Enoch Brown school massacre

On July 26, 1764, during Pontiac's War, four Delaware (Lenape) Native Americans entered a settlers' log schoolhouse in the Province of Pennsylvania, in what is now Franklin County near the present-day city of Greencastle. Inside were schoolmaster Enoch Brown and a number of young students. Brown pleaded with the warriors to spare the children, but he was shot, beaten with a club, and scalped. The warriors then clubbed and scalped the children. Brown and ten children were killed in the attack. One child, Archie McCullough, was scalped but survived his wounds.

A child survivor's account, as recorded in the source material, described the attack: "Two old Indians and a young Indian rushed up to the door soon after the opening of the morning session. The master, surmising their objective, prayed them only to take his life and spare the children, but all were brutally knocked in the head with an Indian maul and scalped."

The day before the schoolhouse attack, the same warriors had encountered a pregnant woman, identified as Susan King Cunningham, on the road. She was beaten to death, scalped, and the fetus was removed from her body. When the warriors returned to their village on the Muskingum River in the Ohio Country and displayed the scalps, an elder Delaware chief rebuked them for attacking children. John McCullough, a settler who had been held captive by the Delaware since 1756, later described this scene in his captivity narrative, quoting the chief, called Night Walker, as accusing the warriors of cowardice for killing so many children.

In the aftermath, authorities captured some of the Lenape warriors believed to be responsible for the massacre. They were subsequently sentenced to death and executed by hanging. The incident, along with others like it, prompted the Pennsylvania General Assembly, with the approval of Governor John Penn, to reintroduce a scalp bounty system that had previously been used during the French and Indian War, offering payment for the scalps of American Indian men and women.

Settlers buried Enoch Brown and the schoolchildren in a common grave near the site. In 1843, the grave was excavated to confirm the location of the remains. In 1885, the site was formally named Enoch Brown Park, and a memorial was erected over the gravesite. Historian Richard Middleton has described the massacre as "one of the most notorious incidents" of Pontiac's War.