Every wondered why that road next to Barnard's Orchard, down from Northbrook Orchards is called Indian Hannah? I have. I figured she was part of the Lenni-Lenape tribe known to have been the original inhabitants of our beautiful area outside Philadelphia - one of the few real estate markets that continues to weather the "media-orite" shower of bad news.
No images exist of Hannah. On July 28, 1797, she stood before Moses Marshall, overseer of the poor for Chester County,and was interviewed to determine which township within the county was responsible for paying her poor relief. She told about her life: family,residences, and employment.
The story shows the dramatic transformations that occurred in the lives of Indians in Pennsylvania during the 1700s. Marshall called her Indian Hannah, but he noted that she also went by the name "Hannah Freeman." When and how Hannah got her last name is unknown, but it flashed a familiarity with white society and proud claim to autonomy and equality within it.
Hannah told Marshall that she had been born in the Brandywine Valley in 1730 or 1731. Early in her life, she moved seasonally with her family and other nearby Lenape between the white farmsteads of southeastern Pennsylvania and summer encampments where they planted corn and fished.
As the white population in this region grew, its Native population dwindled, and Hannah relied primarily on wages and room and board she earned from whites for her sewing and basket-making.
She returned to the place of her birth in Chester County to live among the whites there, because she said, she had "almost forgot to talk Indian" and
Some of her neighbors helped care for her in old age, raising money for her support until Chester County opened its first poor house in 1800. Hannah was one of its first residents, and she died there in 1802, approximately seventy-one years old.
She passed into local lore as the "last Indian" of Chester County. Local whites may have chosen to remember Hannah Freeman as the "last Indian" of their county, but her story could just have easily been told as one of persistence and adaptation to a rapidly changing world.
By the early 1800s, Pennsylvania was one of the most populous and prosperous states in the new nation, a center for its expanding arts and industry and the all too familiar story that inn such a world, there was no room for Native Americans/
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