In case you haven’t heard—is that even possible?—America turns 250 years old tomorrow.

Celebrations of every sort will likely be staged all over the country, including here in Sullivan County. One particularly unique commemoration of America’s birthday will take place at Fort Delaware Museum of Colonial History in Narrowsburg tomorrow.

Although the big events commemorating the Semiquincentennial in Sullivan County are scheduled for the Minisink Battleground Park in Barryville on the weekend of July 17-19, and the Fort Delaware staff will play a significant role in those, the actual July 4th birthday will not go unmarked. There will be cake and ice cream and games and prizes throughout the day, and plenty of stories, too.

That’s because the staff at Fort Delaware lives history, and they believe in narrative history, teaching others by telling stories, manifesting the writer Rudyard Kipling’s notion that “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

One story that is part of several narratives at the Fort and that is particularly appropriate on the Fourth of July is the impact that independence had on the Cushetunk settlement in the Upper Delaware, where the Revolutionary War was very much a civil war.

That is by no means a new idea nor unique to this area, but it is an idea that has gained new traction of late because of the 2021 book “America’s First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution” by the best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands.

Brands tells many stories in his book, including that of Joseph Brant and his raiders, comprising Iroquois who favored the British simply because they less feared a white man’s government that was located an ocean away than one that was nearby, as well as Tories who were willing to fight—and in many instances, kill—their neighbors. He writes, too, of General John Sullivan’s scorched earth campaign against Brant and his men, which destroyed dozens of Native American villages and destroyed tons of corn and beans still in the fields. Brands manages to bring it all back around to the notion of a civil war.

There is ample documentation of neighbor fighting against neighbor--- and even brother against brother— during the Revolution, and that evident in the Upper Delaware River Valley, where residents of the Cushetunk settlement fought on both sides at the Battle of Minisink, and where the sons of Delaware Company founder Joseph Skinner were on opposite sides throughout the war.

As tensions grew and the Revolution approached, the Cushetunk settlement split apart. Those who were in favor of separation from England, the Patriots like Bezaleel Tyler, were outnumbered and most of them left the Upper Delaware for safer locales, either back in Connecticut or in Orange County. Tyler, for his part, would often lead a party of Orange County “scouts” back into the Cushetunk region to “seek reprisals” against his former neighbors, sometimes killing suspected Tories on the spot.

At one point, the homes of Cushetunk Loyalists Bryant Kane and Robert Land were burned to the ground, and Kane’s family was killed, while Land’s escaped a similar fate only because they were warned by a friendly Native American. Although no one knows specifically who was responsible for the death and destruction, it seems likely it was Tyler and his “scouts.”

Once the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776, it was printed on broadsheets and in newspapers in order to make the public aware of the separation. But it was also read aloud, beginning on July 8, when the Liberty Bell summoned the residents of Philadelphia to Independence Hall, where Colonel John Nixon read it aloud for the first time. The document was also read aloud that day in Trenton, NJ and Easton, PA., and there, as in Philadelphia, wild celebrations followed.

It is not recorded if the Declaration of Independence was ever read aloud in Cushetunk, nor if there was any celebrating if it was, but given the ties the settlement had to Philadelphia because of the timber rafting industry, it might have been. If so, chances are that there was a strong Tory response afterward in lieu of any revelry.

Re-enactments of those events will take place as part of the big Patriots Weekend at Minisink later this month, where the Declaration will be read aloud beginning at 1 p.m. and the Loyalist rebuttal is sure to lead to gunfire among the divided residents. Tomorrow’s celebration of Independence Day at Fort Delaware will be somewhat more subdued, but a celebration it will be!

Fort Delaware is located on the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway at 6615 Route 97 in Narrowsburg. It is open (weather permitting) Thursday thru Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Fort is owned by Sullivan County and operated by the Barryville based non-profit history education group, The Delaware Company.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. Email him at  jconway52@hotmail.com.