Ole Larson's Folks

Philip Myers (1759-1835)

Pennsylvania

After the end of the Revolution, Philip Myers married Martha Bennet, daughter of a pioneer leader in the fertile Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania. His elder brother Lawrence did likewise. As an officer, Lawrence received a substantial land grant for his service. Philip and Martha received a plot of land from her father. Both of them prospered, building up large farms and businesses, including thriving taverns. Among secondary sources, the following has a good bit on Philip:

Kulp cover

Philip Myers came to Wyoming in 1785, and was married to Martha, daughter of Thomas Bennett, July 15, 1787, he being aged twenty-seven and she twenty-four years. Thomas Bennett gave his son-in-law a town lot on the north line of old Forty Fort. On this he erected a comfortable house, constructed of yellow pine logs, hewed, and pointed with lime mortar, and limed on the inside. Mr. Myers purchased a lot of one hundred and forty acres, extending from Forty Fort to the top of the mountain. He cleared up his farm, and also raised a large family of children. For many years he kept a public house. His house being situated on an eddy in the Susquehanna, it was a great place of resort for the lumbermen, bringing their pine lumber from the upper part of the Susquehanna and its tributaries and taking it to the Baltimore and Philadelphia markets. The consequence was that Mr. Myers’ house was thronged for weeks by the hardy ” raftsmen ” every spring. He died April 2, 1835. His widow subsequently married Rev. Benjamin A. Bidlack, as his second wife.

It is Philip’s wife Martha, along with her father, Thomas Bennet, whose experiences during the years of Pennamite and Revolutionary wars, including the bloody battle and massacre of July 1778, are minutely detailed in the next dozen pages of the Kulp text, and in a complete book by my distant cousin, the late Charles Myers. Philip and Martha had at least ten children, most of whom grew up and raised families. Many stayed in Luzerne County, which later grew wealthy from coal mining. Philip’s daughter Harriet married her cousin Madison Myers of Maryland; they lived in the home pictured below, located on the Philip Myers property.

myers home painting

Other offspring ventured further west, including our third great-grandfather Lawrence Myers, co-founder (with his brother William) of the historic town of Sunbury, Ohio.\

Philip and Martha Myers were buried at Forty Fort Cemetery; however, their graves were destroyed in the catastrophic flood of 1972. Monuments were erected in another part of the cemetery for Philip, Martha, and Philip’s brothers, Lawrence and Henry Myers.

Philip Martha stones

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