Charles Stewart is the Host and producer for the podcast, Itsnothistory.com. Stewart was always fascinated by history and worked on numerous documentary films. He began his journey with a podcast series called Conestoga Town.

“I'm from Lancaster County. And growing up there, I was always fascinated by the Conestoga and subsequent rivers. And so, I thought, you know, hey, let's you know, and what happened to the people who those rivers are named after.”

He began his podcast by asking one question.

“What happened to the people the rivers are named after. And, you know, the people being the kind of stoker and Susquehanna Indian tribe. And, you know, so I thought this would be a nice, easy way to start a podcast because I naively thought I pretty much knew about what the answer to this question was, which was that the, you know, the last of the kind of stoker and systematic people were tragically massacred in the mid-1700s by a in Lancaster by a group of vigilantes from what's now the Harrisburg area called the Paxton Boys, or the Paxton Rangers.”

Stewart interviewed historians and native Americans for his podcast series, and realized he didn’t know as much as he thought he did. The Conestoga Town series was supposed to be one episode, but as he completed more interviews, he realized there was so much more to the topic.

“And so when I started to dig deeper into this and to talk to, you know, historians and Native American activists, I discovered that this was a very, very far reaching topic with, you know, very, very deep roots in the area. And it had a broad impact, not just in, you know, central Pennsylvania, in Dauphin County, what's now Dauphin County and Lancaster County, but really had far reaching impact on American history as well. And that this was actually a very, very active topic among both professional historians and Native American to Native American communities as well.”

The Conestoga Town series currently has 22 episodes.

 

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