Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOME NOTEWORTHY FEATURES IN THE ANNALS OF THE MAHONING PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: 1785-1910. BY THE REV. PROFESSOR ROBERT LAIRD STEWART, D. D. The records of this time-honored church carry us back to the earliest of the pioneer days on the frontier line of northeastern Pennsylvania. On the 26th of November, 1774, General William Montgomery, a sturdy Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, came from Chester County to this region, and purchased from the land office the wilderness tract on which the town of Danville now stands. On a newly cleared space of this tract he built a small log house, and to this new home brought out his wife and children. Not long afterwards he and all his neighbors were compelled to flee from hostile bands of Indians, who ravaged the country and murdered the inhabitants of every exposed settlement from Fort Augusta, at Sunbury, to the upper end of the Wyoming Valley. In the spring of 1780 General Montgomery returned, and with the aid of his three sons continued the work of clearing and improving his wilderness possession. About this time he built a grist mill on Mahoning Creek, which was the first of its kind in this region. It supplied the settlers with flour and meal for many miles around, and, ere long, became the nucleus of a little settlement which took the name Mahoning. The church, which was organized seven years before the founding of the town of Danville, received its name, as seemed fitting, from the settlement in which it was planted. It was the first Christian church of any denomination in this portion of the Susquehanna Valley, and its bounds, as then constituted, extended from the south of Fishing Creek to the vicinity of the town of Northumberland. The original members and adherents of the Mahoning Church came from the older settlements to the s...