Throwback Thursday: Sassafras Leaves & Lenape Traditions
From Clay to Leaf- Rediscovering Lenape Connections in the Landscape of Historic Yellow Springs
The Visit
During this previous September, Historic Yellow Springs had the honor of hosting several Lenape elders who visited our campus. In collaboration with the Chester County History Center and various representatives from local history organizations, we met incredible people who are descendants of the original inhabitants of this land.
In preparation for their visit, we dug up some native clay that naturally occurs in our landscape. The Lenape elders had requested a pottery workshop during their visit and wanted to use the clay from Historic Yellow Springs, allowing us to give them that unique and meaningful experience.
Before the workshop, we took our Lenape friends on a brief tour of the village.
While touring, we came across a tree growing on the riverbank of the recently restored branch of the Pickering Creek that runs through our property. Several elders immediately noticed the tree and its distinctive leaves, identifying it as a sassafras tree.
Throughout the tour and the clay-making workshop that followed, we at HYS learned how important the sassafras tree is to Lenape culture.
The elders shared that chewing on its end produces a flavor reminiscent of root beer (which we can personally confirm) and spoke about using a tea made from the tree in traditional medicine.
They also mentioned that the iconography of the sassafras’s three-leaf variance frequently appears on traditional crafts, such as beaded moccasins and accessories.
Patterns and Leaves
The three-lobed leaf motif in a floral pattern, potentially indicative of a stylized “ghost”-type leaf of the sassafras, can be seen on many of the textiles that are being produced and sold by the Teton Trade Cloth company, which is owned and operated by the Lenape tribe (also known as the Delaware Tribe of Indians).
Several Lenape elders shared that they did not know where the origin of this symbol actually came from until they returned to their ancestral lands in the Northeast.
It was profoundly moving to see pottery made from native clay by the elders of the Lenape community, incorporating the sassafras leaf as a symbol, all gathered at a site where their ancestors once lived.
Before colonization and the displacement of the Lenape, the ancestors of these visitors shared an intimate connection with sassafras, valuing it for its medicinal properties as well as its spiritual and decorative significance.
Today, their descendants continue to honor those ancestors by using sassafras as a living symbol.
This seemingly ordinary tree, growing on the banks of the Pickering Creek, serves as a tangible connection to the people who lived, died, and experienced full lives on this land long before written history began to record it.
The Archaeological Record at Historic Yellow Springs
While only a handful of archaeological excavations have occurred at Historic Yellow Springs, most of which uncovered colonial and post-colonial materials, we have also discovered numerous artifacts that date back to the Middle Archaic period and beyond.
These findings suggest that Indigenous peoples used this site for a long period.
The site features important geological characteristics, such as clay deposits, a freshwater source, numerous mineral springs, and a gentle rise above the floodplain.
These elements match the environmental conditions found in many known pre-contact settlements in southeastern Pennsylvania (Becker 2010).
Indigenous peoples in the Northeast United States often chose to settle in areas where they could find clay for pottery, access fresh water, and live near forest edges. These conditions helped them thrive in places like this for thousands of years.
The land known as Yellow Springs today matches all of those characteristics. The sassafras that grow here now occupy the same ecological space that would have supported those early communities.
Archaic and Woodland Settlement Patterns
Recent archaeological research in the Mid-Atlantic region has overturned the old belief that the Lenape ancestors only lived near major rivers.
For example, excavations at Ebbert Spring in Franklin County uncovered a rich prehistoric settlement centered around an inland freshwater spring instead of a river (Powell 2010; The Archaeological Conservancy 2019).
Notably, Ebbert Spring is another inland spring system that saw waves of indigenous use as well as colonial habitation, similar to Historic Yellow Springs itself.
Similarly, findings from the Puncheon Run site in Delaware reveal that during the Woodland period, people focused their activities around smaller tributaries and upland water sources (Delaware Department of Transportation 2005).
Marshall Becker’s analysis offers a new perspective, depicting the Lenape as forager-collectors rather than permanent agricultural villagers. He argues that their settlement patterns were closely linked to seasonal resources, such as fish, nuts, and fresh spring water (Becker 2010). This new model addresses inaccuracies in earlier population estimates that unfairly compared them to the more sedentary Iroquoian societies.
In this context, Yellow Springs fits into a growing pattern of habitation sites focused around freshwater springs throughout southeastern Pennsylvania.
The area’s inland freshwater systems and clay-rich soils likely supported temporary or seasonal camps, reflecting broader patterns observed during the Archaic and Woodland periods.
Additionally, the natural connection between the springs, nearby creeks, and the surrounding vegetation— such as sassafras— shows a consistent relationship, as people returned to these locations for thousands of years. Our archaeological finds support these narratives.
Ecology of Sassafras
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) thrives on moist but well-drained soils in partially shaded environments near freshwater.
It grows along creeks, terraces, and forest margins and readily regenerates in areas that experience intermittent disturbance (Flora of North America 2024; USDA Forest Service 2025). It sends up roots and forms thickets in the same transitional environments that supported foraging, tool-making, and seasonal habitation during the Archaic and Woodland periods.
The ecological conditions that support the growth of sassafras trees are largely same as those that attracted early human settlement.
The proximity of Yellow Springs’ creek, its natural springs, its open woodland, and its clay-rich soil create precisely the conditions where sassafras thrives. Even without abundant archaeological evidence, the persistence of sassafras along the Pickering Creek suggests that this landscape continues to reflect the ecological balance shaped by early inhabitants.
The archeological finds that we do have from that time period only supports that further.
The tree’s survival here provides a living indicator of how closely Indigenous land use and environmental patterns once aligned.
Archaeological and Ethnobotanical Use
It is important to note that across the Northeast, researchers find sassafras infrequently in the physical archaeological record because its use leaves minimal residue. Paul Minnis points out that coppiced plants, such as sassafras, rarely survive in macrofossil or pollen samples due to their processing methods and the decay of volatile oils (Minnis 2003).
However, excavators discovered trace amounts of sassafras charcoal at the Puncheon Run site, confirming its presence in local oak-hickory forests (Delaware Department of Transportation 2005). The scarcity of evidence of sassafras reflects a preservation bias rather than a lack of habitual use.
Kathryn Jakes and Annette Ericksen identified sassafras as a dye ingredient common to wide-reaching swaths of Indigenous American cultures during the Archaic period, where it produced orange coloration in prehistoric textiles (Jakes and Ericksen 2001).
Because dye production required both water and fire, ancient artisans likely carried it out near springs and other freshwater sources. These findings provide evidence of the practical use of the plant and connect sassafras not only to daily life but also to artistic expression and community gatherings around water.
Colonial Export and European Adoption
European settlers quickly recognized the economic and medicinal value of sassafras, and they also recorded the use of the tree by several Indigenous groups. In A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), Thomas Hariot listed “Sassafras” among the “merchantable commodities” of the region and described it as a valuable tree used by the “naturall inhabitants” (Hariot 1590).
By 1609, traders exported large shipments of sassafras root from Virginia to London, where it was advertised as a universal cure for fever and infection (Lyle 2004). Dale Hutchinson documents its inclusion in early colonial medical practice, while August Mahr’s linguistic study preserves the Unami Lenape term wfnachk, meaning “sassafras tree” (Hutchinson 2022; Mahr 1955).
These intersecting records reveal how Indigenous ecological knowledge entered global commerce, translating the spiritual and medicinal relationships of the Lenape into an extractive colonial economy.
Historical Medicinal Uses
According to James A. Duke in his book The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook: Your Comprehensive Reference to the Best Herbs for Healing, contemporary herbal medicine in the United States still records the use of sassafras, attributing these uses to Native American sources.
“Numerous Native American tribes used the leaves of sassafras to treat wounds by rubbing the leaves directly into a wound and used different parts of the plant for many medicinal purposes such as treating acne, urinary disorders, and sicknesses that increased body temperature, such as high fevers” (p. 195).
For the Lenape, the colonial period brought both continuity and disruption.
While European traders commodified sassafras, Lenape communities maintained its traditional use as a medicine of cleansing, renewal, and ceremony.
Curtis Zunigha of The Lenape Center describes Lenape healing as inseparable from their spiritual practice, emphasizing that gathering plants involves prayer, song, and an embodied relationship with the landscape (Columbia University School of Nursing 2021). Within this worldview, sassafras continued to serve as a spring tonic and as a reminder of balance between people and nature.
Today, the root of the plant is used as a blood thinner to reduce blood pressure; powdered leaves to thicken sauces, soups, stews (Columbia University School of Nursing 2021).
Even as displacement separated the Lenape from their northeastern homelands, descendant communities carried these practices to new regions. The plant remained as a powerful iconographic symbol for the Lenape, and continues to serve as the symbol for The Lenape Center to this day.
Ethnobotanical accounts by James Duke and Tiffany Leptuck document the continued use of sassafras tea and topical applications through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Duke 2000; Leptuck 2003).
One Plant, Many Uses
According to Leptuck, Indigenous Americans and the Colonial British used sassafras (Leptuck, citing Grieve 1931). Sassafras was exported from the colony of Jamestown, and was traditionally employed to ward off evil spirits and illness (Leptuck, citing Bronaugh 1994).
Leptuck continues, noting that reported (not clinically proven) uses of sassafras included its application as an antiseptic, analgesic, fungicide, dentifrice, rubefacient, diaphoretic, carminative, and sudorific. The conditions that sassafras was believed to treat include scurvy, skin sores, kidney issues, toothaches, rheumatism, swelling, menstrual disorders, STIs, bronchitis, hypertension, and dysentery (Leptuck 2003).
The later isolation of safrole and resulting restrictions on sassafras oil changed its availability, but the plant’s cultural meaning persisted.
Sassafras evolved from a daily medicinal plant to a lasting emblem of endurance, connection, and return.
Contemporary Cultural Importance
Today, the sassafras leaf remains a central symbol of Lenape identity.
It serves as the emblem of The Lenape Center and appears in modern art, beadwork, and ceremonial design (Columbia University School of Nursing 2021). Joe Baker, co-founder of The Lenape Center, also draws on the use of the sassafras leaf as a symbol in his artwork. (Kinigopoulo 2022).
His painting The Three Sisters portrays the sassafras leaf as a bridge between generations, representing lineage, women’s strength, and connection to the Atlantic woodlands that epitomized Lenapehoking– what is now known as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and western Connecticut- the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people.
When Lenape elders pressed local sassafras leaves into clay at Historic Yellow Springs, they enacted that same continuum.
The tree beside Pickering Creek grows in the same ecological niche that sustained their ancestors. Its leaves mark the meeting point of ecology, archaeology, and living culture.
The land and its trees continue to hold these stories, reminding us that Historic Yellow Springs is not only a place of art and history but one of renewal and return.
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References
Becker, Marshall Joseph. “Late Woodland (ca. 1000–1740 CE) Foraging Patterns of the Lenape and Their Neighbors in the Delaware Valley.” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 80, no. 1 (2010): 17–31.
Columbia University School of Nursing. “Plants as Medicine: Lenape Healing Traditions Continue Today.” Columbia Nursing News, April 20, 2021.
Delaware Department of Transportation. “Archaeology of the Puncheon Run Site (7K-C-51), Volume II: Technical Appendices, Appendix C: Paleoethnobotany.” August 2005.
Duke, James A. The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook: Your Comprehensive Reference to the Best Herbs for Healing. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2000.
Flora of North America Editorial Committee, eds. “Sassafras albidum.” Flora of North America, vol. 3 (2024).
Hariot, Thomas. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. London, 1590. National Humanities Center, modernized excerpts.
Hutchinson, Dale L. “Faith, Religion, and Healing in Colonial America.” In American Health and Wellness in Archaeology and History, 11–22. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022.
Jakes, Kathryn A., and Annette G. Ericksen. “Prehistoric Use of Sumac and Bedstraw as Dye Plants in Eastern North America.” Southeastern Archaeology 20, no. 1 (2001): 56–66.
Kinigopoulo, Anastasia. “The Three Sisters by Joe Baker (Lenape).” Traditions and Transformations. The Horseman Foundation, 2022.
Leptuck, Tiffany. “Medical Attributes of Sassafras albidum — Sassafras.” Wilkes University, July 2003.
Lyle, Katie Letcher. The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants, Mushrooms, Fruits, and Nuts: How to Find, Identify and Cook Them. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004.
Mahr, August C. “Semantic Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Delaware Indian Names for Medicinal Plants.” Ethnohistory 2, no. 1 (1955): 11–28.
Minnis, Paul E., ed. People and Plants in Ancient Eastern North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003.
Powell, Ronald D. “An Analysis of Prehistoric Ceramics Found at the Ebbert Spring Site, 36FR367.” Pennsylvania Archaeologist 80, no. 1 (2010): 32–59.
The Archaeological Conservancy (Eastern Office). “Ebbert Spring.” July 5, 2019.
USDA Forest Service. “Sassafras | Silvics of North America.” Accessed October 2025.