My sincerest thanks are also extended to Mrs. Mary B. Bower, who typed the entire manuscript and offered useful suggestions with regard to style.
Finally, for providing almost ideal conditions for carrying on this work and for sustaining me throughout, my wife, Margaret, is deserving of a gratitude which cannot be fully expressed.
George D. Wolf
Introduction
Between 1769 and 1784, in an area some twenty-five miles long and about two miles wide, located on the north side of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River and extending from Lycoming Creek (at the present Williamsport) to the Great Island (just east of the present Lock Haven), some 100 to 150 families settled. They established a community and a political organization called the Fair Play system. This study is about these people and their system.
The author of a recent case study of democracy in a frontier county commented on the need for this kind of investigation.[1] Cognizant of the fact that a number of valuable histories of American communities have been written, he noted that few of them deal explicitly with the actual relation of frontier experience to democracy:
No one seems to have studied microscopically a given area that experienced transition from wilderness to settled community with the purpose of determining how much democracy, in Turner's sense, existed initially in the first phase of settlement, during the process itself, and in the period that immediately followed.
This research encompasses the first two stages of that development and includes tangential references to the third stage.