The Evans back yard was on the bank of French Creek, a few hundred feet from the spot where a young surveyor named George Washington crossed in December of 1753. Of course he crossed the Delaware too, but the difference is that he didn't fall in there. He fell into French Creek when his canoe overturned in the icy water, and it's a wonder that we didn't lose the Father of Our Country right then and there, at the downy age of twenty-one.

He had been sent to western Pennsylvania by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to find out what the French were up to, in their forts of LeBoeuf and Presque Isle (later Erie) sixty miles above Franklin, and he was on the way there when he got the dunking in French Creek. He dried out his clothes and spent the night in the only cabin in Franklin. It had been built a few years before by an English gunsmith, John Frazier, who traded with the Seneca Indians and kept records of sales that slangily up to date now: "Sold Eight Bucks worth of Goods Today." It's still good deer country.

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)