Susan Strickler, moved from Northern Ireland to Lancaster County, between 1725 and 1730. From this family came Dr. John Houston of Pequa, Pennsylvania, distinguished surgeon in the Revolutionary army, and the surgeon’s grandson, Henry Howard Houston, industrial magnate and philanthropist.

The population of Pennsylvania at the time of the Revolution seems to have been divided roughly into three groups as to national origin, one-third each being German, English and Scotch-Irish. The English were centered mainly around Philadelphia, the Germans to the north and west and most of the Scotch-Irish out on the frontier.

As the first great settlement of Scotch—Irish in America the Cumberland Valley, consisting of what is now Cumberland and Franklin Counties, became a kind of headquarters for the Scotch-Irish in the Colonies. It was from here that many of them spread up the Shenandoah Valley, southward into the Carolinas.