Braddock’s Road and defying the Proclamation of 1763

Returning to the Gray and DeCamp branches of my maternal grandfather’s family tree, I was recently reminded of John DeCamp and Susannah Gray, my 5th great-grandparents. According to an 1874 newspaper obituary of their son George DeCamp Sr., John and Susannah lived in Winchester, Virginia in the early 1770s, and moved to West Newton, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, later in that decade. At that time, West Newton was considered to be part of Virginia. It was also west of the Allegheny Mountains, which was officially off limits to white settlers, as outlined in the British Proclamation of 1763. That decree specified that European Americans could not move into the lands west of the mountains that had been acquired by Great Britain at the conclusion of the Seven Years War with France. The line was drawn for a number of reasons, including the fear of violence from Native American inhabitants, and Britain’s desire to tightly control political and economic aspects of new territories. The proclamation was largely ignored by Anglo-Americans looking for land and new opportunities, with little or no consequences.

The DeCamp involvement in this westward movement was pointed out to me while reading The Rediscovery of America, an excellent history of Native Americans written by Yale University’s Ned Blackhawk. The book featured a map of Braddock’s Road, a tribal path that was improved by the forces of General Edward Braddock, to enable the movement of troops and military equipment from Virginia to Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) and the Ohio River. What caught my eye was that Winchester was located on Braddock’s Road, and the road led directly to the area of Western Pennsylvania where John DeCamp lived.

In one period source, the diary of British traveler Nicholas Cresswell, mention is made of staying at the home of John DeCamp, located near Sewickley Creek (“Saweekly” as Cresswell spelled it) and Jacob’s Creek. Cresswell described the site of the battle where General Braddock was killed in 1775.

The Sewickley Creek area had been populated at various times by members of tribes such as the Iroquois, Lenape, Shawnee, and Osage. The increased migration of European Americans into the area caused conflicts that led to violence in many forms. One incident in Westmoreland involved a soldier under the command of Susannah Gray’s second husband, Nehemiah Stokely. In an 1850 congressional ruling on a petition by Stokely’s heirs regarding his military pension, there was a passage mentioning the kidnapping of the soldier, who was used as a witness regarding Stokely’s military service in the period of late 1779:

“…one of the witnesses, James Chambers, whose testimony is filed with the petition, states that Captain Stokely married a lady of Westmoreland county in February or March, 1779, and in April of the following year took out a license to keep a tavern at his wife’s house, …How much longer he continued to keep this tavern, the witness, who was himself taken prisoner by the Indians in 1781, was probably unable to tell.”

Nehemiah Stokely had been a lieutenant in the 8th Pennsylvania Regiment during the Revolutionary War, and his children (along with his step-children, offspring of John DeCamp) litigated the disbursement of his pension for decades.

James Chamber’s pension application of 1845 gave more details on his experience as a prisoner of Native Americans, stating that Chambers:

“…was forted at Captain Nehemiah Stokely’s and in Stokely’s Glades in the month of June 1781 was taken prisoner by the Indians and taken by them to Lower Sanduskey and from there taken to Detroit and given over to the British and by the British put into ships with others and taken out to prison…”

Apparently, these kidnappings were carried out for the British during the Revolutionary War period. Local tribes were encouraged to harass white settlers in Ohio, Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania and bring the captured to the British fort at Detroit.

Chambers was eventually released and was able to return to Westmoreland County in 1783. By the time he applied for a pension he was so “old and infirm” that he couldn’t appear at his hearing, but his pension was granted and he was given $20 a month for the remainder of his life.

With the Revolutionary War, limitations imposed by the Proclamation of 1763 were no longer relevant, as the American colonies no longer obeyed British law. After the war, land west of the Alleghenies was given out as compensation to soldiers who had served (sometimes because the new federal government was unable to pay its veterans in cash). Among those that were given property in Western Pennsylvania were Nehemiah Stokely and George Washington himself. The advance of white settlements pushed ever westward, driving local native peoples from their historic homelands.

Sources

1. George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Proclamation Line of 1763, 2025
2. The Rediscovery of American by Ned Blackhawk, Yale University Press, 2023.
3. Braddock’s Road Preservation Society, The Story, 2025
4. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774-1777, Library of Congress
5. Report Number 339, 31st congress, “Nehemiah Stokely – Heirs of“, May 22 1850
6. Indian Eve and her descendants. An Indian story of Bedford County, Pennsylvania by Emma Replogle, 1911
7. ExplorePAHistory.com, George Washington, Covenant Squatters Historical Marker, 2025