Living in the Cornplanter Grant
Written by Tyler Stump in the Picturing PA category and the Winter 2023 issue Topics in this article: Allegheny River, Cornplanter Grant, Jenuchshadago, passenger pigeons, Seneca Indians, Warren County
The children in this 1937 photograph are standing in front of one of the clapboard houses that replaced the traditional log cabins built by the Seneca.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-12
The Cornplanter Grant is well known as the Warren County home of Cornplanter (Gy-ant-wa-chia, 1740?–1836), chief warrior and leader from the Seneca Nation in northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York. For nearly 200 years, this 700-acre tract of land along the Allegheny River was home to a thriving community of Cornplanter’s heirs and several hundred Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga families.
Most of the Cornplanter residents lived in Jenuchshadago (“Burnt House”), a town in the center of the tract surrounded by fertile farmland, lush forests and waterways. Roy Bennet, born in Jenuchshadago in 1884, recalled: “Work in the woods was plentiful; and the fish drives at the deep hole in the river in front of the Grant drew crowds. . . . There were no dull moments.”
Bennet and his neighbors foraged a great deal of food and medicine from the surrounding forests and stocked their cellars with dried provisions. Cornplanter farmers harvested more than a dozen varieties of maize and corn husks for food and ceremonial use.
Ezra Jacobs navigates a boat on the Allegheny River near the Cornplanter Grant with his two children, Douglas and Harry, circa 1940.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-13
Each spring, Seneca living north of the Pennsylvania state line gathered at the Cornplanter Grant to hunt passenger pigeons nesting in nearby ancestral hunting grounds. In 1929 resident Willie Gordon remembered: “People would come here from Cattaraugus and Coldspring by wagon, and we would go off beyond Sheffield to get the squabs. Families traveled in boxwagons . . . heaped high with axes, guns, cooking utensils, and children and with barrels or bark casks for packing.”
Lydia Bucktooth shared fond memories of hunting with her family: “The pigeon hunt was a good time — just like a fair or picnic.” This annual tradition continued until the passenger pigeon became extinct in the early 1900s.
Cornplanter residents originally lived in log cabins built by Cornplanter and his people shortly after arriving in 1796. As schools, stores and other structures were built over the years, old ones were commonly repurposed as new homes. After Gov. Arthur James gave a speech at the Cornplanter Grant in 1940, his speaking platform was carefully dismantled and its wood used to remodel resident Windsor Pierce’s home.
In 1947 Chief Nick Bailey (Ho-Staote) observed: “The log cabin era for our people is now over. . . . Homes more on the modern pattern are erected wherever the log cabin goes down, this process being symbolically concurrent with the constant change taking place in the life of our people.”
Though the years brought changes to the forests around them and the places they lived, the Cornplanter residents sustained many of their traditions and lifestyles. In 1937 Jesse Cornplanter noted: “During wintertime the storytellers would be going house to house. . . . We would fill his pipe with tobacco and light it for him, so he ould smoke as he related his stories of the animals or the mighty beings and beasts that used to roam.” As an adult he continued this tradition, repeating the stories to the next generation.
Cornplanter residents enjoyed card and dice games and the ever-popular lacrosse year-round. In winter, a favorite pastime was snow snake, where players tried to hurl waxed spears furthest across the snow. Each year, they observed seasonal ceremonies — a spring feast for strawberries and one for green corn in the fall. New Year’s was celebrated in midwinter, with unique feasts, singing and ceremonies each day.
The Cornplanter Grant remained until 1965, when a federal flood control project flooded the land under the Kinzua Dam. Its remaining residents were forced to move to Seneca lands in New York State where they reside today.
Phoebe Gordon making a splint basket at her Cornplanter home, circa 1940.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-13
Materials pertaining to the Cornplanter Grant can be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives in MG-220: The Merle Deardorff Collection, as well as the Warren County Historical Society in Warren, Pennsylvania, and the Seneca Nation Archives Department in Salamanca, New York.
Tyler Stump is an archivist at the Pennsylvania State Archives.
