatong Creek sounds like a Munsee word lokatink, “place of wheat meal,” though he is not sure why Indians, IRESICK (Middlesex County). Probably a Northern Unami name not known to have raised or processed the grain at the time, would for a sachem whose name was also spelled Iraseek, Irooseeke, and give that name to the place. Lockatong Creek is a 16-mile-long Jakkursoe in colonial records. Heckewelder (1834:383) thought that stream that rises near the village of Quakertown in Franklin Townthe spelling of the Jakkursoe sounded like a Delaware Indian word, ship and flows through the townships of Kingwood and Delaware achcôlsoêt, “one who takes care of a thing, a preserver.” He further to its junction with the Delaware River midway between Byram and noted that Delaware people told him that Jakkursoe had served as a Prallsville. The name first appeared in a November 11, 1703, Indian Beyond Manhattan, Robert S. Grumet 57 deed as “a certain brook called Lockatony” identified elsewhere in the document as Lackatong (New Jersey Archives, Liber AAA:434435). Placement of a stream labeled Looking Creek at Lockatong’s current location on the 1770 William Scull map shows that at least some settlers had already anglicized the name during colonial times. Locktown, a hamlet along the banks of Wickecheoke Creek (see below) just one mile east of an upper fork of Lockatong Creek, may be another altered version of the name. The inclusion of Loakating Creek in Gordon’s (1834:167) gazetteer shows that the local people also continued to employ spellings more closely resembling the name’s originally documented form. The spelling of Lauhoekonatong Creek documented in 1725 (Moreau 1957:52) probably most closely approximates what Lockatong sounds like in the Munsee language. LOCKTOWN. See LOCKATONG LOPATCONG (Warren County). Whritenour thinks Lopatcong sounds like a Munsee word *lahpihtukwung, “at the swift river.” Lopatcong Creek is a nine-mile-long stream that rises on the west slope of Scotts Mountain in Harmony Township. From there it flows south into Lopatcong Township where the Morris Canal joins it at Port Warren. Both waterways flow side by side into the town of Phillipsburg, only parting company when the creek turns to fall into the Delaware River two miles short of the canal’s junction with the Delaware across from the mouth of the Lehigh River. The land making up present-day Lopatcong Township was named after the creek and was originally part of Phillipsburg Township. It became one of Mill) to Spotswood. From there, it becomes the South River (formerly known as the Manalapan River), a tidal stream that flows through Old Bridge into the Raritan River at the Borough of Sayreville. Manalapan has been on colonial maps since a place called Manoppeck was mentioned as a tract of territory in the August 15, 1650, Indian deed to land near Raritan Bay (New Jersey Archives, 58 Liber I:6-7). The name first came into frequent use in its more recognizable modern-day form in a series of Indian deeds conveying land in the Manalapan Valley between 1696 and 1741. The prominent sachem Weequehela (see above and in the entry for Iresick in New Jersey Central), also known as the King of New Jersey, lived along the brook and signed many of these deeds. Most of Weequehela’s followers in the area relocated to the Forks of Delaware in 1727, soon after the sachem was tried and hanged for killing a local settler while drunk (Grumet 1991; Wilk 1993). Many of these people subsequently returned after being evicted from the Forks of Delaware following the Walking Purchase of 1737. More than a few of those who returned were converted to the Christian religion by the Presbyterian missionary brothers David and John Brainerd (see Brainerd above). The majority subsequently settled at the Brotherton Reservation (see Indian Mills above) established at Edgepillock in 1759. The small colonial hamlet of Manalapan, later called Tennent, was established just southeast of the Borough of Englishtown. The locale became a Revolutionary War battleground when American and British troops faced off at the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778. A post office given the name Manalapan