General Notes

Ancestral File Number:<AFN> 202B-W9
George Boone, III was born at Stoak, near Exeter, in Devonshire, England in 1666.  He was the son of George Boone II who died at the age of 60 years and Sarah Uppey Boone who died at the age of 80 years. George Boone III grew up and married Mary Maugridge, daughter of John and Mary Milton Maugridge of Bradnich, Devonshire, England.  The couple had at least nine children, George Boone IV, Sarah Boone, Squire Boone, Mary Boone, John Boone who never married, Joseph Boone, Benjamin Boone, James Boone and Samuel Boone.

George Boone, III was a weaver.  On 17 August 1717, George Boone, III, his wife Mary Maugridge Boone and their children still at home left Bradnich, Devonshire, England, which is a town eight miles from Exeter and one hundred seventy seven miles from London, and traveled to Bristol, England.  From their they booked ship passage to Philadelphia.  They arrived in Philadelphia on 29 September 1717 (old style).  They had sent their children, George Boone, Sarah Boone and Squire Boone to America a few years earlier.

The family arrived at Philadelphia and travelled to Abington where they stayed a few months.  They left Abington in 1718 and moved to North Wales where they lived two years.  Then in 1720, they settled in Oley, Exeter Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania.

Exeter was at the western edge of European settlement in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Before the 1750s this frontier was one of the most peaceful in all of North America, though, to be sure, European colonialism had introduced terrible turmoil into Indian societies.  As a result of first Swedish, then Dutch, then subsequently English colonization, the native peoples of the Susquehanna and Delaware river region were devastated by imported diseases, reducing their village populations by as much as 90 percent by the eighteenth century. Commercial trade reoriented native economic life and introduced cutthroat competition among colonists and Indians alike for access to valuable fur-bearing regions and merchant centers.

Unlike other colonies, however, Quaker authorities organized no militia or army, negotiated with Indians over the title to land, and promised natives "the full and free privileges and Immunities of all the Said Laws as any other Inhabitants." A de facto alliance between Pennsylvania and the powerful Iroquois Confederacy of western New York further contributed to a half century of peace attracted by this policy, a number of Indian peoples, dislocated from their homelands by the reverberating effects of colonization relocated in Pennsylvania.  In the early century Conoys and Nanticokes from the Chesapeake, Tuscaroras and Tutelos from the Piedmont of North Carolina, and Shawnees from southern Ohio joined Susquehannocks and Delawares in the upriver country of southeastern Pennsylvania. Within twenty or thirty miles of the Boone home were numerous Indian settlements, and beyond the Oley Hills, in the Lehigh and Lebanon valleys, were multi-ethnic Indian communities, including Manangy's Town, later renamed Reading when it was Americanized in midcentury.  Down the Schuylkill was Manatawny, later called Pottstown.

The North American frontier was a distinctive milieu, where peoples of different cultural origins made contact and conducted business with one another.  This was good for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and during the first half of the eighteenth century the Indian trade accounted for nearly a third of the Commonwealth's foreign exchange.  As merchants, Pennsylvania authorities wanted Indians near at hand.  But the colony also operated as a land company, and as real estate agents, authorities sought to gain possession of Indian lands in order to sell tracts to emigrants like the Boones who began pouring into the colony in 1713 at the end of Queen Anne's War.  That this was accomplished by what one Iroquois chief described as "Pen-and-Ink work" rather than warfare marked the Pennsylvania frontier