Wilkes Barre, PA news and local guide

For thousands of years hunter-gatherers used the Wilkes-Barre area, leaving Archaic tools and Woodland pottery, and after about 950 AD farming villages appeared in the Wyoming Valley. In the 18th century refugee communities of Lenape, Shawnee, Conoy, Nanticoke and Mahican settled there, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the 1740s. In 1753 Connecticut's Susquehanna Company bought the valley from Native owners, though Pennsylvania claimed the same land under a purchase of 1736. About 200 Connecticut settlers built cabins near Mill Creek in 1762 and returned with their families in 1763. On April 19, 1763, Iroquois visitors set fire to the house of the Lenape chief Teedyuscung, who died, and let the Lenape believe the settlers had done it. On October 15, 1763, the Lenape attacked, killing thirty settlers and taking others prisoner, and burned the settlement.

More about Wilkes Barre

The Connecticut Yankees returned in 1769 and set up five townships of five square miles, each divided among forty settlers. Wilkes-Barre Township was named for John Wilkes and Isaac Barre, two members of Parliament who supported the American colonists. Pennsylvanians, called Pennamites, arrived the same year. The Yankees built Fort Durkee, named for their leader, Colonel Durkee, and the Pennamite-Yankee War followed, a series of clashes in which the land changed hands several times before the dispute was settled in Pennsylvania's favor. Sources Wikipedia: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania