Clearfield's Early Inhabitants

For thousands of years, Native Americans traveled through and lived in the Clearfield area, then called Chinklacamoose, where open fields among dense old-growth forests were likely created by burning away vegetation to grow crops rather than by grazing bison. One tribe, known as the Black Minquas, farmed the fertile soil, hunted game, caught fish, eels, and freshwater clams, and traveled the West Branch of the Susquehanna and its navigable tributaries in dugout canoes. Their villages, likely walled for protection from Seneca Indians from the north, were home to 20-40 people living in oval houses built with sapling frames and covered with slabs of bark. By the time the borough of Clearfield incorporated in the 1840s, these Indian villages had been abandoned for over a century, though their circular, mounded walls remained. Many Indian trails crossed the land now known as Pennsylvania, and the Great Shamokin Path, one of the most heavily traveled, ran west from near the confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna River near present-day Sunbury to Kittanning on the Allegheny River; European settlers also used the trail and improved the section west of Clearfield into what is now U.S. Highway 322.

Clearfield, Pennsylvania · United States