Minisink

Minisink is the name of a district in the upper Delaware valley, a homeland of the Munsee-speaking Lenape. The river winds between wooded hills and fertile flats, with islands that gave the region its name. Dutch and Huguenot settlers came from the Hudson valley in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, establishing farms among older Indigenous communities.

The valley became a contested frontier during the wars between Britain and France. In 1779, during the American Revolution, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant led Indigenous warriors and Loyalists in a raid on the Minisink settlements. American militia pursued them up the Delaware, but Brant's force defeated the pursuers at Minisink Ford on 22 July. The battle left many militiamen dead and brought the wider war into the river valley.