Wrightstown Friends Meeting · The Walking Purchase

The Walking Purchase

What the marker doesn’t tell you

You are standing where, at sunrise on September 19, 1737, three men touched a marked chestnut tree near the Wrightstown Meetinghouse and set off into the woods.

The Pennsylvania historical marker tells you their names — Edward Marshall, James Yeates, and Solomon Jennings — and tells you that, in a day and a half, Marshall reached a point sixty-five miles to the north and west. That much is accurate. It is also, as a description of what happened here, dishonest by omission.

The walk was a fraud. The trail was pre-cleared. The walkers were runners. The closing line was angled to maximize the take. The territory that changed hands — about 1.2 million acres — was roughly seven times what the Lenape understood the day-and-a-half walk to convey. The Meeting next to which the walk began was not a bystander.

The 1737 Walking Purchase: the walk (dashed), the actual closing line (red), the fair closing line (teal), and the Friends Meetings of the region.

Read the story

1. The walk: how it really happened

Trained runners on a path cleared in secret. Two of three collapsed; one was paid in land.

2. The angled line and the 1.2 million acres

The closing line that turned a long walk into a vast land grab — seven times the size of any honest deal.

3. Origins of Wrightstown Friends Meeting

A worship line going back to 1686 in John Chapman’s home, an 1717 joint petition with Newtown, and a young Monthly Meeting in 1737.

4. Wrightstown Meeting was not a bystander

The surveyor who drew the map, the sheriff who timed the walk, the ground itself. The Meeting’s role and its silence.

5. What came after: 1756 and 2004

Quakers withdraw from the Pennsylvania Assembly. Two and a half centuries later, the Delaware Nation sues. What the courts found.

6. Sources and further reading

The secondary works, archival finding aids, and primary documents this account is built on.

Published by Wrightstown Friends Meeting. The Walking Purchase began near our Meetinghouse three centuries ago; the honest account of it is ours to keep on the record.