The history of Indian Steps Museum begins many centuries ago, with the people who carved “steps” into rocks (now submerged) in the nearby Susquehanna River. These “Indian steps” were actually footholds, used to reach the river to fish.

The Susquehanna valley has been home for native people for 10,000 years. About its earliest residents, little is known. However, the people most significant, most closely identified with the history of the river, were the Susquehannocks.

Prior to 1450 AD, the Susquehannocks shared common ancestors with the Iroquois people, from the river’s headwaters in New York. However, by 1608, when Capt. John Smith, the English explorer, began venturing into the upper Chesapeake Bay, where the Susquehanna joins the bay, the Susquehannocks were following their own cultural trail.

Smith was the first European to encounter the Susquehannocks. He described them as “well proportioned men…giants” compared to the English, yet of an “honest and simple disposition.” They came to him with skins, bows, arrows, tobacco pipes and beads for presents, wearing bear and wolf skins, he wrote, their language matching their stature, with voices that sounded as if coming from a cavern.

Between this first encounter with Smith and the 1690s, the Susquehannocks saw highs and lows: Their highs were early in the 17th century, as they established themselves as unique from their Iroquois kin, and developed their own culture. The lows came 75 years later, when diseases like cholera and smallpox, brought on by trade with encroaching Europeans, reduced their population to nearly nothing, and they could no longer fend off raids from the expanding, European-armed Iroquois, then vying for control of the Susquehanna valley. By 1760, only 20 Susquehannocks remained, these people living peaceably as farmers in Conestoga, a Lancaster County village near the river. Some of these people were Iroquois kin, living with the remaining Susquehannocks. All, however, were murdered shortly before Christmas in 1763 by the Paxton Boys, a vigilante gang claiming the Ganestogas (as the survivors were called) aided hostile Indians during the French and Indian War.

The Susquehanna eventually washes all things clean; and from this bloody past arose some goodness. In 1907, for example, during an outing along the Susquehanna east of Airville, York attorney John E. Vandersloot became smitten with a tract of land. His interest inspired him to purchase this property, its cabin and two smaller cottages nearby—the original Indian Steps “cabin.” Between 1908 and 1912, Vandersloot constructed his cabin on the property, what would become today’s museum.

While gardening at Indian Steps, Vandersloot  unearthed arrowheads, stone tools, pottery, and many other native artifacts of the “long winding river.” He also gathered artifacts his neighbors shared with him, amassing a mighty collection. During the construction of Vandersloot’s “cabin,” more than 10,000 of these artifacts were embedded in the masonry walls to form Indian patterns, birds, animals and reptiles and tell the story of Indian inhabitants.

Upon Vandersloot’s demise in November 1936, his property was acquired by Pennsylvania Water & Power Company, owner-operator of the hydro-electric and steam-electric power plants at Holtwood, three miles downstream. In 1939, the company leased the estate to the Conservation Society of York County, founded in 1922. In 1955 Pennsylvania Power and Light Company bought the assets of the former company, and on December 3, 1956, PP & L presented the estate to the Society for the payment of 'one dollar.'

I entreat all those who pass this way to safely guard and preserve these former possessions of and monuments to an ancient Indian people.

John Edward Vandersloot,
Owner and Builder, Indian Steps Cabin, 1912