John Wright was an emigrant English pioneer, colonial period businessman who established Wright's Ferry (and eventually the town eponymously named for it) triggering nine years of armed conflict during the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary dispute known as Cresap's War. The animal powered ferry was the very first means of crossing the broad unfriendly Susquehanna River in a region known as Conejohela Valley nearly half-way between what became Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and York County, Pennsylvania.