George Washington, David Reed, and the Struggle for the Frontier
- Brad Strimel
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 minutes ago
This article was prepared by guest writer Brad Strimel for the Montour Trail George Washington historic marker dedication. Originally from Canonsburg, Strimel now resides in the rebuilt David Reed log house with his family. The historic marker was generously provided by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation in partnership with the Rails to Trails Conservancy, and dedicated by the Montour Trail Council, Montour Railroad Historical Society, and Historic Fort Cherry. You can learn more about this by clicking both links in the previous sentence to be directed to the respective webpage.
In September 1784, just months after resigning his military command and returning to private life, George Washington (age 52) embarked on a journey across the Allegheny Mountains to the western frontier of Pennsylvania. This time, his purpose was not military or political, but personal and financial. One decade earlier, for his service during the French and Indian War, Washington had been granted 2,813 acres along Miller's Run in what is now Washington County, Pennsylvania. Yet when he finally visited the tract after years of war, politics, and absentee ownership, he discovered it was fully occupied by thirteen Scots-Irish families, led by Captain David Reed (age 37), who had cleared and cultivated the land since as early as 1773.
Many of these settlers were of the Seceder religion, dissenters who had broken from the Church of Scotland over issues of state interference in religious affairs. Many migrated to Miller's Run from eastern Pennsylvania, where they had spent their whole lives. Others had recently emigrated directly from Ireland and Scotland.
Fiercely independent, they embraced covenant theology, local self-governance, and resistance to unjust authority, viewing themselves as a covenant community bound to each other and to God, not to distant elites. They claimed they had purchased the land from frontier trader George Croghan, who in turn claimed rights from a 1749 purchase from the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy. To the settlers, their years of labor, improvements, and bloodshed defending the frontier during the revolution gave them a moral claim that outweighed any “paper title” from the distant governments.
Washington saw it differently. To him, the squatters represented a direct threat to the sanctity of private property and legal order in the fragile new republic. He had invested heavily in western lands, eventually acquiring over 50,000 acres, and feared that if squatters could simply seize and keep any land they claimed, it would destroy not only his personal fortunes but the rule of law. He considered their occupation “pitifully mean” given his sacrifices during the war. At the same time, he could not ignore their resilience and industry. The resulting clash was as much cultural and symbolic as it was legal. It came down to a new elite order versus frontier democracy.
The Setting and the Meeting
After the end of the war, Washington traveled west with a small party including his physician and friend Dr. James Craik and his son William, his nephew Bushrod Washington, and some unidentified enslaved servants. On September 14, 1784, Washington visited his grist mill property near present-day Perryopolis, Pennsylvania. He then met local notable Colonel John Canon of Canonsburg on September 18th when he lodged at his residence. Canon, a respected frontier figure, would become a pivotal intermediary, sympathetic to the settlers, yet ultimately appointed by Washington to be his land agent.
Washington intended to visit on Sunday the 19th, but didn’t because he called the squatters “apparently” very religious. Waiting until Monday, September 20, he rode to the Miller's Run tract to confront the settlers directly. He was met at the homestead of David Reed, who, with his brother John Reed, brother-in-law Samuel McBride, and others, had carved farms from the wilderness. The scene was stark: rough cabins, crude fences, but rich soil, and evidence of years of hard work. The settlers had survived nearby raids, built community defenses, and lost neighbors to frontier violence during the revolution. Many of these settlers raised their own militia company under Captain David Reed, yet Washington’s journals never acknowledged their service, deepening their resentment, and emphasizing the isolation of the frontier.
Inside Reed’s log house, the tension came to a head. Washington, towering in height a little over 6' and dressed in fine but practical traveling clothes, held aloft a red silk handkerchief as he declared his ownership and demanded the squatters vacate or pay rent. “Gentlemen, I will have this land just as surely as I now have this handkerchief,” he allegedly told them. The settlers, weathered men in homespun linen and leather, hats in hand but eyes defiant, refused his offer. They saw him as an absentee aristocrat trying to dispossess honest families who had earned their land with sweat and blood. The settlers told Washington they would rather bring the issue to court, and threatened suit. Unable to comprehend how such a band of frontiersmen would wish to inconvenience him in such a manner, he called upon each of them and asked them to confirm their stance on the matter. Each man; James Scott, William Stewart, Thomas Lapsley, Samuel McBride, Brice McGeehan, Thomas Bigger, David Reed, William Hillas, James McBride, Duncan McGeehan, Matthew Johnson, John Reed, and John Glen, stood and gave the same defiant answer.
Aftermath and Broader Significance
Unable to reach an agreement, Washington left determined to enforce his claims in court. He gathered evidence with the help of some locals and prepared the only legal defense he would need to give in his life, with the help of his lawyer Thomas Smith. His legal team even went to such lengths as to preparing a jury from Philadelphia, knowing a frontier jury would be less likely to decide in his favor.
By 1786, Washington won a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, legally securing title to the land. Unable to attend due to illness, Washington would never again set foot in the Pennsylvania county named for him. After a brief search, he appointed John Canon as his land agent, though Canon was deeply conflicted, torn between loyalty to Washington and his neighbors. Ultimately, the settlers were ejected from the disputed tract, many resettling on other nearby homesteads. Canon was tasked with finding paying tenant farmers to live and work on the now empty 13 farms.
Yet the conflict did not end with their departure. In the following decade, resentment toward distant eastern authority simmered among these same frontier families. When the federal government imposed a whiskey excise tax in 1791, many of the same men, or their kin, joined the Whiskey Rebellion, resisting federal tax collectors just as they had resisted Washington’s land claims. One squatter, Thomas Lapsley, was even arrested for his involvement. Now the first president, Washington personally led troops west to suppress the uprising, facing again the same independent spirit he had clashed with as a landlord. By 1796, desperate for money, President Washington gave up on some of his western ambitions, selling the Miller's Run tract for $12,000, perhaps recognizing that the frontier would never bend easily to elite ownership.
The David Reed–George Washington confrontation stands today as a vivid microcosm of early America’s tensions: law versus justice, paper title versus sweat equity, aristocratic order versus democratic defiance. It foreshadowed the populist energy that would shape the young republic and showed that even the nation’s most revered leader could be defied on the western frontier.
The Reed house itself was left to time and fell into disrepair until finally salvaged, disassembled and rebuilt in North Strabane by local attorney Adolf Zeman in 1941, preserving the physical legacy of this pivotal encounter. On each anniversary of that September day, we are reminded that the foundations of American liberty were contested not just in Congress or on battlefields, but in smoke-filled log cabins where ordinary people stood their ground against a leader of legendary status.
