Flowing toward the Ohio through the Kanawha watershed, the New River shaped both settlement and movement across the southern reaches of Virginia’s frontier. By the summer of 1774, the fragile balance between Native communities and Anglo-European settlers, after years of strained coexistence, had given way to a new era of widening patterns of retaliation. The New River Valley was not without precedent for frontier violence. Less than two decades earlier, a plantation known as Draper’s Meadow suffered a deadly attack during the Seven Years’ War. Among the survivors was Mary Draper Ingles, whose escape from captivity became one of the frontier’s most infamous survivor accounts. This event lingered in regional memory.

The Draper and Ingles families were among the Middle New River settlement’s earliest settlers, part of the first sustained wave of Anglo-European migration into the New River Valley. Others soon followed. Balzer Lybrook was among them, establishing his claim at the mouth of Sinking Creek by the mid-1750s. 

On the day Shawnee raiders attacked Draper’s Meadow, a young William Preston, later responsible for organizing the region’s militia defenses during the 1774 attacks, had been sent to the Lybrook cabin roughly five miles away to arrange assistance for the upcoming harvest. His absence spared him from witnessing the violence that claimed the lives of his uncle and patron, Colonel James Patton, as well as at least four others, including an infant. [1] Frontier lore, partially corroborated by Preston’s daughter, Letitia Preston Floyd, preserves that the attackers left the head of one of the victims, Philip Barger, on the Lybrooks doorstep.[2]

Within just over a decade, the claim of John Jacob (Jacob) Snidow neighbored the Lybrooks’. There are some suggestions that the Snidows and Lybrooks had once been neighbors in Philadelphia’s Lancaster County. Unfortunately, while Jacob successfully secured the family’s claim, it would not be for him to make something of it. The sudden death of her husband forced Mary Elizabeth Helm Snidow and their children, many of them extremely young, to occupy the claim alone.

Community in the Borderlands

According to David E. Johnston’s A History of the Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory, a fort linked to the Lybrook, Chapman, and Snidow families was situated a short distance below the mouth of Sinking Creek on the New River. This location placed it in a strategic area characterized by a significant horseshoe-shaped bend in the river. [3]

Balzer Lybrook and John McGriff lived with their families along the New River near the mouth of Sinking Creek. Their cabins stood on fertile bottom land, the kind settlers sought for both cultivation and permanence. Their agricultural yields were sufficient to require a stream-powered grist mill. The Chapmans lived across the river from the Lybrooks, Snidows, and McGriffs. Cabins could be the anchor of a claim that consisted of hundreds of acres while still positioned within a quarter to a mile of their neighbors’ cabins. They were close enough to provide each other labor support, to hear alarms, for their children to play together, and above all, to form a cohesive community. 

Balzer Lybrook, John McGriff, and John Chapman appeared on the Middle New River militia roster that Thomas Burke forwarded to Colonel William Preston in May 1774.[4] Their inclusion reflected more than administrative readiness; it marked their position within a landscape already preparing for violence. For additional defense, these families also joined together to erect a fort at the mouth of Sinking Creek.

August 7, 1774

Those who remained on the frontier rather than join the settler exodus that followed the Yellow Creek Massacre understood the risks their decision carried. In the days preceding the attack, the Chapmans’ cabin, their second attempt at establishing a homestead, burned, as the first had before it. Warned that Native raiding parties were moving through the region, the family fled to the safety of the nearby fort. Across the settlement, other households gathered into blockhouses and stockades, transforming scattered farms into defensive enclaves.

August 7, 1774, was a Sunday. On this day, Elizabeth Snidow, some of her children, and a woman whose surname was Scott departed the fort to visit the Lybrook and McGriff cabins. It was a hot day. John McGriff was in his cabin while Balzer Lybrook was working in the spring-run grist mill. Meanwhile, the children from various families had gathered in the water. The part of the river where they played ran between steep banks that restricted passage except where gullies broke the slope. In the shallows, the younger boys splashed around. The girls all piled into a canoe. Overseeing this group, two of the older boys, both strong swimmers, were also out in the deeper water.

Some accounts suggest that the families had recently spent extended periods confined within their fortification, venturing out only intermittently as conditions allowed. Whether this gathering followed such a confinement or reflected ordinary routine is uncertain. What is certain in this case is that the Snidows and Ms. Scott deliberately came to the Lybrooks/McGriffs. Children from multiple families gathered at the river: children treating the water as children do—play, movement, and noise— until the attack shattered the scene.

The riverbank lay beyond the fort’s immediate protection. Of the younger boys in the shallows, eleven-year-old John Lybrook had the surest path of retreat and maneuvered to escape as soon as the first attacker made their appearance known. As he ran, the cries of “Run, John, Run” from the two older boys echoed behind him. [5] One of the six attackers pursued John, but knowing the area, the child cleared a gully to complete his escape. The other boys had no way of escape. Seven-year-old Theophilus Snidow, eleven-year-old Jacob Snidow, and thirteen-year-old Thomas McGriff were captured.

• • •

Meanwhile, on the river, Catherine Lybrook was in the back of the canoe. As the girls neared the opposite shore, the attackers emerged. In the back of the canoe, Catherine, outside the attacker’s reach, leapt out onto the shore. Elizabeth Lybrook and the two young Snidow girls had no such ability; they were too close to their armed adult attacker to get away as he rushed at them. All three girls were murdered with a war club. Catherine, aware of the cries around her, sprinted for safety, but she, too, was pursued. Had it not been for the Lybrook family dog, she would likely not have made it. Instead, the dog held off her attacker long enough for her to get away despite also being beaten with the club. 

Two-year-old Daniel Lybrook and his infant sibling were both among the murdered. The two older boys, despite being fired upon by the attackers, successfully fled to a nearby fort to alert its occupants of the attack. Back at Sinking Creek, the Lybrook children’s father, Balser Lybrook, was set upon while working in the grist mill. Despite receiving a gunshot wound to his arm, he managed to get away long enough to conceal himself within a cave. Ms. Scott, who had accompanied the Snidows’ mother that day, was the final murder victim.

Elizabeth Lybrook, Daniel Lybrook, their infant sibling, the two Snidow girls, and Mrs. Scott were all killed. Mr. McGriff is said to have shot and killed one of the assailants. The retreating raiding party carried away their accomplice’s body to ensure it wasn’t mutilated as they had done to their victims, but it would be found nearby years later. 

• • •

Five days after the attack on Sinking Creek, militia scouts under James Robinson located Jacob Snidow and Thomas McGriff. Both were together, wandering through unfamiliar terrain. The boys told their rescuers that they had witnessed the murder and scalping of their friends and family before being forced to travel overland in the company of those scalps. On the second night, they managed to slip away but left without Theophilus Snidow after failing to wake the younger child. The two boys later recounted hiding in a hollow tree until they were certain their captors were gone. [6]

Robinson reported to Preston that the boys told him that of the Native party, two Native men and one white man, “did the mischief.” [7] Contemporaries described the attack on Sinking Creek as the work of Shawnee raiders. Later interpretations, however, have sometimes leaned on reports that one of the attackers appeared to be white, combined with much later speculation that Shikellamy, Logan’s father, may himself have been of European origin, to suggest that Logan was present. Although Logan was actively pursuing his retaliatory campaign following the murders of his family at Yellow Creek, the surviving sources do not place him at Sinking Creek.

• • •

After the murder of her daughters and kidnapping of her son, Elizabeth Snidow moved her family downstream to Stony Creek, where, per Jacob Snidow, they immediately erected their own fort. Theophilus Lybrook would eventually return to the society of his birth after many years. He died of illness after or during service in the Revolutionary War. All four boys who survived the attack on the shallows served in the Revolutionary War. John Lybrook and Jacob Snidow served as “spies,” scouts who patrolled the Middle New River in search of Native raiders.[8]

The children who survived these years came of age on a frontier where armed conflict was woven into ordinary life. Through the Revolution and into the 1780s, raids, retaliatory expeditions, and captivity remained persistent features of borderland existence. In 1779, violence again returned to a pronounced bend of the New River, where the Lybrook and Chapman families came under attack, and one Lybrook daughter later died from a severe head wound sustained in the assault.[9]

Compounding the families’ tragic losses, genealogical tradition holds that decades after the 1774 attack, Catherine Lybrook, the mother of no less than three of the murdered children, was abducted from her home and later found scalped and deceased. The evidentiary trail is entirely family lore, yet the endurance of the story reflects how frontier families understood their world: one in which past violence was never entirely past.

Conclusion

News of the attack reached Williamsburg within days. An express rider carried the “melancholy intelligence that several families have lately been cut off at Sinking Creek,” prompting urgent requests for arms and ammunition and raising fears that multiple Native nations had “leagued to go to war against the settlements.”[10] In the eighteenth century, melancholy intelligence meant an alarming but unverified report. A wartime report. In the newsflash, Shawnee, Choctaw, Lenape, and as many as seven other Native nations were rumored to be amassing. Within days, the report continued, Lord Dunmore would march with roughly fifteen hundred men to join his forces with those of Colonels Lewis and Preston. Like the movement toward Wakatomica before it, the campaign pointed toward the Native towns beyond the Ohio.

The report confirmed what many along the New River had already begun to understand: settlement in the backcountry carried risks that forts, militias, or distance could not fully contain. Then, a mid-August Moravian diary entry recorded that a messenger from Gnadenhütten informed White Eyes of a returning Shawnee war party carrying eight scalps. The incident may plausibly reflect violence unfolding along the New River frontier, including attacks such as Sinking Creek, though the source does not identify the victims or location directly.[11] Despite months of direct and indirect diplomacy, the Ohio Country was now moving toward open war. Even Shawnee voices that had urged restraint after the destruction of Wakatomika now faced a reality in which war appeared increasingly unavoidable. As summer waned, forces were already moving along opposite banks of the Ohio, their paths converging toward a narrow point where diplomacy would finally give way to battle.

Notes & Citations:

[1] Letitia Preston Floyd, “History of ‘The Preston Family,”

James Cochran, ed., Smithfield Review 1 (1997): 9.

[2] Floyd, “History of ‘The Preston Family,” 11.

[3] David E. Johnston, A History of the Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory (Radford, VA: Commonwealth Press, 1906) 42.

[4] Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905), 398.

[5] Johnston, A History of the Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory. 43.

[6] Johnston, A History of the Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory .44.

[7] Thwaites and Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War. 140.

[8] National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File R. 6540, John Lybrook (Virginia), Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15. Accessed via National Archives Catalog:https://catalog.archives.gov/id/196223045

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File R. 9,903, Jacob Snidow (Virginia), Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15. Accessed via National Archives Catalog:https://catalog.archives.gov/id/196685281

[9] National Archives and Records Administration. Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application File R4612, Ferdenen Harless, Virginia. NAID 54793785. Accessed February 14, 2026. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/54793785.

[10] Peter Force, ed., American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers, Debates, and Letters and Other Notices of Publick Affairs, 4th ser., vol. 1 (Washington, DC: M. St. Clair Clarke and Peter Force, 1837), 398, accessed via HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015009023386.

[11] “Diary of Schoenbrunn on the Muskingum from May 22–September 12, 1774,” in The Moravian Mission Diaries of David Zeisberger, (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 224, accessed via JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jj.27939655.14

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