Three hundred million years ago tectonic plates smashed together and created the Pennsylvania Ridge and Valley Region, and over the eons tributaries fashioned the Juniata River. In what is now Newport, an alluvial plain developed between two major creeks, the Little Buffalo and the Big Buffalo. Native Americans eventually lived along the Juniata and claimed the area as homeland. With the 1754 Treaty of Albany, the region opened to legal colonial settlement, although the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) and Shawnee tribes actively resisted. When frontier violence diminished during the 1760s, land speculator David English Sr. claimed the area between the two creeks and built grain mills on both outlets to the Juniata, whose locations served as outlets to river markets. Paul Reider purchased the English properties in 1789, and in 1804 his sons divided the land into the lots and streets that exist to this day. Informally known as Reidersville, the town extended from Mulberry Street north to Oliver Street and from the Juniata River to Second Street. In 1828 the Reider family subdivided more property, extending the village boundaries. Even before the advent of the 1829 Pennsylvania Canal, the town was called Newport, and the borough, with a population of 423, was incorporated in 1840.