ough actually across the river from it), where
men met of necessity, and having had a father who had exerted influence
and exercised leadership in Philadelphia County, the Antes brothers were
well prepared to lead the West Branch pioneers.

With their gristmill giving Henry and Frederick a decided economic edge,
they soon became involved in the politics of the Fair Play territory,
Northumberland County, and the Province of Pennsylvania. Henry became
primarily a local and county leader, while his brother concentrated on
county and Provincial and, later, State affairs. Both served as county
judges--Henry, appointed in 1775, and Frederick, elected in 1784--which
suggests judicial responsibility as the key to assuming major
leadership, since Robert Fleming took Frederick's judicial post when he
resigned to take a seat in the General Assembly.[9]

By the summer of 1775, when Philip Vickers Fithian first included the
West Branch in his itinerary--the valley by then supported some 100
families--Henry Antes had already distinguished himself as a public
servant. He, along with five others, had been commissioned by the county
court to lay out a road from Fort Augusta to the mouth of Bald Eagle
Creek;[10] he had served as a spokesman for the Fair Play men in a land
title dispute;[11] he had been made a justice of the peace;[12] and he
had been appointed as a judge of the Court of Quarter Sessions.[13] This
was to be only the beginning, for in 1775, when the Associators were
organized, Henry Antes was made captain of company eight, embodying the
Nippenose and Pine Creek settlers.[14] But even this is not the complete
picture, for when the settlers returned to the region in the eighties,
following the Great Runaway of 1778, Antes became sheriff, the chief law
enforcement officer of Northumberland County.[15] The popular miller had
become the popular leader, a popularity enhanced by his interpretation
of the sheriff's role, an interpretation which occasionally brought him
into conflict with the State's leaders.[16]

The leadership of the Antes brothers is further accentuated by the
activities of Frederick Antes. Between 1776 and 1784 he was a delegate
to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, justice of the peace,
president judge of the county courts, county treasurer, commissioner of
purchase for Northumberland County, a representative in the General
Assembly, and a colonel of militia.[17] With Henry on the West Branch
and Fr