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Beyond Manhattan: A Gazetteer of Delaware Indian History

Robert S. Grumet (2014) 800 words

[Robert S. Grumet (2014)] imported from its original locale in Pennsylvania to the Industry that surrendered the area to United States (Oklahoma State Ohio River Town of Gallipolis. University Library 1999-2000). Other local traditions celebrating Johnny Appleseed may have encouraged linkage of Pappellelond’s METUCHEN (Fairfield County). Metuchen Place is a transfer name with the English term apple that occurs in the same general name from New Jersey located in the City of Reynoldville. form as a loan word in Delaware. MINEOLA (Summit County). This Lakota name attributed to Delaware Indians in New York adorns Mineola Avenue in the City ported from the northeastern corner of the state. Indian war party near its banks in 1794. Moxahola appeared as early COMPO (Defiance County). Compo Park evidently bears an un- as 1819 as the Indian name of Jonathan’s Creek (Kilbourn related non-Indian family name. For the Delaware Indian place 1819:110). Iron-makers drawn to the area’s coalfields gave the name Moxahala to the furnace and the settlement they built along its name Compo, see Connecticut. banks around 1873. Both Moxahola and Moxahala appear to be a CROSSWICKS (Warren County). The name of the hamlet of slightly respelled imported version of Mocholoha, the name of a Crosswicks in the Greater Cincinnati area (first platted in 1821) was Delaware sachem (thought by some to be a Susquehannock leader) who signed several deeds to lands around Philadelphia (see above imported by immigrants from New Jersey. in Pennsylvania South in Part 1) during the last quarter of the sevCROTON (Licking County). Croton Road in the Village of John- enteenth century (e.g., State of Pennsylvania 1838-1935, Pennsylvania Archives, 1st Series 1:67-68). Poet Charles Edgar Spencer stown bears a Delaware Indian place name from New York. subsequently romanticized the name and its place in Ohio heritage CUYAHOGA (Allen, Erie, and Franklin counties). Roads named in his Legend of the Moxahala, published in 1878. Cuyahoga Drive, located in the City of Huron and the Village of Fort Shawnee, and Cuyahoga Court, in the City of Columbus bear NORWALK (Huron and Medina counties). Norwalk is a Wampano the Iroquois name of the place where many Delawares lived at and Delaware transfer name that currently adorns a creek and a city located in the Firelands or Sufferers’ Lands tract originally set aside around present-day Cleveland. for residents of Connecticut whose homes were burnt by British raiders during the Revolutionary War. A road named for Norwalk River across from the mouth of westerly-running Wheeling Creek in the Firelands joins the communities of Litchfield and Medina at the City of Wheeling (see above in West Virginia in Part 1). elsewhere in the state. WYOMING (Hamilton and Montgomery counties). Formally seOLENTANGY (Montgomery and Summit counties). Roads named lected for its association with the scenic Wyoming Valley in PennOlentangy Drive in the cities of Akron and Dayton carry the name sylvania at a town meeting in 1851, the community of Wyoming far from its original location in the Olentangy River valley. was incorporated as a city in 1874. Wyoming also occurs as a street name in the Village of Lockland and the cities of Dayton and PATASKALA (Licking County). Mahr (1957:148-149) suggested Cincinnati. that Pataskala resembled a Munsee word, *pendaskitquehelleu, “a rising river which swells the water of a creek,” that he thought may have been equivalent to the Delaware Indian word, petapsqui, “bank or tide water.” Heckewelder (1834:378) thought the latter word was the basis for the name of Petapsco Creek in Maryland. Pataskala first appeared sometime between the years it was not included in Kilbourn’s (1819) Gazetteer and 1833, when it was identified as the Indian name of the Licking River in the posthumously published gazetteer’s 11th edition (A Citizen of Columbus 1833:274). In 1851, the name was given to the post office that opened at what was then called the village of Conine, named for its earliest mill owner, Richard Conine. Although the name no longer identifies the Licking River, Pataskala continues as the name of what is now a city on the banks of the South Fork of the Licking River. PIPE (Knox County). The Pipesville Road running just south of the Walhonding Valley (see above in Ohio in Part 2) Village of Gambier bears the same name as influential Delaware sachem, Captain Pipe (also see above in Ohio in Part 2). The road is also located just a few miles south and west of the Hell Town expatriate Indian community on the Clear Fork of the Mohican River (see above in Ohio in Part 2) led by Captain Pipe during the early years of the American Revolution. Despite these facts, Pipesville Road bears the name of a non-Indian, Warren Pipes, who served the now-defunct Pipesville community in the area as its second postmaster during the 1850s. POCANTICO (Summit County). The name of Pocantico Avenue in