Background
Thomas Cresap was born about 1702 at Skipton in Yorkshire.
Thomas Cresap was born about 1702 at Skipton in Yorkshire.
He came to Maryland at the age of fifteen.
In 1729 he removed from the neighborhood of Havre de Grace, Maryland to a tract near the present town of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania in the territory then in dispute between Lord Baltimore and the Penns.
The murderous little war which now broke out with Cresap as its leader under a Maryland commission as captain of militia came to an end on November 24, 1736 with the burning of Cresap's house by the Pennsylvanians. The year 1740 found Cresap the westernmost occupant of lands in Maryland at a place known as Shawanese Oldtown, where two years later his son, Michael Cresap, was born. Thomas Cresap's stockaded house and trading-post lay on the old Indian trail customarily taken by the Iroquois on their war expeditions against the Cherokees, and though frequently at odds with the Indians, he soon became the intermediary between the Maryland government and the friendly Iroquois of the north and the enemy Cherokees of the south. The position of his house, printed in many maps of the day, made it a stage in westward journeys from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
When the Ohio Company was chartered in 1749, Cresap's name was found among the organizers, and to him was committed by the Company the practical task of blazing the old Indian trail Gist had followed in his preliminary explorations of the territory. With his Indian friend Nemacolin, Cresap marked and improved the sixty miles of trail that ran from Fort Cumberland to the junction of the Redstone and the Monongahela.
He was an active patriot in a private capacity in the Revolution, prominent as a local magistrate, and interested always in schemes of western land development and of western transportation.
He died about the year 1790. From personal knowledge of Cresap, John J. Jacob speaks of his benevolence and hospitality, his personal bravery, coolness, and fortitude, but the old frontiersman seems to have possessed an uncertain temper, and the disinterestedness of his motives was never above suspicion in the estimation of his contemporaries. Even with this admitted, however, there is no doubt of the value of Cresap's services to his province and to the whole western border at a time when soft hands, white collars, and the ethical niceties were neither fashionable nor useful in that country.
About 1727, he married Hannah Johnson.