At the time when Pennsylvania had only three counties, Philadelphia, Bucks and Chester, from the last-named county a section was separated, to which John Wright, a native of Lancaster, England, one of the first settlers in this region, gave the name of Lancaster County. This separation took place in 1729. Out of the original Lancaster County, York, Cumberland, Berks, Northumberland, Dauphin and Lebanon counties have since been taken, leaving Lancaster County today an area of 928 square miles of territory which for beauty, fertility and picturesqueness is unexcelled. On a plot of ground owned by Andrew Hamilton, and divided by him into town lots, there sprang up two hundred and thirty years ago an embryo village called “Hickory Town” or “Gibson’s Pasture” which was the beginning of what is now known as Lancaster City. When Andrew Hamilton laid out this village in 1730 on the 500-acre tract of land he owned, there were less than two hundred inhabitants in the town. It was through his son, James Hamilton, that the village was turned into a borough in 1742. The first Burgess of Lancaster was Thomas Cookson, an Englishman, whose remains are interred in the church yard of St. James Episcopal Church. A number of important Indian treaties were made at Lancaster in 1744 between the chiefs of the Six Nations and the rulers of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland. In the formulation of these treaties, all the disputes between the whites and the Indians came up for discussion. During the French and Indian War, through the influence of Benjamin Franklin, hundreds of wagons and pack horses were sent from Lancaster to General Braddock. Many officers and soldiers from this section served in the battalions which marched with Forbes and Bouquet to the Ohio. In this list of Lancaster County men who served in the French and Indian Wars are found the names of Shippen, Grubb, Atlee, Hambright, Reynolds and a roll of five Presbyterian clergymen serving as chaplains. The Indian history of Lancaster County ends in 1763, when a band of sixty men called the Paxton boys came to this city, stormed the jail and workhouse, then located at the northwest corner of West King and Prince Streets, and massacred all the Indians confined there for protection.