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Incident Among Indians
Gave Community Name
Newcomerstown News,
August 16, 1964
Newcomerstown was not founded until 1814, but its actual history
goes back further than that date when Nicholas Neighbor founded
the settlement.
The earliest visit by a white man to the Tuscarawas river was
that of Christopher Gist in 1750. An explorer and surveyor, he
was sent out by a company of Virginians, among them George
Washington, to explore the land west of the Allegheny mountains
and to determine if it were suitable for new settlements.
The notes in the Gist journal tell of what must have been the
earliest account of the "eternal triangle" in this region.
Chief Eagle Feather became tired of his wife, Mary Harris, who
as a child had been abducted from her home in Deerfield,
Massachusetts by Indian raiders. While on one of his tribe's
raiding trips to the Virginia frontier, he captured a younger
and more beautiful squaw and established her in the same wigwam
with Mary Harris.
This caused no end of trouble and Mary Harris became
increasingly jealous of the "Newcomer" as she was called. One
morning the Indian village was aroused by the cries of Mary
Harris that her husband, Chief Eagle Feather, had been murdered
and that the captive "Newcomer" had fled.
The Indians immediately pursued the fugitive and she was
recaptured at a small Indian town on the banks of the Tuscarawas
river. This town was thereafter known as Newcomerstown. |
