In the early half of the 1700s Monroe Township was still Indian land. The Shawnee held tenuous claim to it with a group of sixty families who had come up from Florida about 1689. They settled just to the north of the township with seasonal encampments along the Yellow Breeches.
A vacuum was created by the departure of the Shawnee to Ohio in 1727. A few braves had raided a neighboring tribe who were under the protection of the powerful Six Nations, and so most of the Shawnees fled. Three years later the Scotch-Irish began their invasion into Cumberland County. A survey was made through Monroe Township in 1732 with a north-south line established just to the east of the future village of Churchtown. East of that line was the Penn family's Manor of Paxton or "Lowther."
One of the first warrants taken out by Adam Steel for 233 acres in 1746. It extended from a point south of the Yellow Breeches to an area just north of present Rte. 174. Adam Steel died intestate, and the warrant passed to his two sons William and Richard. They sold this land to William and Robe1t Hamersley in 1763. Robert sold his half share to William in 1765. The early warrantees of Monroe Township were Scotch-Irish names, but in the 1770s came an influx of Germans from the eastern counties.
Jacob Wise (also spelled Weiss, Wire) came in 1771. A twenty-one year-old tailor from Cumru Township, Berks County, he was the son of George Michael Wise, (who later migrated here) and the brother to John and Felix, both of whom took out warrants for land in Monroe Township. Jacob bought the Steel tract from William Hamersley, this land being contiguous to the warrant taken out by his brother John Weis for 58 acres in 1776.
When John Bratton, editor of the American Volunteer newspaper, paid a visit to the village of Churchtown in April 1875, and then wrote about it in his newspaper, little did he know he would rile up the editor of a competing newspaper and send him off on his own trip to Churchtown.