check out history - Exeter, PA. | WikiXM

The name Exeter derives from the ancient city of Exeter in Devon, England. Numerous other places have also been given the same name. In the 1770s, English men, women, and children (European-Americans) started to settle in the Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania. On July 1, 1778, during the Revolutionary War, Fort Jenkins (a patriot stockade east of present-day Exeter) surrendered to the British (under Major John Butler).

It was later burned to the ground. A couple days later, on July 3, 1778, a force of British soldiers, with the assistance of about 700 Indians, attacked and killed nearly 300 Wyoming Valley settlers in and around present-day Exeter. Present-day Exeter was founded in the middle of a fertile agricultural area—once the heartland of the Susquehannock people—and much lumbering and coal-mining was carried out in the area in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the 1830s, the region entered a boom period and began shipping coal by the Pennsylvania Canal, and by the 1840s even down the Lehigh Canal to Allentown, Philadelphia, Trenton, Wilmington, New York City, and other East Coast cities and ports. This was done by the connecting engineering works of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.

These works included the upper Lehigh Canal, the Ashley Planes, the early Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, and other railroads in the area. After severe flooding ripped up the upper Lehigh Canal in the 1860s, the L&S was extended to the Delaware along the lower canal, keeping the markets of the big cities connected to the still growing Wyoming Valley collieries and breakers.

A second rail line was pushed up the Lehigh Gorge (the Lehigh Valley Railroad), which enabled a resurgent coal exportation to the East Coast cities; it also connected the region to the Erie Railroad and Buffalo, New York. Exeter was incorporated as a borough in 1884. By 1900, the population consisted of 1,948 citizens.

The town lost usable lands in the 1959 Knox Mine Disaster, when the river broke through and flooded the local mines. This essentially shut down the coal mining industry in and around Exeter. Subsequently, despite the local loss of industry, the fact that the population was 5,652 at the 2010 census indicates that the former farmlands have been attractive to building developers.