Loops of Eldred, PA
(please keep in mind that this was written fairly long ago and was written for that present time)
From the first, the McKean county group of Loops, descendants of Vermont Henry, have been connected more or less with the development of that county. This was both long before and also after oil was discovered in paying quantities. Here Henry was first censored in 1820. His descendants think he first came about 1801, but no record is found to confirm this, although beyond the search of known records we have gone direct to the state department at Harrisburg. But they report that no early Loop appears in its records for McKean or Lycoming counties, the latter from which McKean was taken in 1804 or Northumberland, from which Lycoming was taken. Yet we have census records of Loops taxed in the county of Northumberland as early as 1785 and to 1810. No good reason appears to show that this group does not come from Christians Christoganns, and the tradition that Henry’s father bore a queer name seems rather to favor this placing. (H. of VT)
The county history states that the Loops and the Hookers were the first pioneers to settle in McKean county and gives the date as near 1808. The Loop brothers are mentioned. Certainly the Loops and the Hookers were there when the township of Ceres covered a large part of the county, then just beginning to be organized. But its census shows only a few names and no Loops in 1810.
From all that we can gather from the records and the histories, Henry Loop was born close to 1780, settled in Cattauragus county for a time as he come southward in the Genesee county after living briefly in Vermont. The county story tells us of the oil prospects of numerous Loops but the most that the family knows of its ancestry came from Aunt Betsy Drake, Henry’s youngest daughter. Her life overlapped those of two or three generations of living Loops.
Betsy Drake’s own statement to Loop searchers as far back as 1891 was that her father Henry Loop came from Vermont into the Genesee county, having lived in Vermont near the North River, that he was of Dutch descent, that he married Elizabeth Aldrich and died in 1836 in Chataugua county.
She herself lived at Indian Creek, in McKean county. Through her brothers Daniel Loop and the widow of Rodolphus Loop at this time we are advised that Daniel’s grandparents came certainly from Germany, that Daniel’s brother Rodolphus went back from McKean county seemly to Hinsdale, Cattauragus county, New York, whence his widow wrote in 1891. The map shows us that Cattauragus county neighbors McKean at the north and that Stenless county in New York not touches this region but was a township of Chautauqua county at the first. When we find as we do recently that David, a descendant of Capt. Peter son David, was also of Cattauragus county where his son’s own descendants yet remain.
We note once more the great drift of the Loops to this region. For all the counties named tie up with the Loop story. Peter of Chautauqua and Erie county and a William of Eldred in Erie county completing the circle.
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