Laurelville: A Lenape Woods and the Methodist Camp (pre-1943)

 Laurelville: A Lenape Woods and the Methodist Camp (pre-1943)

For the past 50 years, I have had many associations with the Laurelville Retreat Center near Mt. Pleasant in western Pennsylvania. These relationships have been mainly as a neighbor living at Scottdale and as  part of the staff in the 1980s. Some of those personal interactions can be found in my blog during those years. But of a more general nature, in 2023, I wrote a short history which may be of interest regarding the longer time span of the center, especially some of the personalities in its history.

If you ask people about the origins of the Laurelville Retreat Center, they may talk about the Mennonites, the Methodists, and the Native Americans. A few may even recall the biblical creation story and how God has provided the beautiful natural setting we call Laurelville. Visitors today can enjoy over 600 acres of woodlands with many trees, animals, waterways, and rock formations going back hundreds, even thousands of years. 

We’ll acknowledge all these divine and human origins and go back several hundred years to the first Americans who lived with the flora and fauna of Laurelville, the Delaware or Lenape people. Several tribes lived and traveled through this region in the mid-1700s, but we’ll focus on the Lenape because they were the Native Americans who lived here when the Europeans arrived. They earlier lived along the eastern coast near what is now Philadelphia and New Jersey, when William Penn arrived. Within a half century they were pushed out beyond the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio country, western Pennsylvania and what is now Laurelville.    

And we’ll focus on one person: Tewea or Captain Jacobs ( ca 1730 -- 1756) because he was a notable Lenape or Delaware chief during the mid-18th century; a statue honoring his memory remains on the grounds; and Jacobs Creek is named after him. Captain Jacobs grew up as Tewea around the present day Juniata County, Pennsylvania, during a colonial period when Native Americans and Euroamericans often had mutually beneficial relationships of trading and sharing the land. The ideal was William Penn’s Peaceable Kingdom. An early history notes that during some difficult land negotiations between the Delaware and Europeans, Tewea stepped in and negotiated a peaceful settlement. He received his English name Jacobs from a colonial settler Arthur Buchanan with whom Jacobs made various social and financial transactions. Tewea’s mother was a Lenape and some genealogical accounts say his father was a French fur trader.

During the 1750s, relationships among the British, French and Indians became hostile and fierce; the American Indians were drawn into the Seven Years War in Europe between the French and British. In America it was called the French and Indian War, and the Delaware and Captain Jacobs were partisans in the conflict. One early historian said “These Red Men were not as unreasonable in their attitude, as has often been pictured.” They said to an English negotiator: “Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe that you want to take and settle the Land.” The land was the issue, and now Captain Jacobs made cause with the better-known Delaware Chief Shingas leading the Indians in fierce resistance against the British and European colonists who were increasingly encroaching on Indian land west of the Allegheny Mountains. 

In this conflict, Captain Jacobs, his wife and a son were killed on September 8, 1756, when a British military party attacked and destroyed the Indian settlement of Kittanning about 40 miles north of present day Pittsburgh. But this notable leader Captain Jacobs is remembered here also because although his main home was at Kittanning, he and his braves had hunting cabins near here (about half-way between Mount Pleasant and Scottdale, specifically Bridgeport and the Green Lick Park to locals). On July 2, 1755, General Braddock stopped overnight and made camp  at Jacobs Cabins, during his ill-fated expedition to capture Fort Duquesne, now Fort Pitt. 

Over a century and a half later in 1937, a Mount Pleasant auto dealer named William C. Galley (1862-1938) crafted a stone sculpture of Captain Jacobs which has been well preserved by our Laurelville neighbors, the Alberts family. Over the years, much legend and oral tradition has grown up about Captain Jacobs and the family. But we’ll remember him here for both the beauty and and the tragedy of his people, the Lenape, the Delaware. And we remember him for the refreshing stream which runs through Laurelville and bears his name: Jacobs Creek. 

After 1776, the Europeans, the colonial Americans, settled into western Pennsylvania, with the Methodists spreading Christianity, Bible classes, hymn singing, abolitionism, temperance, and Sunday schools across the frontier. By 1884, Scottdale Methodist Episcopal Church was founded. It grew from 12 members to the time of its golden anniversary in 1924 with 817 members. And by this time the Men’s Bible Class was looking for a new project and appointed a committee to look for a summer camp site. On May 22, 1920, the church bought 46 acres from Charles R. Kalp of Laurelville which became their campgrounds under the formal name of the Scottdale Methodist Episcopal Church Camp. 

The Methodists built a large lodge which combined kitchen, meeting area, and sleeping rooms as well as some smaller cabins along the hillside. They added tennis and volleyball courts, and a swimming pool; these  became central physical features of the camp for many years. In their church literature, the purpose of the camp was to provide “vacational privileges,” as well as “recreation for our church people and their friends.'' The camp was to foster an “environment and spirit of a Christian family where rest and recreation may be obtained with the fewest distractions possible.” Meanwhile, by the early 1940s, the Mennonites, who had a denominational publishing house and conference offices at Scottdale, were also looking for a campground. The Methodists sold their camp to The Mennonite Camp Ground Association which became an acknowledged entity in 1943. And that begins the next stage of Laurelville Retreat Center’s history. 

Tewea or Captain Jacobs biographical information and context appear in numerous sources, among them: David I. Preston. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783. 2009; also David I. Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: the Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, 2015; on Jacobs Creek naming in George P. Donehoo,  Indian Villages and Place Names, 1928, p 204; on Jacobs’ Cabins Norman L. Baker, Braddock’s Road: Mapping the British Expedition from Alexandria to the Monongahela, 2013, pp. 123-126. The Methodist ownership of Laurelville comes from the centennial book 1874-1974 of Trinity United Methodist Church, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, “Our Camp,” p. 14 and Directory: First Methodist Episcopal Church, Scottdale, Pa., 1923, pp. 11-13. Scottdale Attorney James Lederach provided information on land transfers and deeds of the Laurelville properties.