Among the earlier settlers were John Wragg, Michael Mitchell, Lawrence Dershermer, Ebenezer Covey, John and William Ross, John and George Fox, John and Lewis Stull, Samuel Wilohick, Archippus Childs, John Lafrance, John Genthu, Henry Ospuck, John Fish, David Dale, Edward Wardell, John Thompson, Mathew Hodson, Peter Rupert, Wesley Hollister, John Besecker, Jacob Swartz, Nathaniel Carter, Samuel Buck, Richard Edwards, John Koons, and Barnabas Carey.

The Philadelphia and Great Bend Turnpike, originated by Drinker, whose name it still bears, was the first to gain admittance into the valley from the east as a public highway. This turnpike commenced at the Belmont and Easton road, some three miles above Stanhope, and ran thence a northerly course to the Susquehanna and Great Bend Turnpike, at a point near Ithamar Mott's tavern, in Susquehanna County.

The charter for this road, over sixty miles of vast inland frontier, was obtained in 1819, but the State, willing to foster an enterprise promising to enlarge its development and dignity, had so little faith in the civilizing advantages of this proposed road that it favored it with the limited subscription of only $12,000. The balance of the stock was taken by the Messrs. Drinkers, Clymer, Meredith, and other wealthy landholders. Drinker, who located the road, superintended its general construction, and was elected president of the company.

The four villages, Moscow, Dunning, Dalesville, and Turnersville, diversifying the agricultural centers among the hills and dales of the Beech, are all increasing in population and importance, and yet have ample room for expansion.

SETTLEMENT OF JEFFERSON.

Although Jefferson Township was only formed in 1836, from Providence, its settlement dates back to 1784, when Asa Cobb, taking advantage of the repose succeeding the

Revolution, located his cabin, and made a clearing at the foot of one of the larger and steeper elevations, deriving its name from him, Cobb's Mountain, as it sends down its steep slope to the old Connecticut road crossing the range at this high point. This cabin, offering its unwavering hospitality to friend or foe from Wyoming, was the primitive structure in Jefferson, and its former location is indicated by the mansion of his great-grandson, Asa Cobb. Between the solitary dwelling in Dunmore and the clearing at Little Meadows, in Wayne County, a distance of sixteen miles eastward, the cabin of Mr. Cobb was for many years the only one intervening. In 1795 Mr. Potter chopped a place for his home in the extreme eastern border of the township and county, upon a tributary of the Wallenpaupack issuing from Cobb's Pond.

Jefferson has achieved no local history of interest, yet its uplands were once familiar to the savage clans crossing from the Delaware to their Wyoming villages. Upon the very summit of the mountain, north of the old Cobb house, the camp and signal fires of the Indian often rose, as the hunter or warrior gathered around the resinous logs, while the flames of the fire glowing high and red among the tree-tops, were visible miles away to the eastward. At an early period, a large number of Indian implements, to smite an enemy or secure the game, were found commingled with the débris of these upraised encampments. The township is sparsely settled, and generally covered with timber, yet in spite of its altitude, it possesses a few farms of surprising fertility and beauty.

The Moosic or Cobb's Mountain, interposing its granite bowlders between Jefferson and the Lackawanna, has shut off all traces of coal formation, yet a coal mine was discovered east of this range, a quarter of a century ago, by a voluble, inventive genius, who was promised a farm by the owner of the land, should the explorer find coal in a certain locality. Making an excavation deep in the

mountain side, he actually toiled weeks in carrying upon his shoulder baskets of anthracite for a distance of six miles before the blackened appearance of the drift gave satisfactory evidence of the existence of coal. The owner of this supposed coal property, always liberal in his gifts, cheered by his good luck in the discovery, promptly deeded a tract of land, from his many thousand acres, as a reward to the finder, who, like the kindhearted possessor, lived long to join in the laugh at the joke.

The country east and southward of Cobb's, alternating with forest and meadow, possesses much of the gloom natural to the primitive wilderness in America when trodden by the warriors. Wild beasts, to a certain extent, inhabit the ravines and woods extending from this point to the head-waters of the Lehigh over the Shades of Death, on the Pocono, and haunt in places less accessible to the footsteps of the hunter, making now and then such demonstrations upon the farmers' sheep-pens as to satisfy the fastidious that the keen, frosty air of the mountain imparts a keener whet to the appetite than rum.

The winter of 1835 was one of great length and severity, from the vast quantity of snow which had fallen. It lay upon the ground for many weeks four and five feet in depth on the level, while drifts, crossed only upon snowshoes, often rose to a prodigious height. Game perished on the mountains in large numbers, and wolves even sought the settlements for food. A gray, lean wolf, thus impelled by hunger, found its way into the barn-yard of the late John Cobb, Esq., in Jefferson, during the winter, while the members of the family, with the exception of Mrs. Cobb, were absent from home. The commotion among the sheep in the yard, some distance from the house, attracted her attention. With a heroism that rose instinctively with the occasion, Mrs. Cobb, though naturally a mild and slender lady, caught the pitchfork in her hand and hurried forth to repel or dispatch the intruder. This

was comparatively an easy matter for the brave woman, as the brute, in its starved condition, had become enfeebled, and, although for a moment it turned its lurid eye and long, white, keen teeth upon the assailant, it soon fell a trophy to a woman whose sterling courage, thus displayed, exhibited in a broader and better light the requirements and qualifications of the earlier women of the country. For the scalp of the wolf, Luzerne County paid Mrs. Cobb the usual reward or bounty at that time of ten dollars.

There lived upon a time in Jefferson a man of fair mental endowments, upright and honorable, glib in speech, of unmeasured egotism, whose ambition led him to hope for a division of the great county of Luzerne and the selection of the green plateau of his plantation for the county seat. Visions of court-house, jail, and prominence, rose before him as he diffused his convictions among all parties throughout the county with a persistency worthy of success, urging the cutting in twain of its ancient boundaries for the especial good of the Beech and Jefferson, offering land gratuitously for the public buildings; and, as a final unanswerable counterpoise, the old gentleman, in his enthusiasm for his favorite scheme, exclaimed to the writer, “Rather than see the thing fail, I would consent to act as judge myself the first year or two for nothing."

CHASED BY A PANTHER.

To the east of Cobb's clearing, eight or ten miles upon the old Connecticut road, nestles down at the foot of a long hill a tract of low, swampy land, known in the ancient Westmoreland Records by the name of "Little Meadows." Two natural ponds, flooding hundreds of acres, lying a mile apart, divided by a strip of wild meadow-land grown over with coarse grass and willows, afforded the earliest pioneers to Wyoming a place to cheer their cattle with food, and led to the adoption of the name. The first set

tlement in the county of Wayne, aside from that upon the Delaware, was made upon the edge of this meadow. From this place to the Paupack settlement, a distance of less than a dozen miles, stretched the woods, unbroken save by a single farm-house, kept for a tavern, remarkable for its neatness within, and its slovenish appearance without. A portion of this distance is swamp-land, grown full of alder, laurel, beech, and the long, wrinkled hemlock, and is a continuation of the swamp or "Shades of Death," extending their desolating aspect for a great space along the Pocono.

Midway through this swamp flows the Five-mile Creek in the most sluggish manner, from which the land upon either side of it gradually ascends for a distance of three or four miles.

In the autumn of 1837, while the writer was passing from this tavern homeward on one bright, frosty midnight, accompanied by a friend, just as the clearing receded from the view, the horse and ourselves were startled by the loud cry of a panther, coming from the thicket along the road-side. The dry limbs cracked as the enormous creature sprang into the road behind us, and it is difficult to tell whether horse or the whitened drivers most appreciated the perilous condition. The moon shone bright down among the opening tree-tops, as over the road, frozen, steep, and stony, trembled the slender vehicle. Deeper and farther the forest closed up behind us, leaving little chance for us to reach Little Meadows in safety. Turning the eye backward, and the approaching form of the panther could be seen within a stone's throw, leaping along at a rate of speed corresponding with our own. The silence of the woods, stretching back in such utter loneliness, the sound of the nervous horse-feet, the jar of the wagon over the stones, the terribly distinct yells of the pursuing animal breaking in upon the surrounding gloom, and our own defenseless condition, made such an impression upon boyhood-that its mention here may seem