Duryea is a borough in the Greater Pittston area of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States, 9 miles (14 km) south of Scranton.

[3] The area now known as Duryea Borough was historically the heartland of the Susquehannock tribe, also called the Conestoga, which were an Iroquoian people whose territory extended from lower New York State to the Potomac.

The Dutch had established their trading posts along the rivers near where two natural Indian trails allowed them to make contact with the Conestoga— these were the sometimes disputed lands of the Susquehannocks and the rival Delaware nation (Lenape people).

A few years later, the English Sea Power defeated the Dutch ending their continued influence in North America.

In the 1660s, the area supported a military conquest which greatly weakened two of the western Iroquois tribes: the Seneca and Catagua.

In the next few years, renewed war with the Iroquois kept the tribe from recovering and only a pale remnant of its strength relocated to the plains area now between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, where they came to deal with William Penn and the new colonial Province of Pennsylvania.

Forty original settlers arrived from Connecticut on February 8, 1769, and set up temporary cabins near the confluence of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna rivers, the area now at the southern end of Duryea Borough.

He built the first log cabin in 1770 on the west side of Duryea's present-day Main Street (not far from the Old Forge line).

Duryea grew in population and listed 1,005 registered voters in 1901, when it petitioned for reorganization as a Pennsylvania borough.

He was a prominent figure in the starch industry, a coal operator, and an official of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad.

The Reading & Northern Railroad Company invested in Duryea Yard (or Muller yard) in late 2009 and early 2010, laying track to accommodate 100 new rail cars and constructing a facility to store and hold up to 800 cars of sand to be used in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," operations at Marcellus Shale drill sites throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.

There is a sand quarry operating just north of the borough limits along a line once traversed by rails leaving the yard during its heyday.

Also in 2011, the borough received national attention for its role in the landmark Supreme Court case Borough of Duryea v. Guarnieri, in which the court stated that "a government employer's allegedly retaliatory actions against an employee do not give rise to liability under the Petition Clause unless the employee's petition relates to a matter of public concern."

Most of the borough's homes and businesses are located just south of the Lackawanna, while most of the land north of the river is forested mountains (e.g., Campbell's Ledge).