BROOKLYN, Pa. - Denise Dennis' ancestors were among the first farmers who settled in northeast Pennsylvania, in 1793. They were free African Americans, extraordinary because they became integrated in a largely white community, 70 years before emancipation.

Their 153-acre farm has remained in the family for seven generations. The Smithsonian Institution has taken an interest. The National Trust for Historic Preservation called it "a rare and highly significant African American cultural landscape."

But as Dennis strolled last week through the snowy burial grounds that include the remains of her great-great-great-great-grandfather, a black Revolutionary War veteran, her mind was on something buried much deeper: the Marcellus Shale.

The Dennis family farm in Susquehanna County is above the mile-deep rock formation whose prodigious natural-gas reserves have inspired a drilling frenzy across much of Pennsylvania.

Most farmers around Dennis have sold their mineral rights to gas operators. Dennis has not.

Dennis, who lives in Philadelphia, is filled with mixed feelings about the gas and its potential for riches, or ruin.

"How can I preserve this beautiful, historical place I love if I allow someone to destroy its landscape? . . . How can I best protect and preserve the farm and its history in the midst of the drilling around us?"

It's a dilemma facing many Marcellus landowners: To drill or not to drill? Reap the bounty, but at what cost?

Landmen have offered the Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust more than $800,000 for the right to drill. But Dennis has heard the stories from embittered landowners in Dimock Township, five miles away, where gas drilling is blamed for polluting streams and groundwater, including one water well that exploded.

For Dennis, the money is tempting. The trust's aim is to develop the farm as an educational and cultural center, where students and heritage tourists could experience the story of an ordinary American black family in the two centuries since patriarch Prince Perkins moved his family there from Connecticut.

"This place expands our understanding of the African American story in American history," Dennis said as a gentle snow fell among the hemlocks and maples. It dusted the broken tombstones in the plot whose 50 graves include the remains of Perkins, who fought in the Revolution as a Connecticut militiaman.

"This place is a reminder that we also owned property in the United States - we had a stake in this country," said Dennis. "Not all blacks were slaves from the South. It says to all of us that things weren't as black and white as we are often told."

But the trust needs funding to develop the farm. Just to keep the place from falling apart requires a substantial infusion.

The family farmhouse, a two-story, timber-framed Cape Cod dwelling built in 1859, has been unoccupied for more than two decades and is decaying rapidly. The plank walls are exposed, the roof is caving in, and the floors are unstable. Vandals have peeled off the boards covering some windows and heaved in boulders and logs, causing the floors to buckle.

"It's gotten worse just in the few weeks since I was last here," said Michael A. Falstad, an architect with John Milner Associates of West Chester, who accompanied Dennis on a visit last week.

Milner Associates is preparing an application to list the farm on the National Register of Historic Places, which will be submitted this month to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. A designation on the national register would increase the trust's access to funding.

Dennis is concerned that gas drilling on or near the farm could disfigure the property or pollute its water supply. Gas operators need to clear and level a four-acre patch from which they can drill multiple horizontal wells that radiate spokelike under the terrain. They also cut through forests and fields to bury pipelines to carry the gas to markets.

"The funding from drilling could prove to be a Trojan horse," Dennis said.

Then there's the disturbing idea of drilling beneath the family's graves, even if the shale formation is a mile below. "I know it's not logical. It's just bones," Dennis said. "But it's where your family's remains are buried."

Dennis may be able to negotiate a more restrictive agreement than the standard industry gas lease, which allows gas operators nearly unrestricted access to a property's surface.