HERITAGE | Monroe County Historic Photo Album

Monroe County’s landscape, like its history, is sprinkled liberally with names like Stroud, Brodhead, Kresge and Depui. Some helped creat a new country while creating new settlements here. Jacob Stroud, for example, was an office in the Revolutionary Army and founded Stroudsburg. Nicholas Depui and Manuel Gonsalez, from Smithfield Township, were members of the Communities of Observation that supervised the boycott of British goods.

Kresgeville is named for the Kresge family, whose members over the years have included chain store magnate S.S. Kresge, who donated $25,000 in 1928 to the school district. Daniel Brodhead was an early settler of what is now East Stroudsburg, and his name lives on in local geography through the Brodhead Creek, Dansbury Park and more.

Dutch and German settlers were first in the area. They and other early settlers came from cultures in which the Protestant Christian Church was important, and they brought their beliefs here, as evidenced in the variety of churches – German Reformed, Lutheran Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, German Evangelical and more. One of the first churches was erected in 1735 in Shawnee and, over the years, was led by Dutch Reformed, Lutheran and Presbyterian pastors. Its foundations were used for the present Shawnee Presbyterian Church. The Great Awakening, which was sweeping American religious life, is seen in camp meetings that were popular in Monroe County during the 1840s and 1850s.

Along Highways 940 and 611, you’ll see historical markers for the Sullivan Trail, which is the path used by Gen. John Sullivan and his troops on their northward march against the Iroquois Indians in 1779. Others from the area who have achieved national attention include A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker who served as United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson and later ran unsuccessfully for president, and John Summerfield Staples, a Stroudsburg native who was President Abraham Lincoln’s representative recruit in the federal army during the Civil War.
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