Pennsylvania Fathers

Prophecies & Politics in Chronicon Ephratense

2009-11-05T03:30:00.001-08:00

Prophecies

Contradiction is the mood of Chronicon Ephratense, A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists (1786), not only in its mystical politics but in the language, a "garb...intended to represent a spiritual man" (88). The desire to "muffle the mortal body in a style of garment" invents a vocabulary. Translator Max Hark (1889) says "involved sentences, ungrammatical constructions, local idioms, mystical expressions and ecclesiastical words and phrases" convey a meaning quite foreign to ordinary usage (iv). At pains to preserve the "peculiar flavor," Hark says he had "to sacrifice every trace of literary elegance and grace" (v), but this is as unbelieved as those scholars who say “the aesthetic quality of these writings is often inferior” ("The Present Status of Conrad Beissel/Ephrata Research," 1976).

The Chronicon is a dark, shot with light, unlike anything written today. It combines passion, clarity, confusion and panoramas in a phrase, "two parties might get into each others wool" (123), like the extreme Elizabethan writings of the 1580's, the Martin Marprelate Tracts. It is a product of the genius of its author, Peter Miller (1710-1796) . Miller tends to be invisible in discussions about Ephrata, but he is by far the most important if unseen character. After all his prose makes the man Beissel. Miller's skill of indirection and understatement is marvelous once we know the background of the events that he is sleight handing. Certainly from his point of view, aside from any personal commitment he had to the parties, the narrative of this communal experiment draws out his best talents.

Ready acceptance of amulet and hex, omen and pow-wows among the Pennsylvania Dutch is not the same as the deep inner complex contradiction of Conrad Beissel (1691-1768). Contradiction within contradiction can be thought of as poetry. His address, "Spiritual Whoredom and Adultery" (Chronicon, 92-94, 20 Nov 1736) rejects the outer forms of such omens even while he was starving himself and sowing "seeds of the new manhood (Chronicon, 135)."As such whoremongers we designate all fortune-tellers, star-gazers, and interpreters of omens, who have not come over in their calling to the simplicity of Christ, but who, because the secrets of the starry magia are disclosed in them, have taken this instead of their heavenly inheritance.

Miller says that "prophecies streamed forth from the Superintendent at all the meetings, witnesses whereof are still to be found in the hymns then composed by him" (90). It was then they discovered "how it was still possible to live without animal food and without evacuation of the bowels" (135). So to inhabit the glorified body before its time, find "again an entrance unto the tree of life," to be "satisfied ...with unceasing prayer as though they had been at a sumptuous banquet; all which Adam forfeited when he descended to earthly things" (135), these extant hymns, with the Chronicon and other of Beissel's writing, embody such prophecies.

In the midst of such extreme language of the Chronicon and its radical ideas of self denial and spiritual martyrdom the thought of the restoration of all things is even more radical, "the Spirit sought to restore, even externally, that unity in all things, which was destroyed by the fall of man, and transformed into diversity" (88). Their theory was that while there had been no guardian over Adam, the Superintendent would provide that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (129) might be protected from" too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." This was called "man-power" (130) or the "selfish possession" of the good. So the women practiced "head-shearing" (126), cut a bald spot on the crowns of their heads in yearly tonsures. As the oaths of perpetual Chasity and the hair of the sisters' heads was laid on the table (126), the puling Alexander Mack Jr. was baptized for his great and righteous father (122), Alexander Mack (1670-1735) founder of the New (Schwarzenau) Baptist Church of the Brethren. How else could anyone measure up to the righteous practice of the good? They declared "property...sinful" (121), that it was to "be accursed of ownership" (121), but "anyone who should leave...should forfeit whatever he had contributed" (121). This may have been helped by their all having given up the names in which their property was held in the first place. The list of names is allegorical, as in all orders. So, as with Peter Gehr, those who failed to be slavish followers of a "bestowal and withdrawal of confidence were loosed upon their death beds" (131). These things and more were measures that the "fires of the first love still burned" (121). Indeed when the bell rang for prayers at midnight in the cloister, homes for four miles around roused to join in "home worship."

Their "lean and pale appearance" (132) are almost stigmata. There is an implicit boasting of their conditions of privation. Miller seems to say with approval that "thus the Prior brought the Brotherhood into such thralldom that the only difference between a Brother of Zion and a negro was that the latter was a black and involuntary slave, while the former was a white and voluntary one" (132). Chronicon uses these conditions as evidence of the rightness of their lives. "How otherwise would it have been possible for them, amidst their severe labors, to live in such abstemiousness?" "They again ate of the Verbo Domini and so satisfied themselves" (135) at the "sumptuous banquet" of "unceasing prayer." This was the environment out which the outpouring of a spirit of prophecy overcame the place, the singing prophecies (134) we should say of the Paradiesisches Wunderspiel "that represent the mysteries of the last times so impressively...the wonders of the last times through the revelation of the heavenly Virgin-estate and of the Melchizedekian priesthood in America" (134). This theology appeared Englished by Miller in Dissertation on Man's Fall (1765). This was an intense period in the cloister, "the Prior [Israel Eckerlin] wrote so much as this time...his witness also was confused and unclear" (136) Reading the coded language of Miller and Beissel is not as disheartening as reading it baldly exposed as some or other species of gnosticism, which shears it of its beauty and mystery in the service of tonsure as much as those sisters ever kept their bald spots. Chapter XXI of the Chronicon on these prophecies is poignant.

Politics: Beissel and Printer Christopher Sauer
The long established practice among English printers to edit and tamper with the work they set in type affects the texts of many plays censored by printers' lights. The German printer Christopher Sauer (1695-1758) wrote to Beissel over one verse in his book of hymns, called Beissel an amateur poet three times. But Beissel's reply was worse. It was Sauer's first book, Zionitischer weyrauchs hügel (Zionitic Incense Hill, (1739), the first printed in German type. In Pennypacker's translation Sauer says Peter Miller justified the weakness of the writing "as one foolish hymn after another came before me" by saying "amateur poets sometimes do such work." Sauer judges fitness because he does not want his press to be an "unholy instrument." Of the 691 hymns, the majority written by Beissel contained those "prophecies." Troubled by verse 37 in "Since the pillar of the the cloud," Sauer cites the hymn in its entirety in Ein abgenothigter Bericht (1739) but as Pennypacker notes, we are hard pressed to see the objection, except that generally "the remarkable influence wielded by Beissel...and the intense mysticism of the doctrines" suggest "there was some foundation for the interpretation." (Pennsylvania Magazine, XII, 78). Alderfer though, in his The Ephrata Commune, says "it is presumptuous to try to dissect the magical complex of an inner spirit and psychic engine of a man like Beissel." Perish the thought that we should even think about Beissel's ideas let alone his life. Admittedly we get a favorably biased view of the Father from the writing of Miller, an immensely gifted writer and thinker, highly trained before coming to Philadelphia. The amateur poetry of the Superintendent and the difficulty of his writing, as Miller says of Dissertation on Man's Fall, which he translated in 1765, what Beissel called Wunder Schrifft, "is somewhat unclear in its expressions" (135).

The printer contended that Beissel represented himself as Christ. In defense, Peter Miller had told Sauer that people thought Beissel "a great wizard" giving an example where he was made "invisible" (103). Arguing siddic powers to refute claims of Beissel's divinity must be a joke but Miller's tongue in cheek further troubles the printer when he asks him "whether he then believed only in one Christ" (104). The Chronicon depicts Beissel either as the Holy Spirit or as Christ because Beissel did so. In quotation of Hebrews 4.12, "the sharpness of his spirit pierced such an one through bone and marrow" (131) or of the Temptation (Matthew 4.4), "his emaciated body was nourished by the Word that proceeded out of the mouth of God" (132), whatever the sources of Beissel's elevation, his continual claims and references deepen the justification of Sauer's suspicion of blasphemy. Chronicon says Beissel is one "who bore in his heart the seal of the redemption of the whole world" (123) and that "whoever opposed him struck at the very apple of God's eye" (126).
None of this however makes the printer's point about the hymn. Sauer's polemic is confused with his own astrological and alchemical analysis of Beissel's planets. He calls him Mercury and unless we are willing to engage in such symbolism the point is lost. If anything the offending stanza was as Peter Miller said, is "so flowery and ambiguous a wise that one could not know of whom he spoke" (Chronicon, 104). In retaliation Sauer published Beissel's horoscope alleging a "strange...conjunction of stars" (104) and the number of the mark of the Beast coded in his name in Latin. This irrationality was as much caused by his wife joining Beissel's order to be a "spiritual bride," as Sauer's principles. But continual occasions of Beissel's "bestowal and withdrawal of confidence" practiced upon this followers more argues his manic depressive state than his divinity, "falling and rising alternated continually; he who today was exalted on spiritual heights, tomorrow was laid low" (131). Whether these are taken as methods of purging selfishness or control of his followers, it was the cult of personality refined, which we should call typical fare of all manias.

Whatever holiness was involved in these affairs was severe. A fair comparison might be Zinzendorf's cultivation of tantric powers after his travels in Pennsylvania. How far anyway is spiritual celibacy from tantric sex? Can't answer that one can you? Severity however masks very well as sincerity, but if it is important to know the true inner life, be glad we have Greek statuary (and Michelangelo), as in the Winged Victory. Even if shorn of interpretation, the lines themselves suggest the nature of such recovery.

Self denial is full of recrimination. The Ephrata order was beset with continual plots, attacks, disagreements, difficulties, fissures, conscience smiting, gossiping quarreling, spiritual tyrannies and vexations ((133-135). The attempt of the Order to name Beissel as Father caused such trouble that this title was left off the grave stone. Miller cites this incompleteness, "so everything in this world must be mixed with hypocrisy if it is to be acceptable" (118). John Hildebrand, who "had a deep insight into the writings of Jacob Boehme," was much opposed to the title, but Miller likens these factions to the tribes of Judah and Ephriam (115). Not only are their political parties, but their geography is Old Testament, named Ephrata's Zion. Naming, renaming, father or brother, baptizing, rebaptizing, they took new names as a matter of course when they joined (113). Beissel had to rebaptize some such as Benedict Yuchly had baptized (107) which gave rise to bitterness among "wooers of the Virgin." Yuchly had schemed to leave the Order to repossess his European estate, but without saying. To get passage to Switzerland he pretended to sign over his wealth in case of death but died before he ever left so Beissel became his beneficiary. On this occasion Miller observes that "more than twenty, of both sexes in the Settlement...similarly paid the penalty with their lives" (107) for false behavior. He says of Yuchly that "the judgment overtook him."

Church of Adam
It's necessary to say that these matters concern the difference of severity from mercy, the true spiritual path. Like the way Sitwell speaks of the end, "in the plain of the world's dust where the lion and honeybee held with the dust a colloquy, all things must end, the hump on the dwarf, the mountain on the plain, all loss all gain, yet will the world remain." So instead of submitting the mind and spirit to the vagaries of madmen, entertaining as they are, the real path is peace, not that anybody ever found it in any community, which reaches from the Golden Dawn to Brook Farm, to Ephrata and all the surrounding Mennonite communities. From Beissel and Bishop Christian Funk to S. L. Mathers, autocracy is the universal style, indeed the only leader who did not inflict such pains upon his followers was the much endeared Bishop Andrew Mack, of whom an account must appear.

Compare the foibles of Beissel with the psychology of poet Robert Bly whose take on anger, that it is from shame, and what to do about it, have the same appeal as Beissel's invitation to celibacy. That is, it is the language and thought of severity, as one would say, iron sharpens iron. All systems of such discipline are methods of severity, control, judgment, submission to outer order. Beissel's intent that "mere external forms of divine worship...were never meant to be the end itself" (attributed to Stephen Koch, Chronicon, 95), that "outer forms of service...became their lord and master...the church of Adam" (96), makes this tension between submission to the outer in order to discipline the inner the psychology of Bly's mythopoetic. In his own words Beissel's order becomes thus a displaced church of Adam, which begs the question as to the proper role of the outer resisted by the inner even while benefiting from it. Outer forms, prayer and fasting, celibacy, 40 day fasts cannot deny the inner truth of prayer without ceasing ( but not an emaciated kind) joy never ending, which sounds impossible to the outer which imposed vigilance actually prevents, making joy a duty. What effect this has on Robert Bly we liken to Beissel's spiritual outlaw.

The first principle of organized lawlessness would be to pretend to law in order to control the thoughts and actions of those in and out of community. When the condemned die for their disregard of the holy, differing versions of the holy each arrogate to themselves the sacredness of their Ark. Such talk is commonplace in the counsels of severity.

Things to look at.

Everett Gordon Alderfer. The Ephrata commune: an early American counterculture. Mostly an uncritical summary of the events. John S. Flory. Literary Activity of the German Baptist Brethren in the Eighteenth Century. 2004. Hans Schneider, Gerald T. MacDonald. German radical Pietism. 2007.Jeff Bach. Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. 2006.Jan Stryz. The Alchemy of the Voice at Ephrata Cloister. As biased as Gordon, but in favor of alchemy. Jade Kierbow. The Women of Ephrata: Recovering the Importance of the Feminine at Ephrata. 2007. A student paper exaggerating the role of two women. Ronald J. Gordon. Conrad Beissel and his Communal Experiment. 1996. Evaluates Beissel as a spiritual raider of the lost ark type. Gives details of judgment out of the norm but accurate.
Consider Kripal, Jeffrey John, Reality against Society: William Blake, Antinomianism, and the American Counterculture.Common Knowledge - Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 2007, pp. 98-112
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/common_knowledge/v013/13.1kripal.html

Peter Miller elected to the American Philosophical Society, 8 Apr 1768. Put the Declaration into the seven major languages of Europe.

A Gathering of Eagles

2009-08-04T08:29:00.001-07:00

A gathering of eagles occurred outside middle earth. The history of Pennsylvania demanded it, that pastoral where shepherds wield forces and eclogues of glory. Later historians naturalized these supernaturals into innocence and prodigies, auguries, and eclipses. The shepherd feuds were about a new world of freedom, a definition of human rights aggravated by a lack of comforts. General irascibility still fuels the tanks spotted along the borders of these antiquaries of dark night.

We expect a lone bird high flying. So the Republic's eagle is solitary, but eagles come in flights, or did before they were killed. This analogy with the democracy of freedom is that each citizen is his own eagle, to soar not ruled by another, which holds good also in its decrease, in the lamented loss of freedom. You think you will have more, but they are less, like the eagles. The idea of elitism in the towers of American romanticism where the little New England gods each ruled a course in American philosophy is a misnomer. Here's where the eagles gathered. It was in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were transcendentalists a hundred years before Emerson, but not single or in small groups, en masse, in flights the whole folk transcended.

We don't believe the supernatural outside fiction, but their lives were fantastic, as journal, letter and report attest. There is a point of entry in Gottlieb Mittelberger who says in 1756 (Journey to Pennsylvania) that as a reputed act of divine retribution Conrad Reiff was attacked and in his field by a whole flight of golden eagles!

An introspective age wants to know the inner life recorded from missteps. This is a search for a legal paper trail. The better to be scandalized and forgotten thus will be remembered. It's the remainder from which we reconstruct their lives. Got sued by neighbors, moral descriptions, passions in the heat, afterthoughts, newspaper ads? A life dredged from negatives, complaint and self defense calls for a discerning eye. Answers relegated from the grave, "better not even ask," they say. "He deserved what he got." But there is no truth like the disgruntled tale. One might say what he ate, how he slept, but not what he thought, especially not the doubts and daily troubles. Reconstruct a life from negatives and you can be sure of one thing, the words of his enemies will not deny themselves. Individual cases illustrate the time so well they shed the light on the whole. They ran afoul of piety. It's easy to like them. Unwritten biographies conflict ethnic, religious and political controls of the old orders, Jacob (1698-1782) and Conrad Reiff (1696-1777), their mother, father, sister, her husband, target for equalizers, and in Jacob's case, the avengers. Mittelberger said Philadelphia had no wall around it. Of course you can't control a scamp who disappears in the trees, but we cut them down. You cannot hide any longer. Atavists, obstructionists, elitists think no common man worthy of free speech. They mind the liberty-happy flaw.

Philadelphia named the region but Germantown was another center, then towns further out, Salford, Skippack, New Providence, Oley. Philadelphia was not dominated by great names. Feel of farmhouse, travel to the main event of the week by wagon to church dominate, the hours bundled up. In the rain there was no top. In winter too, heavily clothed, with baskets of food, the children did their homework in the back. Ha. Domestic issues background every event. There find the ferment of the American revolution. Lots of high rollers went over to the British. Indeed they were British, but the battles in the street, the church, the market and the countryside are the cloth of life and the time.

Unconscious Origins

2009-08-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

They gave my name to honor Andrew S. Mack (1836-1917), the only other Andrew (Andreas) of the immediate generations. My grandmother took refuge with him as a child. Cabinet maker, farmer, stone puller and Mennonite Bishop, forty-eight letters of the events of his life from 1870-1906 remain.

This grandmother was the common denominator of the discoveries narrated here, but farm life and English prejudice conflicted her early. She got a sixth grade education and then had to work the farm. Desperate to escape, with an innate sense of idealism, Anna Bechtel Mack (1880-1970) outdid them all in serendipity. Her attic held a collection of books and linens the kind you read of in Van Allen Bradley. I went to possess that estate one Christmas night, 2004, arrived at dawn to find examples from the library of her great grandfather, Abraham Bechtel, her grandmother, Mary Longacre Bechtel and her grandfather, John B. Bechtel in a bookcase, signed and inscribed. They were Mennonite pastors and their families.

What luck to have had Mennonite bishops on both sides of her family! Naturally the books were in German, which doubled their significance, but doubling from there, they were found with the embroidered linens of four generations of her husband's mother's family, Catherine G. Rosenberger (1857-1883), her mother Margaret Gehman (1833-1860), who orphaned her daughter at age six, her grandmother and sisters. Margaret and her husband, John S. Rosenberger (1824-1861) orphaned both their daughters, but the show towels and linens back to 1772 preserved in Anna's trunks brought them to life.

A tabla rasa child senses the form of patterns only later, if at all, which is countered by cases where those patterns were imposed before. I don't know which applies. I thought it was tabla rasa but the evidence is otherwise. My contemplation of the world of these details began in oil paintings I could see stored above a wardrobe in the attic of this grandmother where I used to sleep on visits from the age of four. Floating on oceanic memories of the background of these paintings, which only emerged in the final years of my aunt's life, full sheets of watercolors were discovered with wood blocks and hand drawings from notebooks with preliminary sketches. She was the artist who did the paintings, yes the oils, but watercolors more. In the peculiar nature of these contradictions which surrounded me I had to first find in my own hand these things before they were revealed in hers, that is, half a century later. It was made to seem a principle overall, that you can only know the other in yourself and cannot know until you do. In the practice of serendipity, this seems like destiny.

If it is destiny it can't be escaped. Very late in life that watercolorist aunt got out two books of ledgers of the period 1870-1900 kept by her grandfather Henry S. Mack detailing his life as a farmer in Clayton and his marriage and courtship of Elizabeth Bechtel. Of course in that attic Henry's and Elizabeth's Mennonite songbooks lay side by side signed, with a copy of Henry's inventory of graves of the Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery documenting the births and deaths of more than 600 Mennonites of the Hereford Mennonite Church of Bally, PA: Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934).

When a third Mack brother emerged, Peter S. Mack (1842-1879), pastor of the Zion Lutheran Church of Hummelstown, PA, and parts of his journal, there were written records of all three brothers, lifelong musicians, extant.Other boxes contained the postcards of Harvey Mack from France in WW I, Anna's brother, where he drove an ambulance like Cummings, and then stayed to work as a carpenter in the reconstruction, throwing over his career in the bank to remain a carpenter the rest of his life.

Connected as the result of 250 years of selection from a roster of families including Reiff, Mack, Moyer, Bechtel, Longacre, Stauffer, Rosenberger, Gehman, Clemmer, Lapp, Landis, Schwenk, Bauer, Markley, Dotterer, Clemens, Hendricks, Turner, Hunsicker, Landis, all Pennsylvania German, predominantly Mennonite, every person on this paternal side was conceived of the same ethnic stock and in the same geographical area as that beginning generation from 1717. Their roots entwined with families like themselves and despite their penchant for anonymity, Mennonite self-effacement, names remained in records as land owners, trustees, executors, deacons, ministers within thirty miles of where we were born (but did not know).

All this unearthed describes it well. If in the cultural conflict that deeply impacted these people the English won the war of words, the written, unwritten word of generations, step by step, remained. A predestined earth puzzle, it feels like a mystery.

Pennsylvania German folk and art conflicted with English prejudice in the lives of the families. Doing no more than being born revealed such attitudes, but it took some time to take it seriously. It was understated. They didn't blame the English they emulated them (of course), but there was blame, true acceptance was not believed attainable any more than folk art could be fine. To a writer with a Ph.D. in renaissance English literature, the result was that the flowers, books, paintings, pottery, letters, manuscripts and furniture made them rich, but unrealized until the principals had gone, as secretive now about the past as they were while storing up these treasures.

These unseen artifacts were similar to that verse in the Bible about being compassed with a cloud of witnesses, hidden, or unknown in their significance until it was clear that their place if unoccupied would cease to exist. So I was born for such a time as this. Little wonder then that interest in old histories of Pennsylvania to find the lives of fathers and mothers, of whom, for the tenth generation, there are 1024 examples and in the greater families more. What began with artifacts was all along in the blood.

Mothers Round the Genome

2009-08-04T08:27:00.001-07:00

The linens, show towels, quilts of Pennsylvania mothers, embroideries, dresses, hats, patches are more intimate than the books. They were made by the ones that gave birth, not strangers at an auction, these symbols of the bone and genome. Their hands touched the linen a hundred, two hundred years ago. In that trunk were bracelets of hair about the bone. Kidding, but only just, in quoting Donne's "Relic," for there were combings of hair belonging to Anna that are over a hundred years old, who had long hair all her life. Doll clothes were there that she made, another avocation to clothe dolls for the orphan, to remind her that she had but one doll as a girl, but she made her daughters many. Her first communion dress is in that chest with its bonnet, fit for a slender girl, blue grey. The quilts she knitted for her family are in that chest.

Mennonites had eschewed the hat at certain periods of their industry. Unlucky for Anna, their latest hat phobia came just when she could bear it no longer, as a young woman emancipated from all farm and ignorance, as she saw it, but then again, when she saw at ninety, the longhair grandson who taught thinking and writing, maybe she thought education could go too far. Probably not, but they looked at each other from across the ages with astonishment.

She loved her Uncle Andrew that much, was of his blood, just as her grandson was of hers, the principled faithful kind, but when Bishop Andrew wrote to her that if she were coming home to the yearly communion at Bally she had better wear the bonnet, it confirmed the recession of the Mennonite in her family.

All these things and more were in that trunk, the double-sided car blanket, double woven, double to guard from the chill of a car without a heater, full size, not a lap blanket, full wool, the two stitched together as one. Was that car in the trunk? Of course it was, it was a touring car for a Mennonite.

Life has more contradictions than you can fit in a hat. That car compromised between her husband and his father, who he worked for. The son could use the car if he drove the father around on Sundays too. Then Old Jake would chew his cigars, which is why there is probably never much masculine in trunks, these maybe lacking a certain delicacy. That car was driven with all aboard by Anna's husband Howard up to the farm, the Old Mennonite root farm in Worcester on weekends, the farm that is gone, the car that is gone, the people that are gone. Only the chests remain. But they are so full.

A Mennonite Tailor

2009-08-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

A Mennonite Tailor: Anna Bechtel Mack 1880-1970.

A Mennonite tailor is a contradiction in terms. Another contradiction, she had Mennonite bishops on both sides of her family, but she and her daughters were feminists. These ministers included her great grandfather, minister Abraham Bechtel of Hereford (1749-1815), his son, Bishop John C. (Clemens) Bechtel of Hereford (1779-1843), her grandfather John B. Bechtel (1807-1889) of Hereford and John B. Bechtel's grandson, Henry G. Bechtel (b. 1878) ordained at Vincent in 1914. Anna Bechtel Mack's family were ministers on both sides, her uncle, Bishop Andrew S. Mack (1836-1917) and her cousin Bishop Noah Mack (1861-1948) all Mennonites except for Peter Mack, brother of Andrew, a Lutheran pastor. They left her a library signed by her forebearers. The books themselves aren't personal except that they are signed, and underlie all the important ideas of the culture

These three, the mother and two daughters, were a powerful force in the formation of my vision of beauty. Grandmother Anna, a white Olympus, fought against domination all her life and was nothing if not strong minded. She had reason to resist the ties, for she had had trials, first the farm, then the near loss of her first daughter, then the loss of her husband, borderline poverty and the difficulties of a father-in-law. In the midst she struck an original path in both folk art and religion.

For Anna the issues were freedom to create and freedom to be what she chose. It is possible to understand that certain pressures might bear on a girl so surrounded by religious figures. The greatest obstacle was her stepmother, a classic case of farmer’s wife domination. Her father Henry at this time still shell shocked from the loss of his first love Elisabeth, his three small children added to by two more, stuck on the farm. In these times he may have been just as inwardly desperate as Anna. But both had a long way to go. For Henry, the next best part of his life, after the loss of Elisabeth, would come maybe after his second wife died and he moved in with Anna and her Elizabeth for eight years at the end of his life, a three peas in a pod collection of people born June 19, 20 and 21. For Anna the time came sooner. When she was 21, in 1901, she left the farm and became a tailor in the city.

Best Foot Forward

We don’t just pass over those farm years of the barefoot girl because we are helped by the folk memoir written by her daughter in 1982, “Best Foot Forward,” who presented it to me patchwork, years before she ever showed me anything else such as Henry Mack’s Ledger. She said I should rewrite it. That was impossible, but the facts in it are good, based on Anna’s countless retellings, including that farm domination. “It was Anna who for sixty years painted word pictures for her daughter about her childhood, girlhood, adult life, who expounded on marriage, child rearing, family life, who at ninety, with a terminal illness, said, ‘I just can’t believe I’m so old! I don’t feel old.’” (2)

The farm implicates the Old Mennonite way, although not necessarily so. Both wore their most negative face in the stepmother, die mem, who had none of the light and air of either the Bechtels or Macks. Uncomfortable with English, unenlightened, dogmatic with strong opinions about custom, right and wrong, she enforced them on her step daughter. It comes with the territory that she was not affectionate, spoke no encouraging words to “Annie,” “your hair is pretty,” or “you look nice in that dress.”

Necessarily she communicated her skills to Anna, but punitively when all was said and done. Henry, diplomat and judge, arbiter of disputes, gave a little here, a little there, the most celebrated case being the dress Anna made that die mem felt not plain enough. “Anna’s father was called to arbitrate loud discussion over Annie’s worldly notions as demonstrated by her fancy dress.” Henry’s decision, saving the appearances, was that she could wear it, but not to church. This all seems so 19th century. It was.

Habermann’s Prayer

A lot of old books in that attic keep telling tales. A dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers (1873) is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, “AM,” Anna Mack. If we assume the inscribed date of another book found there, Christian Spiritual Conversation (1897), as the time Anna also was reading these Prayers, that is the year she joined the church, and note one page especially dog eared (103), she would be 17, half way through her sentence of eight years with four to go before leaving home. On this dog eared page, “prayer of a child,” we see a girl wrestling with her stepmother, trying to subdue herself to the good:

“Give me an obedient heart" the prayer says, "that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse….”

Her biographer picks up the thread. "Annie had to fight her way. Her mother died when she was five. Her new mother objected to too much trimming on the dress. Too worldly. But when stepmother had a cyst removed from her back on the kitchen table on the farm by the doctor, it was Anna who assisted, participated in the whole operation.” She was taken out of such school as there was at the end of 6th grade. “The terms were short, often the teacher of the two room school was a farmer who could teach only in winter and early summer when spring planting was finished and harvests not yet begun” (7). Anna milked the cows, did the dishes, but “wanted to discover the world that lay outside her own narrow environment, inhabited by people who always wore beautiful clothes, lived in elegant warm homes and never milked cows, emptied chamber pots or cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps. "At an early age Anna decided that she wanted to “find people of more culture and education.” Needless to say, the schafige frau (industrious woman) would resist this search for refinement.

Already with two younger brothers, by the time she was 11, two more boys were born. “Always there was washing and ironing, water heated on a wood fire, clothes scrubbed on a board in a wooden tub, rinsed, wrung by hand and hung outdoors to freeze into strange shapes in winter or wrap around the clothes line in the March winds. Bedding and underwear were used just as they came from the line, but shirts and dresses and the long muslin petticoats must be smoothed by flatirons heated on the wood stove. Even in summer the fire had to be kept burning briskly to keep the irons hot. And the cooking! Breakfast must be substantial, the cows had been milked, the horses fed and the milk cans filled, ready to take to the creamery before Henry and the hired man came in to eat.” Add to that one daughter, four sons.

Retelling

In its telling over the years it may have gotten rougher in the imagination of daughter Elizabeth to whom die mem was “sour faced, narrow minded, rigid, very plain,” who would naturally be indignant at mistreatment of her mother. Harbored a long time, this has more than a little to do with her rejections of Dutch customs that she herself never suffered.

“This picture of Pennsylvania Dutch farm life in the 1890’s was probably common to many other parts of the rural United States. There was one important difference. In New England, women were realizing the need to be educated; the woman suffrage movement was gaining ground. Among the plain people, there was only one sphere for women, ‘Kinder, Kich un Karich’ – children, kitchen and church…at twelve Anna finished her formal education and the part of her life she enjoyed most.”

That daughter against farm and peasant injustices reported by her mother seems an important link we should not miss, that is, even though they were perhaps not reported just so, the implications were clear. You could not do what you wanted, you had to do what you were told. This produced in Elizabeth the most fiercely independent mind possible in a family of independent minds anyway.

“For the next nine years Annie spent six days of the week in a round of tasks that today would seem like mindless drudgery. First the cows must be milked, and this Annie hated. Getting out of a warm bed and dressing in an unheated room in the dark was bad enough, but going to the barn and sitting on a milking stool was even worse. Worst of all were the rare occasions when she dozed and the cow became restive and kicked over the milk bucket. This would bring a reprimand from her father and a tirade in Pennsylvania Dutch from her step mother.” So Elizabeth’s image of the Pennsylvania Dutch is negative from the repeated details, the tirades, drudgery and from the language itself, just about what Ben Franklin meant. Annie would “carry the ‘zehn uhr stuck,’ [to the workers in the field], just like the modern coffee break, though often it was only a pail of cold water and some rather dry crumb cake.”

The Romantic

All this and more occupied Anna outwardly, but we know the outward and the inward, as does practically everybody. Inwardly Anna an incurable optimist was a romantic. Later in life she regretted not getting an engagement ring, but when her suitor, would be husband, skidded his horse to a stop at her door she was thrilled. At that time, “one summer, Annie carried a pail of milk to a neighboring farm every day. Barefooted, as befitted a teen age girl, she was always ashamed lest a prince in disguise, riding past on a white horse should see her without shoes.” This admission of the phenomenologist would-be physician, non-folk artist intellectual daughter is just as telling: “It never occurred to me to ask my mother where she had heard about princes on white horses, but it was probably a story remembered from one the precious school readers.’ Romanticism is hard for realism to understand.

Leaving the Farm

The rough manuscript gives many other details of farm life, foods, going to the plain church, “no organ or piano, no decoration of any kind,” the plain wooden benches, long visits after church, abbreviated social life, but after nine years, at age 21 you were free. The summer of 1901 Anna inherited some money from Grandmother Mary Longacre Bechtel and moved to Philadelphia to apprentice herself as a tailor. “Anna and several other girls were taught women’s clothing construction…there were no zippers, no miracle fabrics, each seam had to be pressed, each tiny hook and eye carefully placed and sewn with small but firm stitches. The sewing machine was operated by a treadle, there probably was not even a ceiling fan in that day.”

The farm did not last long after Anna left. Her stepmother not in good health, Anna returned at some point to help out at her father’s plea, but by 1906 the farm had been sold and the whole family moved to the city. Anna married 20 December of that year.

Anna and Elizabeth

Anna’s deceased mother's family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks, were pastors, teachers, hymnists, musicians, artisans and folk scholars, that is they were folk intellectuals. Her mother's death much diminished these influences in the short term in Anna’s life, not only in her reading and thinking. The loss of her mother echoed and reechoed, substituted as it was in Anna’s mind and in her daughter Elizabeth’s too with the unattractive Pennsylvania Dutch traits of her step mother.

Anna’s literary remains are sparse. She had few books growing up. Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales, but she was a born romantic. Aside from the catechisms above there is only an Appletons Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889. But birth is irresistible. Anna expressed her hunger for the life of the mind in the books she got her daughters. Arguably they tell the story of what she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she had lost her little girl at age two when Elizabeth began to read, nor done any more to have fostered imaginative delight in her. New books were added to the house, the ones Anna never had. Inscriptions show that at age 5, December, 1915, Cinderella came at Christmas. According to Elizabeth this was the single most important metaphor in Anna’s imagination. Also at Christmas, age 7, came Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but children will another path from the parents, so Anna’s attempts to nurture a romantic and fantastic imagination in Elizabeth were thwarted by the mind of a daughter who would have flourished with William Osler. In later years Elizabeth read autobiographies, The Fixer, any new translation of the Aeneid, Tolstoy, Dickens. She and her mother were satisfied they had done their part and Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele bedded down in that attic to be recovered.

Prayer for Strength

Without one life the quality of many subsequent lives would never be the same. Neither would this memoir exist, which was the import of a prayer for strength Anna made in 1911 when the one year old folk genius Elizabeth nearly died. For someone who didn’t want to be a nurse, Anna got plenty of practice. Everything she had learned she was grateful for that summer when she nursed her first daughter back from death of the “summer complaint.”

“The doctor came to the house every day, but after a week the baby had not improved. Anna saw him looking into his black bag at the rows of medicine bottles as though he could not decide which one to open. She realized that the young doctor had reached the limit of his professional expertise. That night Anna prayed for strength to give up this child whom she loved so dearly. Next morning, the doctor returned with a new medicine. Slowly the baby improved though she was now thin and pale. By summer’s end she was once again the plump happy child she had been. The rest of Anna’s long life was a witness to the faith that came through that experience” (17-18).

This sounds awfully like those stories of people who surrender in the face of insurmountable obstacles, praying for strength to give up a child, and if that is bad why did the doc come back in the morning with a cure and why does the baby recover with or without the cure? We say it is luck or medicine or piety cooked up for the occasion, but when your daughter or son is saved from death you don’t go around mumbling. You rejoice. It doesn’t do to cite all the children who died just to refute one that lived. Life trumps death when life is such a partisan issue as to be the muse of a work about herself, which in turn saw its own sacrifice, its own surrender.

Surrender for surrender, how is that to proceed? So the one year old sacrificed at 30 because she loved her mother and maybe a way of life or a level of being more than herself. A shocking statement, everybody giving up all the time. Life surrenders to life and to death. That’s the folk way of honoring. Who cares about justice? What we care about is love. Anna’s love reached out in surrender and her daughter was healed. Go to a bookstore people.

Dolls

It tends to come back to you. That is, you didn’t do it for yourself, but the very motive may make the act transcendent, any mother knows this. All folk know it. A lot of Anna’s work only gets remembered because it summons implications of other things. “Underwear, blouses, dresses, even coats when the children were small, all came from the busy hands and sewing machine of our mother.” But not just children’s clothes, doll clothes, especially in the dolls made to give her daughter, made to satisfy her own longing too, that evoke a kind of memory of Anna's own mother. “Anna remembered her mother as a rather large woman with beautiful auburn hair. She remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift” ( 6). And that was all the memory she had of her at age 5 when her mother died.

Few of Anna’s creations remain and would have been unnoticed but for a chance remark when I my informant was being provoked into examining her own developed intuition. She had begun to relate how she could perceive feelings at an early age, practically from birth, and offered evidence from what she called “the worst Christmas” of her life, at age 4. Mother Anna only had one doll: “she remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift,” but the family lived in more than a little poverty, and she never had another. “Perhaps this year she would get a doll for Christmas! But no, it was only an orange, a couple of clear toy candies and a much needed pair of shoes.” Anna of course purposed to remedy this with her daughter, so Elizabeth had dozens of dolls. The “realist” then interrupted her narrative to point out that as a four year old her view was that "dolls were dolls, not real children." No maternal transference here! Then Anna went to work and made the kind of folk doll that would stop an auction today.

Mother Of All Dolls

Neighbor Jenny worked in Strawbridge's fur department and had access to scraps of fur and Anna and Jenny made the grand doll lifesize out of other dolls, dressed her up and sat her in a little rocker with a black velveteen coat, a hat and scarf with white fur trimming and a little white muff with two black tails; the mother of all folk dolls, today worth thousands. To show how large the doll was the muff and scarf were wrapped separately. When the child opened the wrapping she mistook the muff as though it were for her and because she couldn’t "get my chubby fist in that little muff!" began to wail. Do you hear the prejudice in “chubby?” Imagine competing with your own Christmas present? But the wail induced the mother's tears and Anna began to cry, the point of the story. The daughter at ninety four remembers that at four she thought that it wasn’t right to make your mother cry and stopped. Anna never knew her daughter had this epiphany, not that she was ignorant of the little prodigy. Had she become the first female surgeon at Women’s Medical Center Elizabeth would no doubt have boasted that she was a peasant surgeon.

Anna made dozens of dolls for her daughter and continued the practice long after. The ladies of her church made dolls to sell at their annual bazaar. In a photograph taken in 1955 in Anna’s home at least 12 dolls are arrayed for “a private pre-bazaar view at the home of Mrs. Anna Reiff.” The trunks in the attic also contained various forms of doll clothes in finished and unfinished states, as well as some old dolls.

Gardens

Anna was honored in 1970 at a Woman’s meeting for her life long efforts at gardening: “she has always had special results in whatever she was growing – whether children, African Violets for her window sills, begonias for porch boxes, or forcing hyacinths in the winter from January until Easter…she would give us leaves from her finest African Violets…one can remember the dolls she dressed and the aprons…another project was the shoulderettes – thirty of them for Presbyterian Hospital and dresses for T. M. Thomas center." She made quilts for each child and for herself. These were kept and doled out in the breakup of the house. Quilts, dolls, clothes, food, preserves, gardens outside, African violets inside in full bloom on every window sill were Anna’s folk works.

Leaving the Old

Letters were an important part of Anna’s life, but she didn't keep them. She held the notion that their purpose ceased when read and they were disposed. She continued to have no significant literary remains. Entirely folk, all her doings were oral, after dinner in her home she would talk absorbingly about the people she had known. What remains of this is the above folk manuscript, but she did keep decorated postcards, a kind of early Christmas card, sent to families in the early 1900’s from other family members. Sometimes they have only an address and no writing at all. Folk think the folk are eternal, always remembered and that has been true a long time, so while she kept an old photo album of the late 1800’s, none of the photographs are identified. Nor could her daughter identify any of them at the end of her day. They must be of her greater family however, Bechtels and Macks.

The Hat

The most important letter Anna ever received was from Uncle Andrew, Bishop Mack in 1914, no doubt in German, to the effect that if she came to take the yearly communion at Bally (Hereford) she must wear a bonnet. It must be remembered how warm an attachment Anna had for her uncle Andrew and aunt “Lisbet.” “Anna felt closer to this uncle and aunt than to the rest of her relatives” (6). In 1897 when “Anna joined the church, local custom did not require the wearing of the prayer covering and bonnet. A plain, untrimmed hat was acceptable, and the prayer covering could be put on just for Sunday worship."

Different people had differing views of this. The Mennonite division of 1847 involved a protest of a dress code. The proponent there, Oberholtzer, believed in freedom, but the Old Mennonites believed in the “doctrine of simplicity and separation.” People had individual takes. Oberholtzer would not wear his coat and thought he had a right not to wear the plain coat (Ruth, 245), although it is not quite as simple as that. His choice became a symbol of liberty against the Mennonite high doctrine of mutual submission.

Noah Mack says, considering the whole spectrum from 1847 to 1914. “Hats were banished, not altogether without the loss of some members….” “During the years since then some of those who had refrained from taking communion because of this restriction have been reconciled to the church again. Just lately a few have come back to the joy of the church in general. Joy…because the church has been spared from breaking away from her doctrine of simplicity and separation” (ms., 7). The doctrine of simplicity and separation was the main thing.

By 1909-1911 definite decisions had been made in the evolution of custom about how to dress. “At every conference session the question of the woman’s covering was belabored. Fancy hats were more and more common among the younger women” (Ruth, 425). So Anna, who had been attending the “new” First Mennonite in the city anyway, which was a lot closer to her home, conferred with her husband and decided not to go to the Hereford communion. Not to go to communion is a big statement among Mennonites. Held once a year, the week prior, Mennonite preparation for the event is more elaborate than most Protestant services, very personal where everyone in the congregation attempts to reconcile themselves with everyone else. It is a little formulaic: “So far as I know I am at peace with everyone and everyone is with me and if not please come and tell me.” Refusing the bonnet would make that vow impossible. While she loved her uncle, who was speaking for the community, she chose the hat!

Admittedly sometime between 1897 and 1914 they had changed the rule on this, but by then it was a much older point of contention over whether bishops and congregations ruled, this from Funk to Oberholtzer, hence the change was binding. The Rules and Discipline of the Franconia Conference, revised as of July, 1933 state clearly that”…Sisters shall not wear hats” and “…if they would not comply, would have to be rejected” (Wenger, 433). Certainly these rules were not universally enforced, but how could you not see whether a woman wore a hat? “Pride in dress caused quite a bit of trouble in the church in those days “ (Noah Mack, 7).

Such behavior affected the life of her grandfather John Bechtel who took over as pastor in his church in 1847 when the ruling pastor went with the Oberholtzers. It could not have been lost on Anna how he had been grafted to fill the gap left by Clemmer’s release in the Oberholtzer affair. Maybe Anna too thought the coat/bonnet laws a “human commandment.” (Ruth, 247) But we hear in all this insistence for personal liberty just the complaint preachers and Mittelberger had made for 200 years about people making their own decisions in Pennsylvania.

Caught between irresistible forces, her Uncle and the past and the force of modernity, “there were a few, as might be expected, who revolted against the tyranny of the farm, as they were pleased to call it, even before the eighteen-nineties, but they were exceptions. Now [1929] fully half of the young folks, boys and girls alike, are gone to town…” (Weygandt, The Red Hills, 7). Anna left in 1901 over issues that for Old Mennonites impacted worldliness. Noah Mack says, “he had no compromise on separation from the world tho even sixty and more years ago hats were worn by some of the young sisters in various parts of the church in the conference district where he labored. This was true in his own congregation” (7). So the bonnet vs. the hat was a sticking point.

It adds some poignancy to Anna’s apprenticeship as a tailor that she left the Old Mennonites precisely over the issues of dress that caused the Mennonite division of 1848, significant because in the end she made the decision for subsequent generations too. Whether farmer, plebeian or Mennonite, she forced her children into either open conflict or conformity in the war between truth and the world, why the giants had been left in the promised land in the first place, to prove the law of God in their hearts. So they slipped and were rescued, slipped up, stood up.

Death of a Husband

Anna wanted to be free, so when her husband died, the constraint leaving her dependent on her father-in-law, Jacob, was difficult. Her husband had a large investment in Heister and Reiff that his father owned. Old Jacob had been a storekeeper in the world of Hereford and Clayton and Reading before 1900. One of the reasons Anna chose his son for a husband was because he was not a farmer, severing ties forever with that world. But Jacob had a reputation, was reputed a sharp dealer. There were implications that he couldn’t keep a location too long. In at least one of these alleged cases he has been proved innocent.

Over time the attempt to understand Jake produced a realization in his daughter in law that she didn’t like him any more than he liked her, but she showed it in more pleasant ways, inviting him and his wives to family events (he had several marriages). Secretly in their beds they all thought his son Howard, Anna's husband, was dominated. The party line was that Jake, as he is listed in Elizabeth's notes, was a “big shot, unfeeling, dominating, jealous, sharp trader, cheap skate, cigar smoker, reprobate in early life.” She could have added “bad influence” since Howard, like Jake, began to smoke a cigar a day at age 40! In some sense Howard’s early death is the attributed to the father, who either worked him to death or caused his heartburn: “in later years, Howard attributed his chronic indigestion to those hasty and interrupted meals which were a way of life when the family lived behind the store” (4). But now of course we would say it was hardening of the arteries.

A lack of freedom loomed all around, most seriously from economic constraint. Father Howard died at 46 without life insurance. Old Mennonites, Elizabeth says, didn’t believe in insurance the way 18th century fire companies didn’t believe in putting out fires since obviously the fire was a signal identifying evildoers. The fire company was there to protect the neighbors. Hose down the properties, separate the just from the unjust by water. Howard took out a life insurance policy after his first two children were born, a $7000 policy on the quiet. Just in time.

Elizabeth's mother chose her father chiefly on the basis that he had left the proletariat for business school, just as, at the same time, her mother left the farm and sought him as a husband. It made a difference in the next generation. Elizabeth’s brother graduated Penn State and went up the executive beanstalk. Maverick sister Florence wrote limericks and the first text for minority slow learners. Elizabeth studied art and longed to be a doctor. They all escaped the farm, even if business was stultifying.

Inferences made and reports of memories given caused the thought that Elizabeth knew the mind of her father. She could talk to him, was proud that he could add columns with both hands while talking on two different phones, that he sent left-handed postcards. She hugely understates the pain of his loss when she was 17. He was a vigorous looking man, somebody other men took seriously, piercing eyes, but he was just sitting down to read his own philosophy under the palm when he was stricken.

Old Jake

If you offer a sympathetic ear and a disembodied presence, as I do by phone, you eventually wish you had the power to forgive sins, for it is much like the confessional. She’s been thinking that she shouldn’t have hated grandfather Jake, even though he had a domineering disposition. He was youngest, she says, and the youngest often feel like they “don’t quite make the grade.” Widower-hood had taken Jake much as Henry Mack, except that it kept on taking Jake. From Jake’s point of view when he got married at 21 everything was rosy. He had a son, but his wife got TB and died. He remarried and his second son died, followed later by the death of his wife. He remarried a third time and again an infant son died. Out of this remark comes to Elizabeth the realization that what Jake said to his grandson Howard about his mother remarrying when her Howard had died was only a replay of the expectations of his own life. He’d lost his wife and he remarried, not too extraordinary that he’d think Anna would too. This understanding comes late.

Of course she admits her mother Anna was independent, had all along wanted time without Howard’s father present, although she invited him to all the family dinners with the others: (maternal) Grandfather Henry, stepmother Sarah Ann, Jake and wife Willomena. The two middle of these people were not Anna’s favorites.

Jake bought his son Howard a car in 1917, a 7 passenger Buick touring car, with stick-on curtains that hung on pegs. The proviso was that Howard had to drive Jake around. On these excursions men rode shotgun and spit out the window. They had legitimate grievance. Boorish behavior at best, Jake sat in the front while Anna and the children, or Wilhelmina, Jake’s second wife, sat in the back. Jake would light a cigar but not smoke it. He chewed it.

Directing me to tell her all my troubles as if I lay on the analyst’s couch, but continuing her own saga, she says that Jake couldn’t grasp his first and only surviving son’s sudden death in 1927. Filled with grief he wanted to “kick the cat,” i.e., lash out in grief at something or someone. That turned out to be Anna. Jake went a little wild in his fantasies, thought he was going to have his grandson Howard run his business. Instead his grandson gave him the business.

I’m wondering how to pay for all this insight at the current rates when she adds, “it was the time and the place of his saying Anna would remarry that angered Howard. When I needed money (at the College of Design) I went to see Jake [and hated it, she doesn’t say]. He would show me some of the things he had, he gave me some old pottery.” But there are contradictions. Suddenly, ironically, she commits herself to that old institution of life, the rest home, for life, and gives it all up at once in toto, except for a chair, a bookcase and a testament of acceptance. I expect Billy Budd to come leaping out. Mennonites either fight to the death or give up the ghost.

I Cried With Her

At the demise of the accused misanthrope diabetic Jacob L. in 1929, Anna reverted to the girl on the farm solving problems, brought the bed down the stairs, wept with the wife at his condition, did the dirty work: “He sat in the rocker with his foot on the table and he had sat there all day unable to move, suffering agony with that leg, sleeping most of the time from dope which the doctor gave to relieve him, moaning with pain as soon as he was awake. Grandma cried and for a bit I cried with her as the enormity of the situation dawned upon me. I tell you I never missed Dad more, so I pulled off my coat and hat and decided to stay till we got him to bed, but alas, he could not get upstairs, so I and the housekeeper took the bed apart and brought it down (took the table apart). We even had to pull him into the front room in his rocker till we put up the bed.”

No examples of Jake’s dominance of his son are given, unless it’s the interruptions at dinner, it is just assumed, like her question of Jake’s second wife, Wilhelmina, “how did she cope with her husband’s domineering nature?” (5) along with the anecdote that she died of pneumonia after scrubbing the cellar floor on her knees in winter. Like one of Faulkner’s characters, “worn out by the crass violence of an underbred outlander” (Knight’s Gambit, 6). If Jake had tried a palace coup he would have found the army, navy and air force against him. Elizabeth interprets inferential evidence of grandfather Jake from his photographs: “serious, with his full lower lip thrust out aggressively, and rimmed with a scraggly beard.” But she also admits, “my personal memories from childhood and early youth are colored by my mother’s stories and analysis of his character in later years,” offended by the masculine with four high spirited brothers of childhood. In adulthood the daughter remembers that her uncle also was crude, her father dominated by his father and the grandfather worse! I am tiptoeing around.

Forgiveness in Faith

At the end of his life, my old dad, grandson J. Howard, had told the story of Jake’s peccadillo about Anna's remarriage so often I knew it well. I always listened for slight changes, nuances of expression. One evening in 1993, the first time I took the trip to Philadelphia with son Aeyrie, then seven, all light and joy, he told it for the last time. The day after his father had died he and the grandfather were in the garage. Jake was just leaving, but turned at the last moment and said, “don’t worry, your mother will be remarried soon.” The nineteen year old ordered him off the property! At the time of this last retelling we were standing in the middle bedroom looking at Jake and Kate’s framed wedding certificate. Dad was 85, his voice was raised and he was sputtering. I put my arm around his shoulders. “Dad, what do you say you forgive this man? Can you do that? Can you forgive him in faith?”

“Yes.”

Works Cited

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”
Christian Spiritual Conversation…with an Appendix. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1892.
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper. And other Stories. NY: A.L. Burt. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”
William Faulkner. Knight’s Gambit. London: Chatto & Windus. 1951
MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK/BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. Philadelphia: IG. Kohler, 1873.
The Life of Noah Mack.
Gerhard Roosen. Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Elizabeth Young. Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna. Winter, 1982

Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud

2009-08-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, is best candidate to be canonized for a secular saint, although there are a lot of candidates since Sartre proposed Saint Genet. The thing these writers have in common is a disdain for the mundane order and an attitude of heroism attributed to them for their daring explorations of the dark. To compare my Mennonite Aunt to these world figures is equally absurd as their lives, but in the end, beneath the layers of depravity you find the same person as the rest of us. Rimbaud is celebrated for having committed artistic suicide, but it doesn't mean in his life what it has come to mean in its debasement by those who cannot stand to lose their fame. At age 19, willfully overthrowing all his poetic about debauch and actually living as a gun runner, slave trader and addict, Rimbaud chose to never write again. My Lady Philosophy gave over her talent for retailing and to care for her aged mother. By the light of existentialism either choice is absurd.

The discovery of her art began in her attic at age 4 where I stayed on visits as a child. The attic was unfinished, except for a floor. It had windows at both ends, the smell of rock wool insulation and wood. It was the place of exile of several of her still life oils, oranges and apples shadowed in a green bowl on a table. I used to stare at the canvases from my cot in the half light of morning, piled high and dark on the tops of old wardrobes. Then they disappeared. As a boy I wanted to know, whose art is it? Why is it in the attic? Then later, where did it go?

When I had grown up and was able to pursue the argument she denied that there were other paintings, then denied there had been any at all. What she should have wanted to say, with a superior sniff, was, “Oils? I’m a water colorist,” meaning a lyricist of art. She was more than mute on the four, six years she studied and painted formally and the four years after that she practiced. The carvings, the lino blocks, the meticulously graphed interiors on full size watercolor sheets with measurements to the eighth inch were hidden in the attic. Nine shades of brown alone are tested in her notebook for the furniture of “Pennsylvania Room."

Sixty years later, when she asked me to clean and inventory the contents of her attic, I found thirteen watercolors still existed, full sheets of interiors sometimes architectured like a Rilke sonnet, colors fresh, for they’d been rolled up, hidden in the attic all that time. A few had water stains from the leaking roof, the best were immaculate when cleaned. I have digitally enlarged the details, shadows of chair rungs, Pennsylvania Dutch designs on wallpaper above and below tables. They subsist on faith and desire against the terrible nature of self sacrifice, hold integrity even when the faith is full of obstacles. The full sheets of heavy paper were stretched onto boards, the perimeter glued down and the whole wet. When finally executed the paper was cut free.

Images of Furniture
She had a particular affection for furniture in her work, as though the images were a garden, a metaphor of her life, an interior landscape. I came to understand that her course of Interior Decoration was the essence of the inward point of view of all the Pennsylvania German generations. For instance, the large lengthwise cushion of “Sheraton Settee” which seats at least six across reflects the sunlight. The long upholstered panel alternates vertical pale yellow stripes with light green. The Settee is a painting. A frame of wood outlines the whole, four spindled legs equidistant from each other. The upholstery where the backs of people rested is shown to be worn by shading pale yellows up and down the stripes, washing pale to a more constant yellow at the top and from the middle down, where the cushion is implied to be curved. This metaphor of wear, color, time, age is supported and contained by the brown edges, a gold green picture of alchemy. [Proper images of these and more are found in her site, Folk Artist].

“Pennsylvania Room - Philadelphia Museum,” presents a trestle table with a pitcher, vase and an old book held by metal clasps, much like the Wahren Christenthum in her attic inscribed with her great grandfather’s name. Above the table is a painting, an image of a woman in a bonnet, to the right a spindle-backed wooden chair below a country cupboard, to the left another wooden chair. Pennsylvania Dutch folk designs are embroidered in paint on the wall paper, baskets of flowers, borders, part of a barn, a rooster. The designs continue under the table and chairs, interwoven with the shadows. Her sketchbook shows how each elegant detail was prepared, measured, identified: front stretcher, its dimensions, side stretcher, its dimensions, the chair, positive and negative space identified, measured. Different versions of wallpaper exist, but the one chosen, designed on hand drawn graph paper, has each detail magnified before finished execution. Much of these are displayed here and more will be.

"What drives that desire for the beautiful out of twilight into the full sun? Why was her work hidden, not framed? Why was some of it thrown away? Where is the mature body of work promised?In the last four years of her life she lived alone, but was sometimes so bored she would take up even my speculations to fill the time. I asked why she didn’t paint fraktur. “Too tired,” she said, “from the long days.” I argue, but the image of the sun in the sky implicit in the settee’s cushion, the watercolor of green and gold bursts in my mind. “Do you deny that what I saw in my mind all the years from childhood was these paintings?” It is an argument I am bound to lose.I’m afraid of her denial except my memory is unshakeable, as detailed as the paintings exhibited on the walls at Van Gogh’s viewing. Is she ignorant of her influence, this long aged figure of Beatrice? The answer is she pretends to know of no influence and would reject it if she did. It seems to argue that it made no difference to her whether anyone else felt the same longing she did. The canvases stretched in negative space I make positive, the road not taken I take.Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud

This can only lead to the conclusion that like the early 20^th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, celebrated for renouncing his greatness at 19 to never write another word, that the work she never did, accepting that it was never done, makes her a Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud. He accomplished his by dissolution. She consummated her artistic suicide by retailing. “Tired from long days” might be believed, but I don’t trust the Mennonite distaste for glory that she dares to call “realism,” that fearsome display of tiger stripes of beauty and austerity. “Not good enough for fine art,” she says when I ask the right question, denigrates, self-effacement, “not a genius.” But there are causes and counter causes. "

Herbert didn’t think his work measured up, commanded his brother to burn his manuscripts. Donne circulated only hand written copies. Emily Dickinson hid it all in her room. I make a collection of these. Who survives immolation? Who’s doing the work and burning it or burning it by not doing it? Realism or genius! We go to any lengths to restore the beauty of our memories, dig the manuscripts from Rossetti’s grave, thankfully save the one surviving colored copy of Jerusalem. There is no work of her maturity, which suggests a dichotomy of art and life beyond comprehension.

Blame the Mennonites?

Blame fortune, the death of her father.

Blame personality, ambition, that she was able to give it up at all.

Blame duty, sacrifice, she gave it up for her mother.

Somebody’s got to pay. She sacrificed to work, provide a home, protect her mother, did not become an artist in the Dutch manner or in any other. It’s as if she lived on the farm, this last Dutchman who spurned the passion of her life, her art. She invented as many ways to doubt her work as she did her beauty: upbringing, religion, gender, poverty. Beauty might not have been well known by its own name among the Pennsylvania Germans if they thought it vain, consumed as they were by beauty’s sister, truth. Pietists, Mennonites, sought truth and God for their own sake, not use. But where was beauty hid? The pitfall of Mennonites acknowledging beauty was that it might be associated with pleasure. In the city these Mennonites were outwardly ruled by utility, formality and duty, but in the country it was worse. So they didn’t need the English, they could also be their own worst enemies.

Auto de Fe

But actually, in spite of the austerity, self denial, duty, perfectionism, there was some work of her maturity. When the rolled sheaf of watercolors was recovered from the attic she mentioned there had been another collection, painted much later and to her own taste in plain style, “as watercolors should be done,” without extras. Had I seen these in a large red portfolio in the attic?

No, no sign of them.

“I guess I threw them away.”

This is a prank, laughable not only because she is not guessing and knows well what happened, but because she did not just throw them away.

She ripped them up in her husband’s face. The pique of this in the context of her disciplined life and the finely honed wit recounted in her biography make it all the more a piece of the whole fabric.

The story goes that in the midst of some sort of discussion or other, and uncharacteristically wanting to reveal herself further, she had shown them to her husband, another fanatic Dutchman of the mere seventh generation, who had such fierce ideas about art he then and there declared they weren’t art! So equally then and there, in dudgeon she destroyed them in front of his eyes, tore them up in a passionate fury. It’s nice to compare this with the time the rejected Blake, criticized, furiously gouged every word with a chisel from the copper plates of Jerusalem that suggested his “love,” or “friendship” for the reader, “all traces of personal intimacy and spiritual communion” (Blake,10-11).

Artistic suicide is refusal to paint. Destroying the red portfolio is an auto de fe. It isn’t a sole Dutch rage, though there is a tradition in the collection and burning of German devotional books by Peter Miller and Conrad Weiser in 1732. They immolated the Heidelberg Catechism just to prove they weren’t Lutherans, but true Sabbatarians, not the last immolation of that century according to the critic Julius Friedrich Sachse (I, 245). But it wasn’t even the first such immolation of her own family.

Before she ever graduated art school her brother had profoundly destroyed their errant grandfather’s estate papers. The post hoc justification for this act varied. Later in life he said he just didn’t pick them up, but the earliest gleeful report was of their burning and burning. Of course the hearer is not supposed to remember such things literally, but to allow them to just twist unchallenged in the mind. With art or without, she admits to a temper. Is it Dutch? Her mother destroyed every letter she got after she had read it (but not the post cards!) from the belief that once read the letter was worthless. Why then did she save all the post cards? There are flurries of cold reconciliations swirling about. That is why antiquarian Jacob Mensch’s saving of the 49 letters of Andrew Mack is such a rarity and exception. She pulls the aplomb of decades of destruction around her, “you’ll get over it,” she says, as if she did.

I don’t. I’m on my hands and knees piecing the shreds, the clues of attic, basement, china cabinet, chests.

If this rejection of the body, whether book, papers, or whatever oeuvre, is a Pennsylvania Dutch paradigm, it’s not art, letters, estate papers or devotional books that offend. This habit of expression was life long. When she had retired to her new home in the hospital towers at $300 a day, a desk drawer with diaries of the 70’s and 80’s was found, meticulous dailies they were, which however yielded no personal comments or observations of any kind. Asked what she wanted to do with them, she replied, “I’ll get my lawyer to burn them.”

She declares she has old records of her trip to Greece. She asks whether she should send them to me or “tear them up?” This is a manner of speaking. My wife’s grandmother burned all the letters she got from her sisters in Sweden after moving to Texas in 1920. Her recipe book was handed down though, except that her daughter glued recipes cut from magazines over the original ones handwritten in Swedish.

Why Did You Go To Art School

Peter Miller retired to live out his years quietly on a farm in Skippack. Do we get ever over the destiny generations find so hard to attain?

Forces oppose the inevitable.

Considering all this she is asked, “why did you go to art school?

“I didn’t want to be a teacher.”

Why did you go to art school?

“Well I wanted to be a doctor but that didn’t go over at home.”

That evasion rings true.

Not good enough for fine art or medical school, the vessel despises entitlement. When she finished art school she painted murals for cash, floral scenes on walls for rich ladies such as Mrs. Sheldeker on Oak Lane who insisted on having her driven home by chauffeur. For this patronage she terminated the position. I fear I have inherited some of these tendencies.

What she lacked was hubris. Forbidden by the Mennonite. Talent or genius? Entitlement. She was a reverse genius. She believed the opposite so strongly it didn’t matter what others did. What if all the high flown questions of the Pennsylvania Dutch aardvarks about celestial chastity, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders and rebaptizers comes down to just fulfilling a need to belong, being accepted when everything they did caused them to be excluded? The soft hearted Benjamin Rush accepted them. They have nice barns.

A Fragrant Husband

She disdained farmers and ignorance, but immensely favored the maternal families, even though farmers and Mennonites, but she cast a cold eye on the paternal. The irony is that in the 18^th century these people weren’t Mennonites or poor farmers, but had farms, were educated professionals, founded, amid controversy, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. As political and social leaders they were everything her mother Anna, eight generations later, wanted to be. Before Anna ever sought to escape the accent, farm and country ignorance, these paternal forebearers spoke multiple languages, including English and held public office. Anna must have sensed a deep fragrance of the life she wanted in her husband’s background.

You will read of them below, but briefly this first new world progenitor settled his family in Salford at least by 1717 (Strassburger, 414). Although no Mennonite, he signed his name “with a firm hand” (Heckler) as witness to the Mennonite Trust agreement of 1725 that allocated land for a burial ground and school. Maybe he even put this agreement into English. The terms of his will show him to wise and implicitly educated.

His son “was entrusted by the Colonial government as agent …to collect partial payments on their lands in 1723, he must have been here some time before, well acquainted, and in the confidence of the leading men”. (Dotterer quoted in Heckler, 31) This son was Philadelphia County assessor in 1741, deputy for the probate of wills for Philadelphia County, 1743 to 1748. Heckler in his Historical Sketches (1886) said he was “the most prominent man in the early history of Salford” and among the four most “reasonably well educated” men of the area who were classically trained, “a man of great force of character.

The next generation’s oldest son, Jacob, was the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), voted for the Convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, was one of several founders of the Wentz Reformed Church which continued the Skippack Reformed Church, the first Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, begun by his father and grandfather. The second son, George (1740-1808), from whom she descended, became a Mennonite, married Elizabeth Hendricks, daughter of Leonard Hendricks, son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks, part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled Germantown in 1683 whose progenitor signed the anti-slavery tract in 1688.

George and Jacob’s cousins, Daniel and Phillip, were officers in the Berks Co. Militia during the Revolution. Their wives were likewise educated, wrote and spoke English, were mentioned honorably in contemporary affairs. Many of these activities fall under Mennonite suspicion, but how many generations does it take to get assurance for the immigrant mind

Compelled to answer the questions raised here just because the puzzle is in front of my eyes I do it because from the earliest age she was the image of beauty to my mind.

When she first declared herself terminal with cancer an early draft of the whole of this was rushed out for her to read, a thousand disorganized details.

“People are going to ask me whether you read it, but it’s very chaotic, the Mennonites, for instance crop up everywhere. What do I tell them?

“ That’s the way it is with me," she says, "the Mennonites are always following me around mentally. I’m still a Mennonite in some way or other.”

Works Cited

William Blake. Jerusalem. Edited by Morton D. Paley. Princeton: William Blake Trust. 1998.

James Y. Heckler. The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1899. NY: AMS Press, 1971.

Strassburger, Ralph Beaver. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Privately Printed: Gwynedd Valley, Pa. 1922, 414.J

ohn Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s, 1966.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

My Lady Philosophy gave over her talent for retailing and to care for her aged mother.

A Mennonite Broadside: The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians

2009-08-04T08:23:00.001-07:00

It is easy to like and dislike them. In a world owned by bullies you want to knock down, from the militancy everywhere in the wars of natural selection to the cry of justice for the weak, the five kings Joshua found hiding in a cave-don't stop! Pursue your enemies-when he summoned the commanders of Israel-put your feet on the necks of these kings - to the cry of the blood of martyrs before the throne, vengeance is mine, I will repay, to Elizabeth's husband, pacifist Marvin, who broke the head of a burglar in their home one night at the age of 85, but repented it! something happened those nights to Mennonites. It was Christmas Eve. They couldn't get to the theater, that is, our equivalent, were up by the fire roasting, quilting, repairing tools.

One understands Christmas, Messiah, Four Quartets, stables and cattle, but how understand the world of affliction that blazes so bright one forgets to live, where flesh, ashen by a knock at the door, beds the night in straw? We live in peace and safety the way Mennonites take a thousand pages of their martyrdoms, but without the blood. They call it their Bloody Book, Theatre of Tortures. That was the threat that was. Do you want to make a Mennonite sing? Respighi, his Lauda per la Nativitὰ del Signore, reechoes: Segnor tu sei desceso de cielo en terra (Lord, you have descended from Heaven to earth), which wraps the whole: vestito en carne humana, that is, wrapped in human flesh.

The first Mennonite theater was clad in human dress. There a Mennonite exhorted to improve the self separated from the world of earth. There was a rehearsal in rituals and rules that Mennonite theater concocted among themselves to set them apart in plain dress and wooden knives, a foolishness of action and rhetoric, for God had made foolish the wisdom of the wise.

As a metaphor this theater shamed Aristotle's stuff. Do you want to arouse and purge pity and fear? The Mennonite was in desperate conflict with the world that put him to death, while the populace in Athens was getting theatrically pacified and cleansed of contradiction, making the state safe. In Bern the theatrical mirror saw them crucified, burned and drowned, but murder is countermanded when peasants overcome, so European states undertook more subtlety in their subversion and discovered pride, which insistence does not arouse nobility. Seduction works, we all know that and if we don't we learn from Mennonites old and new. This was the pride the Franconia rules were intended to prevent in the wearing of hats and of shed blood with a trenchant witness against the mirror and all its good.

Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming from tender stem hath sprung.

American Mennonites escaped the fire to reproduce a book of tortures read in their centuries of peace, a people and a holy book, Bloody Theatre or Martyr’s Mirror, translated from Dutch to German, (Märtyrer Spiegel, Ephrata, 1748) to English. Two centuries of horror behind, ten American generations ahead, Mennonites however are still asking today, “could you forfeit your life.” The courage to sacrifice themselves they could not know, failing opportunity, they could not know what they would do. Hostage to their martyrs, denied the peace of freedom the martyrs had died to collect, “could you forfeit your life as he did” was asked and is asked again.

Bloody Theater rehearsed the persecutions of centuries before by contrasting the “gay performances” of “Grecian theaters” with martyrs’ deaths. Not cheery, not “merry," "comedies,” these entertainments, but “valleys of death where nothing will be seen…,” yet “the soul will nevertheless rejoice” (6). A tantamount of horror follows the theater motif, “O that Satan would show himself, as he really is, and that the world, too, might come forth without disguise or mask” (10). We shall all run from our seats.

It is masquerade worthy of renaissance shrines and anti-shrines, the House of Fame, The Bower of Bliss. Our leading lady, this world's mistress at court: “Satan appears to be a prince or king and the world a noble princess or queen." A Queen whose hands can ne'er be clean, and the court's lesser figures, “servants and servant-maids, who follow them as pages and maids of honor, appear as cavaliers and ladies, reveling in joy and delight” (10). This is stark opposite the prophecy of latter day where the least shall be as David and David shall be as the angel of the Lord. Only the bloody then are undeceived. Do you want to run up and ask a Mennonite, how does Christmas get tied up with the crucifix anyway?

Little child of Jesse's lineage coming, as seers of old have sung?

They refused to conform. All they had to do was conform. No bloody hands, the "nonresistant doctrine" forbade all taking of life or resisting evil at all. Jesus' commands were literal, "give to him that asks of thee," "turn the cheek," and Paul, “resist not evil but overcome with good.” Their friends had to explain in the American Revolution that they just didn’t know any better, "their present blindness to their own essential interest proceeds from an unhappy bias in their education, and not from a disaffection to the present Government" (J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 61). Mennonite-disdained violence against enemies, neighbors and the world in all its sorrows, in Philadelphia was the background and context of their America and the world.

Just Say No to Goberment

This thing about this "unhappy bias" shows. To the worldly constants of self defense, revenge and resistance, Mennonites would swear no oath, not even go against the oaths sworn by their fathers to the British king. They could not renounce the British government in 1777, not because they loved the British, but because Jesus had said, "swear not at all," and because they feared being “forsworn.” Such literalists held their grandfathers' promise to the previous King George as binding on themselves. How can you not love such intransigency? ["We do swear or solemnly declare, that we deny all obedience to the Pope of Rome; and further swear or solemnly declare that no Prince or Person whatsoever hath any Right or Title to the Crown of Great Britain but his Majesty George the Second and his lawful Issue."] It is non conformity all ways, an old world view, or anti-intellectualism run amok. Hostage to time and fearing torture their Bloody Book would produce, friends and neighbors had to keep repeating, "their present blindness... unhappy bias [taking Jesus literally] is not a disaffection to the present Government"(Wenger, 61). American government mostly blinked an eye.

It came, a blossom bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

If government blinked their bishops did not, for though they were against swearing and war, and favored loyalty to the British Crown (their apriori oath of loyalty before), Mennonite Bishop Christian Funk, who supported the Pennsylvania government because its constitution gave freedom of worship and promised to exempt from arms and the oath, supported a war tax to the American government. So in 1778 Funk was deposed. We can ask all we like about who is our enemy and never know who is in the mirror.

Two important issues raised by Ruth's Funk's Mennonite's oaths are (John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984, 153-55):

1) why did the bishops excommunicate Funk on their own authority but asked the people to reinstate him?

2) What do we make of the principle raised by Funk's dilemma that if a man is right in his vision but impolitic in its expression he is wrong?

3) What of the opposite postulate, that the man is wrong because he is wrong?

Chamberlain! Bingo! Of no. 1, is not this what they charge Socrates, but at least they don't call him by his first name! that he alienated the elders by his lack of consideration (of their feelings) and Jesus who failed to defend the status quo? Surely! Mennonites continually raise and illustrate societal debating, should the individual in the right give over truth to merge with the group (that is wrong)? Too insistent upon the truth, the world called it.

Isaiah 'twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind.

The Franconia Rules of 1933

The storms of this Mennonite Theatre and glee were alive as recent as 1933. In the Franconia Conference Rules Mennonites were still making fun of the sensitive, powerful majority world, poking sticks of incense at evangelicals and Sunday golfers. We do not dig deep to find these goads but they will out, for roses have thorns and spiritual Mennonites mud.

Consider how "this conference feels the necessity of urging the leaders of the church" to "not speculate on unfulfilled prophecy as the doctrine of the Millennium" (Wenger 431). In the hundred years since Darby there was scarcely talk of aught else in the Church. The millennium! The tribulation! An old Mennonite turned Baptist once asked, "do you still at least believe in the tribulation?" The answer must be, not while suffering! The difference about the tribulation is that Mennonites were, had been and sought to be in it while the rest hid out. Non-conformists.

Take another Franconia discipline, "we as a conference, protest against the evils of the radio… condemn…the heretical doctrines on the air." You think the preposition could be "of" the air, thought control, mind control to control masses, the "powers of the air," what blue states convinced themselves of. It goes deeper. Mennonites, too prophetic, think violence on TV affects the rate of high school murders, that children contract vibes from peers like virus. Just what can't you foist on a Mennonite? Vibes in the air? Say yes! Be afraid to go to the mall.

With Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind.

And what about the theatric "flowers and other decorations are to be omitted at all funerals held in our meetinghouses and members are not to clothe their dead in black."

Do not clothe your dead in black throws the school of death in a hat. “He's gone to a better place! We wish him well! " Speak no nasty Black of the afterlife, even if preachers wear it here it is to renounce the world. Just one thing while we're pretending, the guy died in his sin. Flowers aren't going to change it. None but the Rose the Mennonite sing. The flowers are there to convince the cousins in the pew that they too will have a fragrant and not a flagrant end. When flowers fade. It pictures the conflict of the world.

To show God's love aright, she bore to us a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

Mennonites contradicted the flesh done in the name of mortician's dress, flying in the face of custom: "dress him in black and paint his face so he looks good. He’s just off for a interview somewhere up the road." Franconians say, he's dead, now judged. Dress him up in white or red. White for sins forgiven, translucent in Christ's robe, red for sins he carries to his bed.

Inner Adornment, Symbolic Dress

The venture of Mr. Wm. Blake, sharpish into the post-modern psyche, proves we clearly see how the "mind-forged manacles," protocols of black, bind the present that those of the primitive past set free. Mennonites want to liberate from the "foolishness," of banking, "stylish automobiles," "bankruptcy law," "voting," public office, just about every shibboleth each election makes cool: consumption democracy in the name of conforming individuals. These got the "plain people," over here into trouble over snaps and zippers and buttons and bows.

The unvarnished Mennonite was not much of style, an insult to fashion, which rejected, took it hard. Plain dressers are bad for business, but the Mennonite is not solely to blame for boring the world. The Proverb said, sound judgment is "an ornament to grace your neck" (3.22) so dress in that, and that fisherman was guilty too, who sought beauty not of "braided hair, gold jewelry and fine clothes," but a "gentle and quiet spirit" (I Peter, 3. 3-4). Paul wants dress "with good deeds" (I Tim. 2.10), a deacon not measured by his banking prowess should "manage his children and household" (I Tim. 3.12). Mennonites sound and dress like Jews whose best adornment is the tefillin: "tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads" (Deut. 6.8). A sign on the hand and a symbol on the head, embodied in phylacteries, literal exaltation of the Word of God upon the person, don't they belong together, Franconia and Torah? Symbolic dress stimulates spiritualness, ages that at one time appreciated the new Millenial London, Paris, Rome.

Vestito en carne humana!

"Maybe it's not the Mennonite we should blame for dramatizing this, but the Bible," says World Empire, Web bound, cocooned desire. "It's a good thing there are so many different versions, we can be comfortable and not have to surrender to the Order of Christ," says the Internet army: "There's truth and room for all you can be."

This argument still says, "well if this country wasn't free then where would Mennonites be?” Back in the old country dead no doubt. But when they wheel you out who disciple yourself to this edge, there are more things than heaven and earth. There is the Sovereignty of God. Ouch. There is the predestination of the Elect. No! There is Providence. Oh! Take Mennonites for what they're worth, truth in opposition to the world, not for what they're not worth, founding the fourth world empire.

Don’t affiliate with chorales says Franconia. The horror! Or theater (disingenuous) recitals. Never! Or academies. Set an example of abstinence, not drain the dregs of the cup. Their Confession in its absurdity to the modern contrasts nicely those current world codes for children that read:"Please don't OD in public.

"Please don't commit suicide at home. Please don't blow up your high school or take ecstasy and drive, but you may prolong your adolescence into your 50's. We did!"

Mennonites think: Skeletal resistance. It's life as art, Mennonite theater in the theater of the heart. The actors took off no caps. There was no stage. The audience changed. Or not. There was no show. The show went on. It was living.

Hypocrisy In The Camp

Old Mennonites doubled down when it came to the charge all children make that they are hypocrites. It isn't hypocrisy that "vitamins are valueless" until we hear about vitamin D. These are counted as sincere vs. the hypocrisies there:

"Believe in evolution until we tell you not, then believe as told, if science is wrong it is just more right."

Mennonite separation from the world was so great from the start that their field of contradiction was even greater, viewed from failures at the Commandment Gates. The higher you climb the farther you fall, but a long fall draws sympathy for the underdog so you're back up. Fall from a standard of worldliness and your children will hold you in contempt. What are they gonna do, tell you you were worldly! Get angry, be foolish, smoke to death, go to concerts (if you must!) disagree with neighbors, show your prejudice. You don’t measure up to TV morals or the news, let alone PBS. But if you believe you should sacrifice your life and fail from that then we hold you succeed. We are suckers for the high ideal. If you simply want to please, you cannot be said to fall. In the religion of social position one size fits all. Faith falls on pebbles.

Oh flower!

Maybe the small "c" in contradiction makes Mennonites not proven Adepts. It's just that some contradiction is honorable, some not. It's hard to meet a pretentious Mennonite. Maybe that’s a sign their ideas are working. Mennonites wrote 4 books in 150 years. Not long on theology, they consider eternal security speculative, the millennium debatable, believe in spiritual community, mutual submittedness, the small group over the large. You might call it Mennonite mythology that opposes a culture which says "do what you will is the whole of the law." There is no dimple on the chin of doubts and questions. Why are you doing it? The flesh, the sin nature, throw up the hands, shrug the shoulders. Are you sure you couldn't do more? Preparation for heaven laments a failure to realize the could, but there is no shirking of duty to the would. Such language gives psychology a following.

In Bunyan's tale, Christian on the road to God is distracted by the world, by Vanity Fair, flesh, its weakness, not so much the devil. That subtle moral made it to Puritan land. Who you ask didn’t? Hawthorne's preacher, Dimmsdale, preached the sin he was most guilty of. We go from that to repeating that "public moralists secret practice the sin they most condemn." Moving rapidly, William Bennett, the living moralist is addicted to gambling. Guys and prostitutes in Sunday sermons carry on on Saturday night. Public morals are protective covering for the moralist. Right again, right is wrong. That's why they call it the devil with its twisted rhetorical triumphs. Arguments with this devil go on forever. It always has what if.

Consider the do-gooders and everything they do. All men are created equal in the blurb. Speak to immigrants when they cut the lawn, the moral force, but flame out against offenses against newspaper codes. Could Jesus talk to them? Or Blake? Or Socrates? Put them to death with the Mennonite. Well, Blake escaped. Their hero and ours! Moralists of England, moralists of France, have you disrobed your hierophants? Leaving only all who kill for peace, lie for truth, those stand up fundamentalist liberals of earth and sky. Let us go back to yesteryear, to that era long ago.

Freedom of Conscience

Part of the purpose of Mennonites as precursors of Gandhi and King, was to understand the oppressor, not the Christian’s favorite thought. Apostle Paul echoes the judges who put them all to death in his own words to Agrippa, “I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them [like the judges above and below]. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them” (Acts 26.9-11). What is too good for him?

In context, the Mennonite was blamed for corrupting the State Church like early Christians did Saul’s synagogue. Keep reading that sentence. On the other hand the keepers of the state equivocate two principles. First, that of being pious, as related in the death of Hans Van Overdam, 1550: “we were all betrayed by a Judas...who seemed to be one of the most pious of all the brethren that were there, so successfully could he practice his deception” (Theatre, 487). These must always be the greatest offenders, with Saul, Dimmsdale and the esteemed mouth.

The second principle of subversion is engage in dialectic: “...they imprudently allowed themselves to be drawn into disputations with the false prophets, though they had been sufficiently warned...for it is not given to everyone to dispute...when these poor lambs engaged in controversy, they became perplexed in their consciences.” Finally, “the poor, ruined lambs were released from prison and recanted everything...” (Theater, 487).

Mennonites were not asked to kneel at Caesar's hand and call him good. They were merely asked to conform, believe. When you start giving your life to what you are supposed to conform to, where stop? Will you die to wear a beard? Will you die to be sprinkled, immersed? To publicly confront authors? To speak a certain language? Where does freedom not force us in its quest? Into symbolic speech and beyond!

There is danger however when different members sacrifice in varying degrees, but all are made to feel that the greatest must obtain for the least. You could go to death as much from tyranny of your own group as from the oppressor. Cannot the group confront the dominance without your death? When dominant, will your group do what was done? Some Mennonites have symbolically shunned offenders. Some sent a death certificate to the parents of a member who gave the local governance some offense. Read again, again.

After the fact of their tortures the question for American Mennonites was, whether they too would leave their “flesh on the posts” of the “strait gates” (Theatre, 6) over issues of how to worship God. The reference to the strait gate means narrow, “strait is the gate and narrow is the way.”

Moral Confidence

Oh flower!

Not only Mennonites face the quandary of courage and choice. Psychiatrist Robert Coles found a parallel in Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis and his execution before war’s end. Asked “what would you do under such circumstances, under Hitler, if you were there, back then,” Coles replied, “by the time that question had been put to the class, not one of us was able to answer with any moral confidence.” (Coles, 198-99).

Coles cites teacher Niebuhr that there is only a “potential disparity” between psychiatry and religion, counseling that “stresses of social adjustment” and religions like Mennonites diametrically oppose social accommodation. Coles really means actual, not “potential.” There is a polar disparity between psychiatry and total committment. Counseling stresses adjustment. Normality means avoid conflict, anxiety, depression, not to continue“the essential ‘madness’… that won’t settle for the rewards of social conformity.” Social conformity, promotion, tenure, couldn’t counsel Bonhoeffer out, so he was martyred like Mennonites, who were always social heroes.

Another problem of the Accommodating Ethics occurs when Coles and his physicians confront malnutrition in Mississippi to be in turn rejected by Washington bureaucrats. RFK tells them that the real problem is the anger and pride inside themselves. Yes Kennedy was a Mennonite. They think malnutrition is an object. "Why can’t the government see it? We’ve done all we can." But the problem is inside them. Ouch.

It's the same with Bonhoeffer. Niebhur says. “we looked up to him as if he’d been sent to inspire us" ( 201), but they didn't go back to Germany. As Crito does with Socrates, they urge his escape. Martyr and hero find themselves an accident of time with fixed purpose. Fixed purpose! Hardly are those words out.... The Mennonite martyrs don’t give in. Why not, they could have lived? "The difficulty my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death" (Mennonite Socrates). When the audience far and wide, Niebuhr, Coles, Crito, Mennonite congregations of the new world, sees the problem outside focused by another, they are the problem.

The extracted conscience portrayed in homily and false dilemma caused Mennonites to mourn their weakness, claim they couldn't chose. What would you do? What would you do? The answer is die or betray and be left with the endless guilt of words. The weakest ethical offenders make the greatest moral defenders, the greatest adulterers. It is why the flesh beds the night in straw. But look, who is that beside?

O Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air
Dispels with glorious spelendor the darkness everywhere.

The Life Within

How does it get there? They don’t say. But commonplace in small deeds, unnoticed acts, choices, hard stands with the attitude, I’m no hero. High flying words, advanced degrees plague us with their fears that they are not good enough. So don’t be good. Profiteer your doubt. It is always the curse to be ever observing conscience outside and not in life.

There Are No Liberal Martyrs

What makes an intellectual anyway but doubt and information? If it comes to debate about liberal righteousness the response is ad hominum, "what have you done," they ask as if heroism were PR and you cannot see in the human face all of its acts. Controversy between the inner and the outer smacks of those pietists of the soul, who do not fit the Social Adjustment Franchise@Assassinating pietists, that is, Albrecht Ritschl (History of Pietism, 1880-86), “so overpowering and far-reaching that today, outside the small circle of specialists, pietism is still generally associated with anti-intellectualism, hyper-individualism, and holy-group separatism… (Heiko A. Oberman, preface in Johann Arndt, True Chrisitanity, NY: Paulist Press, 1979, xii). This “antagonism was continued by the Protestant dialectical theologians of this century, chief among whom was Karl Barth” (Peter Erb in Arndt, op cit, 1). In the end you can be a martyr if you just give up and surrender.

This is not to say tests don’t exist for the masses in their racist thoughts and crucifixions of their depressing lives without faith and in the sacrifice of their children. Who wants to be a moral hero? Everyone. Who doubts their commitment? Everyone. You’ve got to find it in the belly not the brain.

The “defenseless” took much of their inspiration from the early church: “even the Roman bishops, in the first three hundred years, were mostly all martyred”(Theater, 357), the point being that “true Christians have never persecuted the innocent, but were always persecuted themselves” (357). For the modern era, this raised a question for Mennonites as to whether they were true Christians, not whether they had attained the inner state of Arndt’s union, but whether they had been persecuted enough. Outer trumps inner again. Of old they were persecuted by institutions that no longer exist, “because they did not obey the mother holy church and the decree of the Emperor” (357- 58). When church and empire were survived by free will and democracy the defenseless had a hard time coping.

Shunning

True Christians never persecuted the innocent; “the holy apostle commands no greater punishment for heretics, than to shun...Tit. 3:10” (Theatre, 359). New world Mennonites shunned their own nonconformists, either heretics of doctrine or of the flesh taken in the world. It is hard to get a list of offenses. One might do as mindset directed, punishment mediated as the group would, men treated differently from women of course, according to the sin.

Heresy was not the original edict for which shunning occurred; it was style of life. It might come from wearing the bonnet, driving a car, or sleeping with the choir director. The motive for such rigors derives from “former times, in the times of the cross, when men could assemble only under peril of their lives...” (Theatre, 361) Then, “heavenly riches were sought above all things; for earthly possessions were altogether insecure.” But in a time of peace, failing persecution, “simplicity is changed into pomp and ostentation. Possessions have increased but in the soul there is leaness” (361), which sums up a large part of Mennonite schism, that the world had overtaken Christian in his race. Without persecution to stir his ardor he was subverted by his possessions. John Herr inspired his Reformed Mennonites with calumnies of their brothers’ worldliness.

True Man, yet very God, from sin and death now save us.

Persecute Yourself

It sounds a little strange. With inner and outer so opposed how could it be other? Depression is accounted for when anger is great. “For, though outward persecutions now and then cease, yet every Christian is called to sufferings and conflicts...each must live, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit; each must suffer in the flesh, that he may cease from sin.” (361).

The understanding is that when the outer world suffers, the inner is at peace, but when the outer is peaceful the inner suffers. There was one way out of this,“if you then find, that the time of freedom has given liberty and room to your lusts, persecute yourself, crucify and put yourself to death, and offer up soul and body to God.” (361).

The whole argument of Bloody Theater is, without persecution Christians fall away. But how long can you persecute yourself? Inner hair shirts and psychological flagellations call to repentance and self doubt. These applications of mind-body dualism become a theology of depression, for what better or more accessible way is there to persecute yourself than to accuse you that you are unworthy, guilty, weak, don’t measure up? Others beside Mennonites do this. What could be their motive?

It can be a theology for oppressing others. If you don’t measure up how could they? Of that reading of the Gospel that absorbs mind and body in one new man, little is said, that is, of the one who doesn’t persecute himself but renews the mind.

Mennonites were caught in a warp when there was no persecution by church and state in the new world. Without persecution where was the motive, for “words and colloquies in edifying instructions, and awakenings toward godliness?” When the outward persecutions cease, “examine...whether...you have not lent your tongue to please frivolous, worldly men with vain and useless talk...whether you did not defame your neighbor’s good name...by lying and deceit ministered to avarice” (361-62), a brazen openness.

This reads like the confession of every church, a teaching broader than the Mennonite repeated in pulpit: “Many, when they could not use the world, turned of necessity to God, as their nearest refuge; but as soon as a little breathing time set in, they again began to lean towards the world; the parents became rich, the children luxurious and wanton; the world caressed them, and in course of time they became respected and lifted up; the reproach of the cross was relinquished, and the honor of this world stepped into its place.” (Theater, 362). So 16th century religion menopaused into the present. But on the other hand, it is still looking around.

In broader context the martyrs of all denominations and names played a role in the freedoms of civilization in the breaking of Church and Empire. Some would say that all freedoms stem from this while the Anabaptists might say that modern freedoms are themselves a persecution.

Two Wrong Paths

There are then two ways to go, if you can’t be godly and prosper, or be persecuted and betray, how can you live. It’s like what Socrates tried to teach, rein in extravagances to achieve self-government.

The psychologists of the world the Mennonites disdain have raised a question as to whether Mennonites are not just harboring a death wish by making people murder them, let alone that they should be so filled with loathing that they persecute themselves.

This charge could occur with every principled stand, that if only the stubborn would let go of that fixed idea we could let them live in peace. That we might let them live at all is the catch, for by what right do we rule? Conformity. On similar grounds I. F. Stone charges Socrates for what Stone argues is a deliberate aggravation of his judges, the jury of 500. Socrates early and late practiced theater against the world. He says, "me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser and not to give an account of your lives" (Jowett).

That is the point, the world will do anything to anybody to avoid facing itself. The It-Self here is the operative. In Mennonite terms the unclean garments the It-Self wears are just opposite the garments of the Lamb. Socrates wants a man to do nothing common or mean when in danger, nor to use any cowardly way of escaping death, even in war, so he refuses escape and all the petty escapes of his sentence urged upon him.

In much the same way the old world took Mennonites to death and prison. The new world was more happy but still with consequences, for this is how the lawless think: you could steal their cow and they won't prevent it! "What do you say about going over and getting some corn?" It was thought you could do just anything to Mennonites. That's why their pacifism is unlikeable. It encourages lawlessness. Of the French and Indian War Wenger says "there is no evidence that Mennonites used self-defense in any attack made upon them" (58). For the evil-doer the only danger was their inability to calculate who among the Mennonites were truly devout (thus nonresistant). The cry of the devout, "vengeance is mine, I will repay" echoed with "because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him." But human contradiction can be as great a force as piety. There is danger to a thief who comes upon a lapsed Mennonite and gets a beating. You can't always tell whether it was Harvey or Philip Mack coming down the road.

What is the inward nature of the Mennonite today, the defenseless Christian in name? When Funk began his crusade to bring them into the American fold, brothers and sisters were able to abstract their desire not to kill into not to pay war tax into not swear allegiance. The heart of legalism abstracts issues from specific to general. Not to work on the Sabbath means not to heal. Not to kill or do harm means not to support those who do. Colonial Mennonites couldn’t swear the oath any more than Huckabee can believe in evolution. Why should either? Pledge allegiance or pay the tax, but reservations occurred. Be at peace before communion is an example. Men apologize to the church, shed tears, confess discourtesy to their wives they haven’t yet told them about! Sham suggests doubt.

The Adverse Party as the Advocate

Pick on Mennonites? The defenseless? No. No more than Israel you idiot. I will revenge, I will repay. So let us see the higher good and the happy fall to earth that is our own. Consider righteousness with an anti-Petrarchan view as late Elizabethans did. Beauty is not meant to magnify contradiction, but to “show the adverse party as the advocate,” as Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXV designs. Mennonites as deep conflicted as any “clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun / And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.” The ideal cloys. The only problem with Roger Clemens' innocence is Marion Jones. We must turn it upon its head to see what's really true. Good humor is more tolerant than law. Maybe it is the only true love, realistic clay about which not much is said, not to hide the ill, indeed confess aplenty, but to urge “no more be grieved at that which thou hast done.” No more be grieved that is the sum. Mennonites didn’t say.

In Switzerland, some carried wooden knives in their belts to show their contempt of murder, were sometimes dragged behind the boats of Lake Geneva. Much in the way of torture and oppression was practiced against them all, especially as is noted in the Mirror where Mennonites and Anabaptists were tortured for communion and their views withal. It was like the theatre of Rome that informed the martyrs’ trials.

In their “kindness” the authorities of that time coaxed a general confession first, conducted in the leniency of their compassion in the surrendering up of one’s Mennonite fellows and parents. One example among many, a “Miss Elizabeth,” for whose sacrifice only one cure can occur, in a first arraignment was accused of being a teacher. Beadles found a Latin Testament. The horror! When asked to take an oath she replied that “we ought not to swear” quoting and liberally believing that same testament of the words of Jesus that centuries later her family believed. Nor would she identify this family or her friends. She said the phrase “holy sacrament” did not appear in the Testament. She failed the test of infant salvation through baptism. Off with her head! She failed the exam of Papal ordinance general.

Thus a second audience required to show her the severe arm. She was reexamined in a chamber: “but as she would not voluntarily confess, he applied the thumbscrews to her thumbs and forefingers, so that the blood squirted out at the nails.” This earnest catechism of confession further despised, examiners “applied the screws to her shins.” This called for her to elicit associates’ identity more than admit any particular "crime." Oh she was hard hearted. And since “they obtained not one word from her detrimental to her brethren in the Lord, or to any other person,” along came the spider and sat down beside her and she was “drowned in a bag.” Although she was held from January 15 until her execution on March 27, 1549 (Theatre, 482-83), this was her last offense.

Works

The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians. Thieleman J. van Braght, tr. from the Dutch edition Of 1660 by Joseph F. Sohm. Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1964.

Forgiveness In Faith: Anna Bechtel Mack Reiff

2009-08-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Forgiveness In Faith

My grandmother and aunts were feminists. The three of them were a powerful force, my aunts toward a vision of beauty I’d not otherwise had, my grandmother Anna, a white Olympus.
They fought mentally against domination all their lives and were nothing if not strong minded. Anna especially had reason to resist the ties, for she had had trials, first the farm, then the near loss of her first daughter, then the loss of her husband, borderline poverty and the difficulties of her father-in-law. In the midst of all this she struck an original path in both folk art and religion.
For Anna the issues were freedom to create and freedom to be what she chose. It is possible to understand that certain pressures might be brought to bear on a girl so surrounded by religious figures. The greatest obstacle was her stepmother, a classic case of farmer’s wife domination. Her father Henry at this time was still probably shell shocked from the loss of his first love Elisabeth. His three small children added to by two more, he was stuck on the farm. In these times he may have been just as inwardly desperate as Anna. But both had a long way to go. For Henry, the next best part of his life, after the loss of Elisabeth, would come maybe after his second wife died and he moved in with Anna and her Elizabeth for eight years at the end of his life, a three peas in a pod collection of people born June 19, 20 and 21. For Anna the time came sooner. When she was 21, in 1901, she left the farm and became a tailor in the city.
Best Foot Forward
We can’t just pass over those farm years of the barefoot girl. We are helped to an
account by a folk memoir written by her daughter in 1982, “Best Foot Forward.” She presented it to me patchwork, years before she ever showed me anything else, such as Henry Mack’s Ledger, said I should rewrite it. That was impossible, but the facts in it are good, based on Anna’s countless retellings of everything, including that farm domination.
“It was Anna who for sixty years painted word pictures for her daughter about her childhood, girlhood, adult life, who expounded on marriage, child rearing, family life, who at ninety, with a terminal illness, said, ‘I just can’t believe I’m so old! I don’t feel old.’” (2)
I think the farm implicates also the Old Mennonite way, although it was not necessarily so. Both wore their most negative face in stepmother, die mem, who had none of the light and air of either the Bechtels or the Macks. She was the unenlightened Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite, uncomfortable with English, with dogmatic and strong opinions about custom, right and wrong, and enforced them on the only person she could, her step daughter. Besides that, it comes with the territory, she was not affectionate, spoke no encouraging words to “Annie,” “your hair is pretty,” or “you look nice in that dress.”
Necessity demanded she communicate her skills to Anna, but a little punitively when all was said and done. Henry, diplomat and judge, sole arbiter of disputes, gave a little here and a little there. The most celebrated case was the dress Anna had made that die mem felt not plain enough. “Anna’s father was called to arbitrate loud discussion over Annie’s worldly notions as demonstrated by her fancy dress.” Henry’s decision, saving the appearances, was that she could wear it, but not to church.

Habermann’s Prayer
There were a lot of old books left in that attic that keep telling tales. A dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers (1873) is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, “AM,” that is, Anna Mack. If we assume the inscribed date of another book found there, Christian Spiritual Conversation (1897), as the time Anna also was reading these Prayers, that is, the year she joined the church, and note that one page is especially dog eared (103), that would make Anna 17, half way through her sentence of eight years.
On this dog eared page, “prayer of a child,” we see a girl beset with difficulty, wrestling with her stepmother, trying to subdue herself to the good:
“Give me an obedient heart that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse….”
Her biographer picks up the thread for us.
"Annie had to fight her way. Her mother died when she was five. Her new mother objected to too much trimming on the dress. Too worldly. But when stepmother had a cyst removed from her back on the kitchen table on the farm by the doctor, it was Anna who assisted, participated in the whole operation.”
Life always had a lot to bear for Anna. She was taken out of such school as there was at the end of 6th grade. “The terms were short, often the teacher of the two room school was a farmer who could teach only in winter and early summer when spring planting was finished and harvests not yet begun.” (7) Anna milked the cows. Anna did the dishes, but “wanted to discover the world that lay outside her own narrow environment, inhabited by people who always wore beautiful clothes, lived in elegant warm homes and never milked cows, emptied chamber pots or cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps.”
Anna sounds at times like an indentured daughter. “At an early age Anna decided that she wanted to “find people of more culture and education.” Needless to say, the schafige frau (industrious woman) did not approve of this search for refinement.
By the time she was 11 two more boys had been born. “Always there was washing and ironing, water heated on a wood fire, clothes scrubbed on a board in a wooden tub, rinsed, wrung by hand and hung outdoors to freeze into strange shapes in winter or wrap around the clothes line in the March winds. Bedding and underwear were used just as they came from the line, but shirts and dresses and the long muslin petticoats must be smoothed by flatirons heated on the wood stove. Even in summer the fire had to be kept burning briskly to keep the irons hot. And the cooking! Breakfast must be substantial, the cows had been milked, the horses fed and the milk cans filled, ready to take to the creamery before Henry and the hired man came in to eat.”
Retelling
While outwardly this life sounds a little rough, in its telling repeatedly over the
years it probably got rougher, especially in the imagination of the daughter Elizabeth to whom die mem was “sour faced, narrow minded, rigid, very plain.” She would naturally be indignant at any perceived mistreatment of her mother. Harbored a long time, this has more than a little to do with her rejections of the Dutch way she herself never knew.
“This picture of Pennsylvania Dutch farm life in the 1890’s was probably common to many other parts of the rural United States. There was one important difference. In New England, women were realizing the need to be educated; the woman suffrage movement was gaining ground. Among the plain people, there was only one sphere for women, ‘Kinder, Kich un Karich’ – children, kitchen and church…at twelve Anna finished her formal education and the part of her life she enjoyed most.”
There seems to be an important link in a chain here that we should not miss, that is, that the daughter held a kind of unacknowledged grudge against the farm and peasant injustices reported by her mother. Even though they were not probably reported just so, the implications would be clear. You could not do what you wanted, you had to do what you were told. And this produced the most fiercely independent mind possible in a family of independent minds anyway. The structural implications just kept getting stronger as the details piled up.
“For the next nine years Annie spent six days of the week in a round of tasks that today would seem like mindless drudgery. First the cows must be milked, and this Annie hated. Getting out of a warm bed and dressing in an unheated room in the dark was bad enough, but going to the barn and sitting on a milking stool was even worse. Worst of all were the rare occasions when she dozed and the cow became restive and kicked over the milk bucket. This would bring a reprimand from her father and a tirade in Pennsylvania Dutch from her step mother.”
So Elizabeth’s image of the Pennsylvania Dutch becomes pretty negative, not just from the repeated details, the tirades, the drudgery, but from the language itself, which is just about what Ben Franklin meant. Annie would “carry the ‘zehn uhr stuck,’ [to the workers in the field], just like the modern coffee break, though often it was only a pail of cold water ands some rather dry crumb cake.”
The Romantic
All this and more occupied Anna outwardly, but as we know the Mennonites juxtapose the outward and the inward, as does practically everybody. Inwardly, Anna was an incurable optimist and a romantic. Later in life she deeply regretted not getting an engagement ring, but when her suitor, would be husband, skidded his horse to a stop at her door she was thrilled. At the time of which we are speaking, “one summer, Annie carried a pail of milk to a neighboring farm every day. Barefooted, as befitted a teen age girl, she was always ashamed lest a prince in disguise, riding past on a white horse should see her without shoes.” The admission of the factual-realist-phenomenologist, would-be physician, non folk artist daughter is just as telling: “It never occurred to me to ask my mother where she had heard about princes on white horses, but it was probably a story remembered from one the precious school readers.’ Certainly romanticism is hard to understand.
Leaving the Farm
The rough manuscript gives many other details of farm life, foods, going to the
plain church, “no organ or piano, no decoration of any kind,” the plain wooden benches, long visits after church, the abbreviated social life, but after nine years, and anyway at age 21 you were free. So the summer of 1901 Anna inherited some money from Mary Longacre Bechtel and moved to Philadelphia to apprentice herself to a tailor. “Anna and several other girls were taught women’s clothing construction…there were no zippers, no miracle fabrics, each seam had to be pressed, each tiny hook and eye carefully placed and sewn with small but firm stitches. The sewing machine was operated by a treadle, there probably was not even a ceiling fan in that day.”
The farm did not last long after Anna left.. Her stepmother was not in good health. Anna returned at some point to help out at her father’s plea. By 1906 the farm had been sold and the whole family moved to the city. Anna married 20 December of that year.
Anna and Elizabeth
Anna’s family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks, were pastors, teachers, hymnists, musicians, artisans and folk scholars, that is they were folk intellectuals. Elizabeth Bechtel’s death much diminished these influences in the short term in Anna’s life, not only in her reading and thinking. The loss of her mother echoed and echoed, substituted as it was in Anna’s mind and in her daughter Elizabeth’s too with the unattractive Pennsylvania Dutch traits of her step mother.
Thus Anna’s literary remains are sparse. She had few books growing up. Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales, but she was a born romantic. Aside from the catechisms above there is only an Appletons’ Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889.
But birth is irresistible. Anna expressed her hunger for the life of the mind later in the books she got her daughters. Arguably they tell the story of what she thought she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she had lost her little girl at age two when she began to read, nor done any more to have fostered all imaginative delights in her. New books were added to the house, the very ones Anna never had. Their inscriptions show that at age 5, December, 1915, Cinderella came at Christmas. According to her daughter this may be the single most important metaphor in Anna’s imagination. Also at Christmas, age 7, came Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but Anna’s attempts to nurture this kind of imagination in Elizabeth were thwarted by that rational mind, what she has dubbed “realism.”
Alice’s Wonderland fell on fallow ground where William Osler would have flourished. In later years Elizabeth read autobiographies, Malamud’s The Fixer with pleasure, liked any new translation of the Aeneid, Tolstoy, Dickens. But both she and her mother were satisfied they had done their part. Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele were bedded down in that attic waiting to be recovered.
Prayer for Strength
Presumably it is obvious that without one life the quality of many subsequent lives would not have been the same. Neither would this memoir exist. That was the import of a prayer for strength Anna gave in 1911 when the one year old folk genius nearly died.
For someone who didn’t want to be a nurse, Anna got plenty of practice. And any thing she learned she was grateful for especially in that summer when she nursed her first daughter back from death of the “summer complaint.”
“The doctor came to the house every day, but after a week the baby had not improved. Anna saw him looking into his black bag at the rows of medicine bottles as though he could not decide which one to open. She realized that the young doctor had reached the limit of his professional expertise. That night Anna prayed for strength to give up this child whom she loved so dearly. Next morning, the doctor returned with a new medicine. Slowly the baby improved though she was now thin and pale. By summer’s end she was once again the plump happy child she had been. The rest of Anna’s long life was a witness to the faith that came through that experience” (17-18).
This sounds awfully dependent, these stories of people who surrender in the face of insurmountable obstacles, praying for strength to give up a child. But it is dependent, and if that is bad why did the doc come back in the morning with a cure, why does the baby recover with or without the cure? Unfortunately we cannot say it is just luck or piety cooked up for the occasion, it’s just too important. When your daughter or son is saved you don’t go around mumbling. You rejoice. It doesn’t do much good to cite all the children who died just to refute this one that lived. Life trumps death in every case, especially when that life is such a partisan issue as to be the muse of a work about herself, which in turn saw its own sacrifice, its own surrender. Surrender for surrender, how is that a way to proceed? So the one year old also sacrificed at 30 because she loved her mother and maybe a way of life, even a level of being, more than herself. A shocking statement and value, everybody giving up all the time. Life surrenders to life and to death. That’s the folk way of honoring the living and the dead. Who cares about justice? What we care about is love.
So Anna’s love reached out in surrender and her daughter was healed. Go to a bookstore people.
Dolls
Whenever you give your life in any part for someone else or something else, as you’re always doing anyway after you grow up, it tends to come back to you. That is, you didn’t do it for yourself, but that very motive may make the act transcendent, any mother knows this. All the folk know it.
So a lot of Anna’s work only gets remembered because it summoned implications of other things. “Underwear, blouses, dresses, even coats when the children were small, all came from the busy hands and sewing machine of our mother,” does not do justice to it. But not just children’s clothes, doll clothes. But it was especially the dolls, made to give her daughter, made to satisfy her own lost longing too, a kind of memory of her own mother.
“Anna remembered her mother as a rather large woman with beautiful auburn hair. She remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift” ( 6). And that was all the memory she had of her at age 5 when her mother died.
Little of Anna’s constant creations remain and they would have been unnoticed now but for the chance remark that occurred when I was trying to provoke my informant into examining her own developed intuition.
She had begun to relate how she could perceive feelings at an early age, practically from birth, and offered evidence from what she called “the worst Christmas” of her life, at age 4.
Mother Anna had had but one doll, “she remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift,” but the family lived in more than a little poverty, and she never had another. “Perhaps this year she would get a doll for Christmas! But no, it was only an orange, a couple of clear toy candies and a much needed pair of shoes.” Anna of course purposed to remedy this with her daughter, so Elizabeth had dozens of dolls. But at this point the “realist” interrupted her narrative to point out that as a four year old however, "dolls were dolls, not real children." No maternal transference for her! But Anna went to work with much purpose and ingenuity and made the kind of folk doll that would stop an auction today.
Mother Of All Dolls
Neighbor Jenny worked in Strawbridge's fur department and had access to scraps of fur. I was never told what the body of the doll was made of, but Anna and Jenny made this grand doll of all dolls life-size, dressed her up and sat her in a little rocker with a black velveteen coat, a hat and scarf with white fur trimming and a little white muff with two black tails; the mother of all folk dolls, today worth thousands.
But the muff and scarf were wrapped separately, to show how large the doll was. When the child opened the wrapping she mistook the muff as though it was for her and because she couldn’t "get my chubby fist in that little muff!" began to wail. Do you hear the Dutch prejudice in “chubby?” Imagine competing with your own Christmas present.
But the wail induced the mother's tears and Anna too began to cry, which was the point of the story. The daughter at ninety four remembers that at four she thought that it wasn’t right to make your mother cry and stopped. Anna never knew her daughter had had this epiphany, not that she was ignorant of her little Dutch prodigy. Had Elizabeth become the first female surgeon at Women’s Medical Center she would no doubt have boasted that she was a peasant surgeon.
Anna not only made dozens of dolls for her daughter, she continued the practice long after. The ladies of her church made dolls to sell at their annual bazaar. In a photograph taken in 1955 in Anna’s home at least 12 dolls are arrayed for “a private pre-bazaar view at the home of Mrs. Anna Reiff.” The trunks in the attic also contained various forms of doll clothes in finished and unfinished states, as well as some old dolls.
Gardens
Another folk aspect not to be missed, Anna was honored in 1970 at a Woman’s meeting for her life long efforts at gardening and sharing her successes: “she has always had special results in whatever she was growing – whether children, African Violets for her window sills, begonias for porch boxes, or forcing hyacinths in the winter from January until Easter…she would give us leaves from her finest African Violets…one can remember the dolls she dressed and the aprons…another project was the shoulderettes – thirty of them for Presbyterian Hospital and dresses for T. M. Thomas center.
She made quilts for each child and for herself. These were kept and doled out in the breakup of the house. Quilts, dolls, clothes, food, preserves, gardens outside, African violets inside in full bloom on every window sill: Anna’s folk works.
Leaving the Old
Letters were an important part of Anna’s life, not that she kept them. She held the notion that their purpose ceased when read and disposed of them. So she continued to have no significant literary remains. Entirely folk, all her doings were oral, after dinner in her home she would talk absorbingly about the people she had known. What remains of this is the above folk manuscript. Anna did keep decorated postcards, a kind of early Christmas card, sent to the family in the early 1900’s from other family members. Sometimes they have only an address and no writing at all. Folk think the folk are eternal, always remembered and that has been true a long time, so while she kept an old photo album of the late 1800’s, none of the photographs are identified. Nor could her daughter identify any of them at the end of her day. They must be of her greater family however, Bechtels and Macks.
The Hat
The most important letter Anna ever received was from her Uncle Andrew in 1914, no doubt in German, to the effect that if she came to take the yearly communion at Bally (Hereford) she must wear a bonnet.
This complete narrative of this event is omitted from BFF, except to say that in 1897 when “Anna joined the church, local custom did not require the wearing of the prayer covering and bonnet. A plain, untrimmed hat was acceptable, and the prayer covering could be put on just for Sunday worship.
It must be remembered how warm an attachment Anna had for her uncle Andrew and aunt “Lisbet.” “For the rest of their lives Anna felt closer to this uncle and aunt that to the rest of her relatives” (6).
Different people had differing views of this. For one, the Mennonite division of 1847 involved a kind of dress code. The proponent there, Oberholtzer, believed in his freedom. The Old Mennonites believe in the “doctrine of simplicity and separation.” People on both sides had individual takes. . Oberholtzer would not wear his coat, thought he had a right not to wear the plain coat (Ruth, 245), although it is not quite as simple as that. His choice became a symbol of liberty against the Mennonite high doctrine of mutual submission.

Noah says, considering the whole spectrum from 1847 to 1914. “Hats were banished, not altogether without the loss of some members….” “During the years since then some of those who had refrained from taking communion because of this restriction have been reconciled to the church again. Just lately a few have come back to the joy of the church in general. Joy…because the church has been spared from breaking away from her doctrine of simplicity and separation” (7).
The doctrine of simplicity and separation was the main thing.

There is a background for this kind of thing among the Mennonites. In 1909-1911 definite decisions had been made about how to dress. “At every conference session the question of the woman’s covering was belabored. Fancy hats were more and more common among the younger women” (Ruth, 425). So Anna, who had been attending the “new” First Mennonite in the city anyway, which was a lot closer to her home, conferred
with her husband and decided not to go to Hereford.
Not to go to communion is a big statement among Mennonites. It was held only once a year. At least the week prior the Mennonite preparation for the event is more elaborate than most Protestant services, a very personal service where everyone in the congregation attempts to reconcile themselves with everyone else. It is a little formulaic: “So far as I know I am at peace with everyone and everyone is with me and if not please come and tell me.” Refusing the bonnet would make that vow impossible. While she loved her uncle, who was speaking for the community, she chose the hat!
Admittedly sometime between 1897 and 1914 they had changed their rule on this, but by then it was a much older point of contention over whether the bishops and congregations did rule, this from Funk to Oberholtzer, hence the change was binding. The Rules and discipline of the Franconia Conference, revised as of July, 1933 state clearly that”…Sisters shall not wear hats” and “…if they would not comply, would have to be rejected” (Wenger, 433). Certainly these rules were not enforced universally, but how could you not see whether a woman wore a hat? “Pride in dress caused quite a bit of trouble in the church in those days “ (7
The influential precedent of such behavior in her grandfather Bechtel’s life could not have been lost upon Anna, how he had been engrafted to fill the gap left by Clemmer’s release in the Oberholtzer affair Maybe Anna too thought the coat/ bonnet laws a “human commandment.” (Ruth, 247) But we hear in all this insistence for personal liberty just the complaint preachers had made for 200 years about people making their own decisions in Pennsylvania.
She was no doubt caught between irresistible forces. On the one hand her Uncle and the past and on the other the force of modernism and all that entails. “There were a few, as might be expected, who revolted against the tyranny of the farm, as they were pleased to call it, even before the eighteen-nineties, but they were exceptions. Now, [1929] fully half of the young folks, boys and girls alike, are gone to town…” (Weygandt, 7). Anna left in 1901. For the Old Mennonites these issues impacted worldliness. Noah Mack says, “he had no compromise on separation from the world tho even sixty and more years ago hats were worn by some of the young sisters in various parts of the church in the conference district where he labored. This was true in his own congregation” (7).
.” The bonnet vs. the hat as always was a sticking point among Mennonites.

It adds some poignancy to Anna’s apprenticeship as a tailor that she left the Old Mennonites precisely over the issues of dress that caused the Mennonite division of 1848.
In the end Anna made the decision for subsequent generations not to be what she was, whether farmer, plebian or Mennonite, forced her children out into either open conflict or conformity in the war between truth and the world, why the giants had been left behind in the promised land in the first place, to prove that because the law of God is in their heart their feet do not slip. So they slipped and were rescued, slipped up, stood up.
Death of a Husband
Anna wanted to be free, so it was hard to bear the constraint which she did when her husband died, leaving her dependant on her father-in-law, Jacob, for her husband had a large investment in Heister and Reiff that his father owned.
Old Jacob had been a storekeeper in the world of Hereford and Clayton and Reading before 1900. One of the reasons Anna chose his son for a husband was because he was not a farmer. She was severing ties forever with that world. Yes Jacob had a reputation, was reported as sharp dealer. There were implications that he couldn’t keep a
location for too long. In at least one of these alleged cases he has been proved innocent.
Over time the attempt to understand Jake has produced a realization that his daughter in law didn’t like him any more than he liked her, but showed it in more pleasant ways, always inviting him and his wives to family events. Secretly in their beds they all thought his son Howard was dominated. The party line ever since has been that Jake, as she has listed in her notes, was a “big shot, unfeeling, dominating, jealous, sharp trader, cheap skate, cigar smoker, reprobate in early life.” She could have added “bad influence” since her father, like Jake, began to smoke a cigar a day at age 40! In some sense Howard’s early death is attributed to his father, who either worked him to death or caused his heartburn: “in later years, Howard attributed his chronic indigestion to those hasty and interrupted meals which were a way of life when the family lived behind the store” (4). But now of course we can say it was hardening of the arteries.
A lack of freedom loomed all around them, most seriously from economic circumstances. Father, Howard R., died at 46 without life insurance. Old Mennonites, she says, didn’t believe in insurance, much the way 18th century fire companies didn’t believe in putting out fires since obviously the fire was a signal from above identifying evildoers. The fire company was there to protect the neighbors, hose down their properties, separating the just from the unjust by water. Howard R. did take out a life insurance policy after his first two children were born, a $7000 policy on the quiet. Just in time.
Her mother chose her father chiefly on the basis that he had left the proletariat on the way to business school, just as, at the same time, her mother left the farm and sought him as a husband. Elizabeth’s brother graduated Penn State and went up the executive beanstalk. Her maverick sister wrote limericks, the first text for minority slow learners. But she studied art and longed to be a doctor. So they all escaped the farm, even if business was equally stultifying.
Inferences have been made and reports of memories given. She knew the mind of this father who died at 46. She could talk to him, was proud that he could add columns with both hands while talking on two different phones, and that he sent left-handed postcards. She hugely understates the pain of his loss when she was 17. He was a vigorous looking man, somebody other men took seriously, piercing eyes, but he was just sitting down to read his own philosophy under the palm at the end of the mind when he was stricken.
Old Jake
If you offer a sympathetic ear and a disembodied presence, as I do by phone, you eventually wish you had the power to forgive sins, for it is much like a confessional. She’s been thinking that she shouldn’t have hated grandfather Jake, even though he had a domineering disposition, wanted to be in control. He was youngest, she says, and the youngest often feel like they “don’t quite make the grade.”
Widowerhood had taken Jake as well as Henry Mack, except that it kept on taking Jake. From Jake’s point of view when he got married at 21 everything was rosy. He had a son, but his wife got TB and died. He remarried and his second son died, followed later by the death of his wife. He remarried a third time and again an infant son died. Out of this remark comes the realization for the first time that what Jake said to his grandson Howard about his mother remarrying when her Howard had died was only a replay of the expectations of his own life. He’d lost his wife and he remarried, not too extraordinary that he’d think Anna would too. This understanding is way too late.
Of course she admits her mother, Anna, was independent, had all along wanted time without Howard’s father present, although she invited him to all the family dinners with all the others: (maternal) Grandfather Henry, stepmother Sarah Ann, Jacob L., and wife Willomena. The two middle of these people were not Anna’s favorites.
Jacob L. bought his son Howard a car in 1917, a 7 passenger Buick touring car, with stick-on curtains that hung on pegs. The proviso was that Howard had to drive Jake around. On these excursions men rode shotgun and spit out the window. Now you see why I walked on tiptoe around these ladies, they had legitimate grievances. Boorish behavior at best. Jake sat in the front while Anna and the children, or Wilhelmina, Jake’s second wife, sat in the back. Jake would light a cigar but not smoke it. He chewed it.
Directing me to tell her all my troubles as I lie on the analyst’s couch, but then continuing her own saga, she says that Jake couldn’t grasp his first and only surviving son’s sudden death in 1927. Filled with grief he wanted to “kick the cat,” i.e., lash out in grief at something or someone. That turned out to be Anna, she feels. Jake went a little wild in his fantasies, thought he was going to have his grandson Howard run his business. Instead his grandson gave him the business.
I’m wondering how in the world I’m going to pay for all this insight at the current rates:
“It was the time and the place of his saying that angered Howard. When I needed money (at the College of Design) I went to see Jake [and hated it, she doesn’t say]. He would show me some of the things he had, he gave me some old pottery.”
You notice though that she’s not giving the old pottery away, at least not yet. Then suddenly, ironically, she commits herself to that old institution of life, for life, and gives it all up at once, in toto, except for a chair, a bookcase and a testament of acceptance. I expect Billy Budd to come leaping out. Mennonites either fight to the death or give up the ghost.

I Cried With Her
At the demise of the accused misanthrope diabetic Jacob L. in 1929, Anna reverted again to the girl on the farm solving problems, brought the bed down the stairs, wept with the wife at his condition, did the dirty work in a pinch:
“He sat in the rocker with his foot on the table and he had sat there all day unable
to move, suffering agony with that leg, sleeping most of the time from dope which the doctor gave to relieve him, moaning with pain as soon as he was awake. Grandma cried and for a bit I cried with her as the enormity of the situation dawned upon me. I tell you I never missed Dad more, so I pulled off my coat and hat and decided to stay till we got him to bed, but alas, he could not get upstairs, so I and the housekeeper took the bed apart and brought it down (took the table apart). We even had to pull him into the front room in his rocker till we put up the bed.”
No examples of Jake’s dominance of his son are given, unless it’s the interruptions at dinner, it is just assumed, like her question of Jake’s second wife, Wilhelmina, “how did she cope with her husband’s domineering nature?” (5) along with the anecdote that she died of pneumonia after scrubbing the cellar floor on her knees in winter. Like one of Faulkner’s characters, “her life had been worn out by the crass violence of an underbred outlander” (Knight’s Gambit, 6). If Jake had tried a palace coup
he would have found the army, navy and air force against him.
She interprets inferential evidence of grandfather Jake from photographs: “he is serious, with his full lower lip thrust out aggressively, and rimmed with a scraggly beard.” But she also admits, “my personal memories from childhood and early youth are colored by my mother’s stories and analysis of his character in later years.” Her mother had been much offended by the masculine in the form of four high spirited brothers of her childhood. In adulthood the daughter remembers that her uncle was crude, her father as being dominated by his father and the grandfather was worse.
Forgiveness in Faith
At the end of his life, my old dad, grandson Howard, had told the story of Jake’s peccadillo so often I knew it well. I always listened for slight changes, nuances of expression. One evening in 1993, the first time I took the trip to Philadelphia with son Aeyrie, then seven, all light and joy, he told it for the last time. The day after his father had died he and his grandfather were in the garage. Jake was just leaving, but turned at the last moment and said, “don’t worry, your mother will be remarried soon.” The nineteen year old ordered him off the property! At the time of this last retelling we were standing in the middle bedroom looking at Jake and Kate’s framed wedding certificate. Dad was 85, his voice was raised and he was sputtering a little. I put my arm around his shoulders. “Dad, what do you say you forgive this man? Can you do that? Can you forgive him in faith?”
“Yes.”

Works Cited
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”
Christian Spiritual Conversation…with an Appendix. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1892.
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper. And other Stories. NY: A.L. Burt. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”
William Faulkner. Knight’s Gambit. London: Chatto & Windus. 1951
MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK/BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. Philadelphia: IG. Kohler, 1873.
Gerhard Roosen. Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Elizabeth Young. Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna. Winter, 1982

Pennsylvania Spiritual Lawlessness

2009-05-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

Peasant art, tramp art, folk art corrects for the radical religious ideas and proves the integrity of their life. But the extremes are interesting. Celebrations of baptism held in such honor as to be worthy of death in Switzerland, in Pennsylvania were more about contradiction.

The Baptisms of Beissel

One star in this stellium of radical artists, Conrad Beissel operated under the guise of prophetic religion in 18th century Pennsylvania. The illuminations of the books and prints of Ephrata, what Hawthorne would have deemed a Utopian society in the next century, had already occurred in Pennsylvania. Whether in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) or Brook Farm (1841-47) New England imitated the real transcendentalists of Pennsylvania. Beissel's ritualistic mentality and isolation were so extreme that he at one time had attempted to baptize himself, a difficult feat: "this questionable act, however, failed to convince him...yet he considered his old master...so far beneath him... that it would be too great a humiliation for his proud spirit to receive baptism at their hands." (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 102). He got by this handicap by comparing himself with Jesus. In the revival on the Pequea (1724) Beissel remembered "that even Christ had humbled himself to be baptized by so lowly a person as John" (103). Then he was immersed face forward three times.

Sachse, himself a Rosicrucian, empathizes as Beissel in November 1724 "plunges beneath the flood, and through it again enter[s] the material world cleansed from all taint and sin...yet his pride forbade him to humble himself, as he considered, to bow to his old master [Peter Becker] and receive the rite at his hands" (103). These exaggerations match the pride of the celebrant, for that cleansing from all taint lasted only so long. It had to be redone, so was no cleansing at all. Of course all this must be done in further imitiation "apostolicwise," Sachse says. "Apostles" appeared in Pennsylvania as much as they did in later Scottsdale's pyramid schemes. Aposticity seemed to go along with autocracy when down he went "face forward, under the cold flood." Sachse says that "this baptism in the Pequea was the most noteworthy one in the history of the sect-people of Pennsylvania" (104).

But not so fast. As those baptized in muddy water had later to rewash, four years later Beissel renounced this baptism lest there seem to be any taint on his authority in having been baptized by a group from which he now severed (Becker's baptists). It uts a whole new meaning on Anabaptist when Beissel was rebaptized again, that is he back down to the river and got re-baptized twice. By any proper count we are now at four. First he was unbaptised backwards to wash off the former at the hands of Becker. He went under three times backwards. This was done to an accompaniment of Rosicrucian fours and sevens that only Sachse comprehends. Then Beissel, after being unbaptized, flipped over on his face and went down forwards. Backwards means face up in renunciation and frontwards means face down in restoration. In 1738 Beissel enacted baptisms in and for the dead, (Chronicon, 122) that the son of Alexander Mack has baptized in his father's stead in order to qualify him for the Celestial Virginity. These incongruent baptisms were apparent common knowledge. In his polemic against Beissel he says, "I have, without baptizing myself and letting myself be baptized four times (like him) (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 344).

Sabbath and Celibacy
Lawlessness attracted other peculiarities, contention over the sabbath, denial of sexuality in celibacy, fervent separation from the world. Whether it be wife from husband or goose from the table, "luxurious indulgence." Buñuel's Simon of the Desert captures the spirit of this monasticism. Maybe it's hard to believe they're serious, but death threats were also exchanged. Establishment charismatics Paul Crouch, Benny Hinn, et al. have continued the practice of death threats (xvii) against Hanegraaff and his children. Prophetic authority, tithing, healing have all been turned to lawlessness as much as baptism, chastity, Sabbaths and communal living were. Should it be called spiritual inconsistencies? Convinced they were headed east they called it west.

The long title of Beissel's Mystyrion says, the "Lawless ANTICHRIST discover'd and Disclos'd, Shewing that all those do belong to that Lawless Antichrist, who wilfully reject the Commandments of God, amongst which, is his holy, and by himself blessed Seventh-Day Sabbath." Beissel summoned these extremities to defend his notion of the Sabbath. A law of opposites prevails in his writing in code where yes means no, whore means bride, rest means turmoil. So the preface to the reader of Mystery of the Lawless invests in Beissel's own word, invokes the editorial "we" dozens of times in two pages. The thing is as apostolic as his proof that truth must first be spoken before it is written, that is, by himself. Facetious returns of such words indict the speaker, "the Whore and her Cup," "explain the Words of God after her crooked Serpentine Will" who must "withdraw with all his Heart and whole Mind from all Vanity, and Love of Creatures, and from all Worldly and carnal or fleshly Desire," "denying the world," a favorite topic of the sanctifieds own thoughts even while the whole of Pennsylvania subculture in its art celebrated the very world its religion forswore. You have to get used to "the Whore together with the Antichrist" being the facetious Beissel himself.

Baptism morphed with the Sabbath in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth made an equal insistence on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (Sachse, 150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. The upshot being that Wohlfarth and Beissel found themselves on the court house steps arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy is that while Beissel is proclaiming himself sultan, introverting his sexuality, baptizing again and again, he is early associated with Franklin who becomes his printer, coins the atonal music of his later community and fosters the decorative art there to the nth degree. All this is simultaneously active more or less with Beissel's theosophical second work in print, the first with Franklin (c. 1729), also of 32 pages, of which 99 were printed because, as Sachse helpfully explains, "the figure 1 stands for the finite or man, while the 0 represents the infinite, and to make the number 100 would have been to place the finite before the infinite" (162). We can't have that. These NINETY NINE MYSTICAL SENTENCES exist translated by Peter Miller in part (1768), issued by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1912. So Beissel in quick succession in two years published four books, the Mystery of Lawlessness, 99 Sayings, a hymnbook of 62 hymns, 31 of his own, Gottliche Liebes (Franklin, 1730) and one on Matrimony, Ehebuchlein (Franklin 1730) in addition to Wohlfarth's Seventh-Day-Sabbath (1729). These would be the points of contention to occupy him the rest of his years: baptism, the Sabbath, wisdom, hymns and music, celibacy.

Denial of sexuality as a perversion of the human seems to have opposite programs in Beissel and Zinzendorf, celibacy on the one and tanticism on the other. Turning freedom of inquiry on its head and substituting their own systems of control, their supercharged terms for sexual denial were similar, from the celestial virgin on. The harm and productivity of their efforts is measured both by their autocracy and amazing outputs of energy, which should not necessarily seem a product of sublimation. Beissel kept publishing prolific editions of his hymnbooks of 1730, 32, 34 (ms. edition) and 36, with Ben Franklin, most of the hymns written by Beissel. All told in those years he was a propaganda machine. The First Century of German Language Printing attributes eight of the twelve known printed works in the colony to Beissel and Wohlfarth (2) before 1738, the Mystery of Lawlessness, German and English editions of 1728, 29, the Ninety-nine Mystical Sentences of 1729-30, a book on marriage as the penitentiary of man, Ehebuchlein...Menschen of 1730 and the hymn books. He and his community built houses for neighbors and held theater even when they marched the road.

This community was in many ways analogous to a large family in the support they gave one another, although one feels an issue under this surface that it is a substitute for the real family and functions like a gang. Celibacy's extremities. How to explain such things? A prejudice against life? You can see it in the theosophy of the cycle of death and rebirth. One life is never enough. Those dying generations at their song says Yeats, dying generations, entropy, life never sufficient. Celibacy, tantricism, magic rituals, incantations, death, rebirth, drug use oppose life which exists in and of itself. Negativity is so strong it casts itself as positive and maligns the positive as negative. Theosophy contributes to this in a range from the dictates of every cult leader like Beissel to every popular media view. That negativity also produces huge creativity, denial, push a thing down here and it comes up there, is something to come to terms with. Polarized or natural? We are unable to think clearly when the poles are reversed! The commonplace phrases of these esoteric teachings increase the reversals: mystic rites, secret rituals, mystic theosophists, altar of mysticisms, fires of theosophy, esoteric speculations, Celestial Eve, heavenly virgin, spiritual virgin, celestial virgin, virgin Sophia, all mixed up with mystic dogmas, spiritual awakening, primitive Christian simplicity, extraordinary revival powers, fervent spirit. As if all you need do to attract a following is tie disparates up in a sack and call it love. The negative joined to its opposite is still negative, thus comes the sensational claim that St. Paul had a agapetae, meaning a live-in snuggle bunny the real version of which might be David's girl who warmed him on his deathbed. Is there a priest, give him a bastard. Is there a romance of Thecla, make it historical. The root of negativity is overturn authority to create undue authority. Error goes in every direction. The one thing none of this bears is the thought, from the apposite Beissel condemnation of those who profane his sabbath to those seduced by women, that the universe, all human relation, every act, every thought, each moment is infused with redemption and the spirit of redemption, so no matter what you have done, thought or said, there is redemption for it.

Even if Beissels's tract against marriage has no copy known there is plenty of evidence of his view. About 1735 he was awakened in his hut by intruders who whipped him presumably for seducing one of the Reformed wives to seek her virginity with him (Sectarians, 254). All opposites! Along with chastity came mortifying the flesh, full beards, pilgrim costume with the implicit violence of that garb. Whether to be a full hermit or merely a monastic seemed the choice in their minds. Of our immediate temptations in this melancholy we have Buñuel again to spank.

To borrow from conspiracy theory, the processes of this control through sexual repression are mesmerist, patterning and depatterning, inversion techniques, hypno-illusions, etc., and even if we question the applications in politics, the techniques are there to see in the Pennsylvania communes.

Zinzendorf

There were many of these mystics. The meditations of Zinzendorf riding horseback to take the gospel to the Indians may resemble the meditations of Crashaw and Donne, but Zinzendorf is a consumed megalomaniac. His mysticism was tantricism, his community autocracy. Pennsylvania is more than toy statistics in the bathtub however. Christopher Sauer's wife went one snowy night to become the spiritual bride of Conrad Beissel at Ephrata. Alexander Mack, Brother Timotheus (Sectarians, 88) got baptized for his godly father of the same name, founder of the Baptists. Conrad Weiser bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to Zinzendorf and back to Muhlenberg's daughter after burning all his prayer books. The New Mooners of Pennsylvania, played trombones at the new moon in the wilderness, holding that prayer ascended in the waxing but descended in the waning moon as did deceased souls (Sectarians, 431). The entrance to the doorway of the Ephrata chapel was low to force the entrant to bow (404). Iron was prohibited in their building because it was unholy in the Temple, as Sachse says in reference to Nebuchadnezzar's dream, "that even in Babylon iron was known as the symbol of destruction" (402), but while iron may have been destructive it was not deceitful. When it served them to spurn Babylon they did, and turning on their head would confirm their learning with Rosicrucian Egyptian-Babylonian ritual. Even while surrendering their so called "Babylonian names given them by their parents at baptism they substituted new spiritual names" (305) embracing Babylon at every turn, admitting Eckerling (Onesimus), Miller (Jaebez) and Weiser (Enoch) to the grandiose Order of Melchizedek (386). The Zionitic Brotherhood at Ephrata could in as little as 40 days so completely physically and spiritually rehabilitate as to lengthen your years to 5557 in perfect health and contentment. The initiate restored to the state of perfect innocence of Adam, reborn by fasting, chanting, and drugs, was a perfect Casteneda of the 18th century (361f). The good news for historians is that these elites must still be alive to be interviewed. Of course they are yet in their baby hood, so may not be compatible with rational discourse. The underlying purpose of these efforts, as reported by Sachse of Johann Frantz Reguier, was the good Pennsylvania quest that "by a strict life and bodily denial one may grow and increase in sanctification" (362). And when the self-administered treatment failed and he had after some time regained his senses, what did Reguier do but go off "on July 15, 1735…for Georgia in the hope of meeting Count Zinzendorf and through him learning the way to perfection and sanctification' (quoted by Sachse, 364). "The fortunate adept who had thus successfully completed the ordeal, with physical body as clean and pure as than of a new-born child, his spirit filled with divine light, with vision without limit, and with mental powers unbounded…should finally be able to say to himself, I AM, THAT I AM."

Sachse says they aped the monastic customs of the Middle Ages in night vigils, tonsures, regalia, priesthoods (375), a mystical theology that included baptism for the dead, an even more primitive than reincarnation, the most absurd instance being the creation of "immunity for deceased or absent kinfolk" (366) gained by the outer faith. Medieval except that in his high calling and self esteem Beissel was forced to adopt the office of Vater instead of merely Brother, a title "too commonplace" (367). Such orders, rituals and hierarchies of law and outer ceremony were just opposite the Oley Newborn so totally dominated by inner vision. Signs, countersigns and mystics, how embarassed was Yeats when he practiced the rituals of the Golden Dawn?

The words of Beissel and Zinzendorf held the flower of peace but beneath was a bite. They could not mutually humble themselves enough to even meet in the flesh. Beissel "regarded himself as of a higher rank in the theosophical fraternity, considered it against his dignity to call on Zinzendorf (Sachse, 448) who responded by letter that Beissel "should descend from his spiritual height, that others might sit alongside of him without danger to their lives" (449). This from the one who threatened to kill Weiser. The two are paired. Both loved secret orders, the paraphernalia of medals, robes and rituals and the power that the command of others conferred on them. The Moravians had the Order of the Mustard Seed and the Order of the Passion of Jesus (Sachse 4548f). Both were social visionaries. Zinzendorf had his seven ecumenical conferences to found "one congregation of God in the Spirit" (442). Throughout these things their words about Christ and love are enticing to the extreme, but the liberty and love they speak are completely opposite their autocratic practice. 440. Bethlehem and Ephrata communities (435)."The tail of a comet portended switches with which God would lash and judge them with great "calamities, 417, compelling Beissel to issue Mystische Abhandlung uberdie Schopfung und vondes Menschen Fall (1745), A Dissertation on Mans Fall, Englished in 1765 (433) which Peter Miller (Agrippa) says "has gone further than even the holy Apostles in their revelations" (422). No wonder Christopher Sauer says, but not in devotion, "this one must be regarded as a God" which he calls "spiritual harlotry and idolatry" (343, 44) in regard to Beissel's hymn to himself, Hymn 400 in the collection Sauer printed for Ephrata in 1739, Zionitic Incense Hill, (Zionitischer Weyrauchs Hugel) (320). But of course this is a god-awakened soul, that word, awakened, being the favorite of them all, but it had several meanings. Peter Miller in the Ephrata Chronicon supports the mythology. He says the claims that Beissel can render himself invisible are true, "the spirit under whose guidance he was, at times made him invisible" (332).

If it is a mystery how Blake yokes such disparates in his visionary poems, bespeaking at the same time primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man, describing his Fall in mysterious quaternaries, he is just the most lovable case axiomatic of 18th century minds where renaissance cabala remarried a pietistic lifestyle. Were there such extremes in England as turned up in Penn's Woods of a mix of emotion and pietism with the renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride? Blake got it from Swedenborg. Swedenborg got it from Zinzendorf. Thus the teachings of "the occult philosophy of the Mystics and Cabalists of the Middle Ages [were joined] with the severely simple Sabbatarian worship and tenets set forth in their primitive Bible teachings" (German Sectarians, 31). There was always a heavy blend of Rosicrucianism in Boehme, in the mystics of the Wissahickon, in Beissel, Zinzendorf, in them all, Muhlenberg aside.

Theosophists are well loved nor confined to particular time, place and station. Percival Lowell in Occult Japan makes what we can only call a space jump when he undergoes possession in the Shinto ritual. Whether to be possessed by food or the gods? Shall we be satisfied merely to say our names in sobriety and let that be enough? Sauer's sour grapes, for "all was well between the two men until Sauer's wife left her husband and family to follow…a stricter observance (313). This is one who "journeyed towards the valley of the Pequea to bring about an awakening among the Mennonites, who had settled there, many of whom had become followers of the seductive Bauman and his noxious "Newborn" teaching.

"Many thousands of these people cared so little for religion [or so much] that it became a common saying in reference to such, who cared neither for God nor His word, that they had the Pennsylvania religion" (Spangenberg as quoted by Sachse, I, 442).

Hawthorne's Dimmesdale impregnated a naif to prove that human nature can neither be created nor destroyed by ordinary means.

There was a continual flow between the Moravians at Bethlehem and Beissel at Ephrata about 1742 (Sachse, German Sectarians, 424).

Esoteric teaching, secret ritual, mystic behaviors have much invaluable surface truth meant as bait for all poor flies who find the sweetness bitter as they dive, but with enjoyment skim the surfaces. Deeper dived bitter truth, which is so sweet and satisfying beneath, is the way of opposites in earth.

Nothing is so unimportant as the principled conflict of principals.

Megalomania is incomplete without projection, that holiest of psychological mechanisms where the outer world is inflicted with the inward state.

The comet must be punitive if Beissel is so and his word greater than God's.

It's easy to exaggerate liberty, from Gottlieb Mittelberger (1756) to Jack D. Marietta and Gail Stuart Rowe's Troubled Experiment (University of Pennsylvania, 2006), which is just shocked to learn that the crime rate among Germans was greater than among English, as if there were such statistics. But Pennsylvania includes more notable lawless mystical hard cases than libertines. These made a work of love and roaring contradiction. What makes up spiritual lawlessness can be left to the induction from cases interesting in themselves, but it is a little ironic that one of the first publications in Pennsylvania was Conrad Beissel's The Mystery of Lawlessness (Andrew Bradford, 1729), translated by Michael Wohlfarth.

[One is tempted to be facetious and say that elaborations on these practices in Felker's Schwamp coined a deep pit baptism. Celebrants there had feet tied to a rope suspended from a branch over water and were raised and lowered three times head first. You believe that? Oley Judizers practiced left and right side baptism. Then there was foot first baptism, reserved for sects whose final planting at burial, made ready to be raised.]Why douse a sick girl with buckets of water three times in the middle of the night? To be able to say at her funeral that it was just in time for her death. Sprinkle or plunge, forwards or backward, splash one or three, that's obvious Pennsylvania.

Some Sources:

On the musical compositions of Conrad Beissel. Peter Miller to Ben Franklin, President of the American Philosophical Society (1768)

"The Present, which I have added, was the Father's musical Book, wherein are contained the most part of the Musical Concerts, by himself composed. It did cost three Brethren three Quarters of a Year Work to write the same: by the Imbelllshment thereof It will appear, what a great Regard we had for our Superior, In the whole Book there Is no musical Error. And as It was written before the Mystery of Singing was fully discovered, there- for are not all the Keys therein mentioned. The Masters of that Angelic Art will be astonished to see that therein a Man, destituted of all human Instruction, came therein to the highest Pitch of Perfection, merely through his own Industry. Also, that when he did set up a School In the Camp, not only the Members of the Single Station were therewith occupied for many years : but also the Family- Brethren were also thereby enamoured, that their natural Affection, to their Family suffered a great Loss.

It Is a Wonder, how the even Notes and few half-notes can be so marvellously transposed, as to make thereby 1000 Melodies, all of 5 Tunes, and some of 6 Tunes, yea some of 7 Tunes, also that they came not one the other In the Way. In the Composition the Father had the same Way as in his Writings, viz : he suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly, also were all the Melodies flown from the Mystery of Singing, that was opened within him, there- fore have they that Simplicity, which was required, to raise Edification. It Is certain, that the Confusion of Languages, which began at Babel, never did affect Singing: and therefore is in Substance of the Matter in the Whole."
It's very rare to find someone who writes down something and does reveal their disease in the writing.

Outbreaks of Pennsylvania Lawless

2009-05-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

Outlaw Religion

Lawless or lawful, pre-colonial religious history in Pennsylvania is dominated by feuding shepherds. Right out of Colin Clout, pastors and parties feud for the same reasons as their shepherd analogies. Fame, boredom, spite, glory, these alliance-shifting friends, enemies at one, the next and back. It would seem comical if we invest their passions with ours. Pastors and people escaped the tyranny of the old world but found no plenty without labor or freedom without discord. The opposite of the golden age of singing, quarreling. Religious fratricides of early Pennsylvania are supercharged by later partisans. Contemporaries who perversely hold the law of grace assassinate character, ideas and activities. Historians of the institutions these activities founded argue based on beliefs and not evidence. Principals, historians and antiquarians produce the most startling effects of light and dark. Early religion in Pennsylvania is like a pathology. The more they claim the right the more wrong they are.

Pennsylvania Religion

"If the head of a house should give offense to some insolent Irishman or brutal German, he may very likely find that some harm has been done to his cattle or crops during the night, since everything stands out in the open, exposed to the revenge and spite of such callous people… before he is able to summon the aid of a neighbor or the justice of the peace, the enemy may already have perpetrated the utmost damage and fled several miles away into the forest" (Journals, I, 136).

Intruders at a wedding "scoff at churches and preachers," (I, 136) says Muhlenberg. Adam Hains attempted to burn down the house of his son-in-law, justice of the peace Conrad Weiser, at night with his family in it (Wallace, 208). The lawlessness that thrived in "Pennsylvania liberty" fit nicely the Newborn philosophy of irreligiousness. This violence and intimidation were an important background to Newborn success. Muhlenberg says tolerance of lawless behaviour stemmed from fear. The pool of anti-clericalism masked personal vengeance, which implies a positive and a negative expression of Pietism, positive since many people, generating so many sects, sought spirituality with an emotive base, negative when inflamed emotions turned against neighbors.

A more common explanation from Sachse to Mittelberger's lament is that in the new world they lost their faith. The two are often one. The tautology and nihilism of the Newborns was a tip of the branch of liberty and license. "Even the most exemplary preachers, especially in rural districts, are often reviled, laughed at and mocked by young and old, like Jews" (Mittelberger, 48). How then to distinguish the newborns from the unborns so to speak, when the newborns seem to speak for all? "Such outrageous coarseness and rudeness result from the excessive freedom in that country, and from the blind zeal of the many sects" (Mittelberger, 48). Thus the much-quoted phrase: "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers." A broader case for Newborn membership includes every anticlerical spirit focused by the more spectacular Newborns. Mittelberger laments:

"In Pennsylvania there exist so many varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to name them all. Many people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone. Furthermore there are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but who do not even want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments and to the Holy Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in the existence of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think that everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not only is everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to express these beliefs publicly and freely" ( 22).

In the days before 1750 Muhlenberg says that makeshift preachers did "not know the fundamental truths of religion, but they affect only the outward forms and dispute about such matters as altar and table, the bread and the host, the preacher's robe and vestments, about whether to say Vater Unser or Unser Vater. This gives rise to heated religious disputes and disgraceful word battles among the common people—between husbands and wives, among neighbors, parents, children, relatives, and friends" ( I, 152). Mittelberger illustrates, "I knew an old German neighbor of mine very well. He had been a Lutheran. Then he rebaptized himself in running water. Some time later he circumcised himself and thereafter believed only in the Old Testament. Finally, just before he died, he baptized himself again by sprinkling water over his head" (84). Compare Beissels many baptisms above.

The difference between the Newborns and other rhetorical lawlessness was narrow. Beissel, founder of the Ephrata Cloister, and Newborn founder, Baumann, insisted absolutely upon their authority in everything. Reformed founder, Boehm had to have his way, and his usurper Weiss, his. Each arrogated a law. They said they were following God in overthrowing men. Zinzendorf, the Moravian had the sweetest tongue to speak the redemption and the most autocratic command of the redeemed. He tells "'Benedict, I am giving your daughter to Eschenbach; you and your wife I am taking with me to Germany, and your estate belongs to the Saviour'" (Muhlenberg, I, 150). Sects overruled the minds of their followers. Conrad Weiser bounced from being Lutheran to being celibate with Beissel to Zinzendorf' and back to Lutheran through the offices of his father-in-law, Muhlenberg whose daughter he married. When the much reconverted Indian scout left Beissel it was because he was "compelled to protest for a considerable time against the domination of conscience, the suppression of innocent minds, against the prevailing pomp and luxury…" (Weiser, 128). When he left Zinzendorf that cult prayed for his death! The choices were either subscribe to the old world church, the newer Pietists, the religious no-religion of the Newborns, or no religion, called the Pennsylvania religion: "It had become proverbial, respecting any one who cared not for god and his word, that 'he was of the Pennsylvanian religion'" (Spangenberg's Life of Zinzendorf, in Wallace 246).

A Pennsylvania Dada Cult Der Neugeborene

Such rhetoric seems Elizabethan. The apparent secular irreligiousness, of say a "Spinoza, Collins, Spenzer, Bayl," (Muhlenberg, I, 139) is notwithstanding religious. In May 1747 Muhlenberg mentions a woman in "Oley, where practically all the inhabitants are scoffers and blasphemers. It is a place like Sodom and Gomorrah and I have preached there several times for the sake of a Lot or two who live there, but the wanton sinners only scoffed and jeered at me" (I, 146). In June, "we stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect called Newborn…he will listen to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher revelation in all its parts…when he came to this country, he joined the turbulent sect" ( I, 149). Presiding at the funeral of an ex-Newborn member in 1753, Muhlenberg says, he had "lived in a region inhabited by people who hold all kinds of curious opinions, despise preachers, churches, and sacraments without discrimination, and pride themselves in their own righteousness" (I, 357). During the service, "an old man, who called himself Newborn, stood outside, before the door, and began to preach to several people of his persuasion with noisy blustering which was intended to disturb me."

Monopolizing the term Newborn to denote a sociopath might seem a mockery of these pietistic people to get some integrity into their religion. Perhaps it was so meant and was not ironic. Pietists believed in a new birth, a regeneration leading to a changed life, an unworldly life much as evangelicals do who end up discrediting themselves. The Newborn, wrenching the term, made it virtually opposite and antagonistic. New born of course signifies spiritual birth. Despite the similarity to evangelical parlance the Neugeborene founded no denomination. Among the host of visionaries, starting about 1714, Baumann began to travel from Oley into Philadelphia for dialectics against Quakers and the populace on the courthouse steps, once promising to walk on the Delaware river. They donot say whether this was in winter. His comeuppance came from Beissel, even nastier, when Baumann went to visit at Ephrata (c.1722). Beissel was offended at this freedom from sin and offered his own stink (literally) as a remedy and repudiation of Baumann's sinlessness. Such rhetorical turns enabled his seduction of other men's wives with promises of spiritual intercourse. Is this a less danger than the Newborn?

Muhlenberg (June 10, 1747) gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages, which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (I, 149). Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupy what Muhlenberg says of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral: "this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him, that he was a child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches, schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc" (I, 357-358).

Pennsylvania Dadaist

A response to the Newborn came from George Michael Weiss, Reformed pastor, who issued Der In Der Americani Schen Wildnusz in 1729. In the guise of a visit to the farm of a Newborn adherent the central point is the Newborn's denial: "I have worked hard and that is the result, but I do not see any reason why I should thank God" (summarized by Hinke in Sachse, 157-59). "I do not need all that, for I am a New Born. I am perfectly without sin. God is in me and I am in God," presumably quoting John 14:20, "I am in my Father, you are me and I am in you." When the narrator poses four ways God could be in him "the New Born then claims without hesitation that He is in him in the most perfect way, because He is perfectly sinless." There being no greater authority than himself he "answers by denying the authority of the Bible," that is, he is his own Scripture. Trumping the objective universe, in answer to the query, "How do you know that you are new born?" he answers, 'I feel it within me by a peculiar illumination of God's Spirit.'" Cautioned about the danger of self-deception, "the New Born answers that he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things as have been mentioned. Especially does he object to divine worship in a church and to ministers." Finally, QED, "it is all the same whether you talk or don't talk."

Such speaking lent itself to "Pennsylvania liberty," hence the groundswell supporting the Newborns was a patina to justify lawless acts. Dreams, visions and inspirations of modern appeal provide a greater context for 18th century Pennsylvania setting out to "confound men." In the religious customs of his day Baumann was a Pennsylvania Dadaist.

The Dada Manifesto of the early 20th century writes large the thinking of the Baumann cult. When Tristan Tarza proclaimed that Dadaism "expresses the knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither away" (Motherwell, 78-79) we hear Beissel and Zinzendorf too. It is the perfect religious credo: "everything one looks at is false" except the cultist. "Everyone dances to his own boom-boom." Tarza's aphorisms, the "abolition of logic…memory...unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity" (78-9) are very suitable for a zealot. Were we to substitute "religion" for "art" in the Neu-merz manifesto of Victor Zygouov (1997) we might have a Neugeborene:"In art, Dadaism is the concept of anti-art. All art that one sees is just a product of the society that created it. ( Because Dadaism is in opposition to all society, it is in opposition to the art which society produced as well."

To spell it out, religion is just a product of society, and because the Newborn is in opposition to society he is in opposition to the religion society produced. The only truth is the inward illumination, a particularly religious conundrum, kergyma vs. truth, me vs. thee, rhema vs. logos. The word fragment "merz" was discovered by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters in a Hanover trash can. Pennsylvania prophets resemble Dadaists who "express the knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither away." This withering of law is a common denominator, among Labadists, Rosicrusians, various Pietists, Dunkers, German Baptists, Moravians, Ephratatites, Baumann, Beissel, Zinzendorf.

Oley

Oley was a territory of mockery: "Many agitators appeared among the backwoods, among them Matthias Baumann from Oley who came in 1719 (sic.) to conduct revivals among the godless settlers. A visionary, he taught that his disciples were free from sin and had no need for Scripture, sacraments or marriage. Many converts flocked to even Quakers, Reformed and Lutheran" (Earnst, 48). Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn. (Philip E. Pendleton. Oley Valley Heritage. The Colonial Years: 1700-1775).

"One of our churchmen approached a rich scoffer in Oly Township and desired to borrow some money.
The rich man said to the poor man, "Do you know who my God is?"
The poor man replied, "No."
The rich man pointed to his manure pile outside the door and said, 'there is my God; he gives me wheat and everything I need" (I, 138).
Wheat, of course, was the region's cash crop. Was this rich scoffer our Conrad?

Another, admonished to give thought to his death, laughed "that he had long since thought of his death and decided, as far as his soul was concerned, to enter into a swine, since he was fond of pork anyhow" (Muhlenberg, I, 138).

Mittelberger's homily against Conrad Reiff and Arnold Huffnagel for their contempt and mockery of the clergy is his most detailed report of Oley. (Journey to Pennsylvania, 84) In it we understand the fundamental mission of the Newborn to mock the clergy.

Mittelberger made example such an "objectionable preacher" giving a Newborn parody.
"Alas, among the preachers there are also several quite irritating ones who offend many people, besides causing much annoyance to our ministers. At a gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with whom he ministers. I will cite one example of such an objectionable preacher. His name was Alexander. At a gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with whom he had been carousing he announced that with his sermon he would so move the people standing in front of him that all of them would begin to cry, but at the very same time all of those standing behind him would start laughing. He wagered these same young farmers a considerable sum that he would be able to do this. And on a certain agreed day he appeared at a church meeting, stationed himself in the midst of the assemblage, and began to preach with a great deal of power and emotion. When he saw that his listeners had become so moved that they began to cry, he put his hands behind him, pulled his coat-tails apart, and revealed through a pair of badly torn breeches his bare behind, which he scratched with one hand during this demonstration. At this those who were standing behind him could not help roaring with laughter; and so he won his bet. An account of this disgusting incident appeared both in the German and English newspapers of Philadelphia" (45).

Following the riches theme, Muhlenberg says life in Oley was "lucrative and lascivious." A third time, June 10, 1747, "eight miles from New Hanover we stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect called Newborn. . .he separated from the (Reformed) Church and the Lord's Supper and refused to give the oath of loyalty to the then ruling elector, for which he was examined by the consistory and imprisoned. According to his opinion he had been persecuted and expelled for the sake of Christ and the truth, but as a matter of fact he was only confirmed in his stubbornness. He will listen to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher revelation in all its parts, since he is weak in understanding, headstrong, and hot-tempered; and unfortunately he abuses the freedom of Pennsylvania. When he came to this country, he joined the turbulent sect of people who call themselves Newborn."

We need a word like fact, but facts themselves are interpreted. It’s not really fiction if we use "day" in a generic sense, it’s just inexact. This inexactitude we call fiction, but fiction has intention, however fact does too, to prove a point in disregard of all other facts. This affects every written account. To the mind of the reader factual assumptions are invisible and fictional ones obvious.

Confounding Men

With apology to Kafka, Matthius Baumann had his own metamorphosis during a sudden illness in 1701. His only publication was a tract written in Oley in 1723 intended for distribution in Pennsylvania, Ein Ruf an die Unwiedergebohrene Welt (A Call to the Unregenerate). Parts of this are preserved in the Chronicon Ephretense (1786). In mockery of the inner light Baumann was "translated to heaven and given the power of prophecy" (Sachse, 73). He had trances for 14 days, saw the end of the world, had an interview with the divine. "All church and sect life as it was known - clergy, sacrament, ritual, catechism, scripture, prayer, communal worship-was an abomination before God and a waste of time. The only way to salvation was through a traumatic experience of spiritual death and rebirth, which incorporated an actual interview with the heavenly Being. Those who underwent this wrenching transformation emerged saved and, from then on, forever free of and incapable of sin" (Pendleton, 106).

The Newborn believed "perfection" was a massive internal revelation from which the "babe" could not fall. Whether the faith was Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian or anything else it was sin. More traditional communities thought that "New Born beliefs more dangerous to people's souls and to the social order than those of any other sect in Pennsylvania" (Pendleton, 106). The ridicule and blasphemy the Newborn urged was first cited in the Chronicon (17), a result of their desire to "confound men," to disrupt their religious services and rhetoric. In this confounding, Oley and the Newborn joined at the hip. Oley, derived from the Lenape name, meaning "hole" or "kettle," was thus a hollow ringed with mountains, a caldron of prophetic thornapple.

But while early it continued a little. In 1753 (although the account is published in 1756), Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn in his Journey. But Mittelberger gives the Newborn current status, including them equally in his heterogeneous catalogue of "Lutherans, members of the Reformed Church, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites or Anabaptists, Herrenhuter or Moravian Brothers, Pietists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, New-born, Freemasons, Separatists, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes, and Indians" (41).

Silencing the newborn

Boehm wrote of Oley in 1740: "The worst were those who called themselves 'The New Born.' Without hesitation they declared themselves to be equal to God and greater than our Saviour; they pretended to be free (from sin)…however, after God had removed such shameless blasphemers of His name, the true Christians met and desired to establish, by the help of God, a congregation according to our true Reformed doctrine" (Life and Letters, 1740, 278-79) He refers to the founding of the Oley Reformed Church in 1736. Boehm said he had been aware of the Newborn since he was first in the country, eighteen years before, that is, in 1722. He mentions them first in his letter of 1728 among "all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks" (Life and Letters, 1728, 161).

The multiple references of Muhlenberg and Mittelberger to the Newborn contradict Boehm's statement that they had been silenced, as does the Old Moravian record of the Oley church in 1736 that "there were at that time all kinds of spirits in Oley, of which the Newborn were the dominant party" (cited by Hinke in Life and Letters, 110). The Moravian version of the silencing is that it came about as a direct result of their efforts, namely of Spangenberg's, who in 1737 "…came to Oley and there he gave such testimony regarding the meritorious death of Christ, (this language, also that of Conrad Reiff's will, suggests he became a Moravian) with such a demonstration of the Spirit, that the power of darkness received a severe blow. His first sermon was delivered in the house of Jonathan Herbein and the second in the house of Abraham Bertholet. He attacked the newborn in his discourse from the words of I John 1:7,8,9. Through this address the spirit of the Newborn was so broken that it could not gain strength again and is daily becoming weaker" (Hinke, Life and Letters, 111).

Everybody wanted a part of the Newborn's demise. Ephratites claimed "it was observed that from this time on [after Baumann's audience with Beissel] they lost all power to spread their seductions any farther, which finally died out with their originators" (Chronicon, 17). Thus Boehm must share Baumann with the Moravians and the Moravians with The Ephratites.
Newborn notoriety was so much greater than their actual numbers, for as Boehm said, some partially agreed with them, swelling their ranks. We discern true believers, partial believers and in the pond that supports the lily pad where the fish blogs, a great swell of anti-clericalism and unbelief that the Newborn focused and gave expression to.

Outlaw Outtakes on Conrad Reiff

Some of Conrad Reiff's biography in The Historical Review fell to the cutting floor, but suppositions continue that he and Gottlieb Mittelberger were friends of a sort. Before he left Pennsylvania in 1753 for Germany Mittelberger must have attended the funeral service of Anna Reiff. Everyone else was there. The object of his pejorative, Conrad Reiff, was. We develop the likelihood of their contact in the article. At the funeral of their mother various contacts among the frontier brothers occurred, at the funeral and also at the reading of the will of their brother George in 1759. The conflicted Balthaser Gehr, son of Anna Reiff II and Conrad Gehr, probably attended. He had fiduciary and legal care of his cousin Philip Reiff, Conrad’s son, from 1786 to his death in 1815. Sort of like the son of the innkeeper in the Fellowship of the Ring, Balthaser Gehr (cf. Pendleton, 137, 147) married the daughter of that equally wealthy neighbor of Conrad Reiff, Antony Jaeger. In 1767 Jaeger's "sons Daniel and Henry, and his son-in-law Balthaser Gehr were tried for assault and battery on the Jaegers' lifelong neighbor, miller Heinrich Kerst. A neighbor, Jacob Silvious, also stood trial for coming to Kerst's defense" (Pendleton, 147). Balthaser exercised a power of attorney for his infirm cousin, Philip Reiff, second son of Conrad, in 1786 (Pendleton, 137). More outbreaks, Baltes went Oley.

The disposition of another son of Gehr, Philip, is unknown. He appears in the ledger of the Old Salford Store (c. 1766-1774) reported as, "Gehr, Philip; Conrad Gehr's son of Germantown" (John R. Tallis, The Perkiomen Region, II, 33).] Near the bottom of the will of Hans George Reiff (d. 1726), a different handwriting than the will reads, "Cunrad Gehr married Anna," (Riffe, 20) suggesting this was written after probate. Gehr was issued a patent by the land office for 34 acres in the Salfords in 1735, the same year as Garrett Clemens, Christopher Dock, Peter Wentz and Hans Reiff among others (H. W. Kriebel in The Perkiomen Region, V, 11), but Heckler speculates he possibly there was confused with Conrad Custer (Heckler, Lower Salford, I, 13). Gehr had at least two sons. Baltazar, or Baltes Gehr served in the Pennsylvania legislature. He was mentioned in his uncle's will, (George Reiff) in 1759, "my will is after my sister's son Baltes should set up his trade, my wife shall give him twenty pounds to buy tools for it" (Riffe, 28). It should be noted that Anna was not called Anna Maria as her full name is suggested to be, but merely Anna, like her mother, who signed Anna in the Landes will and on the board in the attic.

Conrad Gehr's Peccadilloes

Oley affected Conrad Reiff, brothers Peter and George and Jacob's daughter Catherine who all either lived there or owned land. Spiritually the effects of Oley were more serious upon Conrad's mother and sister (Anna and Anna Maria) through the aforesaid sister's husband Conrad Gehr. Gehr's experience of the Newborn is as important as brother-in-law Conrad's because they together flesh out the satirical Newborn beliefs and show the influence in the family. Genealogist Harry Reiff says the "family knew about Conrad's (Gehr) peccadilloes, as indicated in the will of Hans George's son, George (d.1759), who died leaving a legacy to nephew Baltazar with an admonition not to permit his father, Conrad Gehr, to have any of the legacy" (Letter of 2/13/2002). Gehr's peccadilloes were 1) that he operated a tavern in Germantown (before 1753) where Newborn blasphemy was commonplace and 2) that he had been imprisoned for fraud (Muhlenberg, I, 353). Gehr figures prominently in Muhlenberg's writing after the funeral of Conrad's mother, Anna. The daughter, Anna Maria, had been "attached to the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church," which means Muhlenberg must have heard firsthand the distress Gehr put his wife through by his behaviour. This distress doubled because at that time the mother lived with her daughter. Muhlenberg says,

"During my first years here [1742 and following] she was living with her daughter in Germantown…for the sake of her daughter the distressed old widow stayed at the former's home…she was obliged to listen to many a blasphemous utterance and witness many an offense on the part of her son-in-law, who was Reformed by birth, but in this country not only forsook the Word of God and the other means of grace, but also despised and ridiculed them" (I, 352).

Muhlenberg stipulates that the "offenses" included, that "the said man maintained a public house and it occurred to him that he might institute a so-called assembly of worship in his house on Sundays. For this purpose he associated himself with a half-educated but totally perverted Christian who was to deliver a sermon or address on physic or natural science at every meeting. The auditors were obligated to pay three pence apiece each time, and this money was to be consumed in drink after the speech" (I, 353).

New Born ideas gave a metaphysic to tavern talk, even if it sounds like Paine's Age of Reason (1795) or other enlightenment doctrines, such attitudes were early 18th century and German, the specific form that Mittelberger saw affecting Conrad Reiff. But it was not isolated from all the other revisions of order in PA from Wohlfarth and Beissel standing on the court house steps to argue which day of the week was the sabbath (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 154) to Gehr's substitution of tavern for church, science for scripture and the price of a drink for the offering. These suggest that the 1701 Blue Law of the General Court of Germantown was not being enforced, which said: "no inn-keepers on the first day called Sunday in God's service, shall hold gatherings of guests. . .on pain of whatever penalty the court of record shall inflict" (Pennypacker, Germantown, 283). Gehr was the brunt of gossip. Muhlenberg had heard further: "a trustworthy man named Georg Stoltz came to me and related the following incident. One evening he and a Swiss gentlemen were obliged to stop at the blasphemer's house and put up for the night. He went out of his way to annoy his two guests with sinful talk. Among other things he said that the context of nature is God, that the world came into existence by an accident in eternity, that the universe maintained itself, etc. What the parsons say about God, about a revealed religion, about a Saviour, and about heaven and hell, they have to say to make a living and in order to lead the masses by the nose."

Although Muhlenberg does not make the connection, such views easily mask themselves as naturalism.Gehr's satire is very much in the Newborn manner, like Conrad and those others to whom the sacraments were "ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Muhlenberg), who uttered "such blasphemous words against our Saviour" (Boehm), who theatrically mocked preachers in parody (Mittelberger), who "despise preachers, churches and sacraments without discrimination" (Muhlenberg), who scoff that manure is life and pig the destiny of the soul. The Newborn catechism was as active in the tavern of Gehr as in the township of Oley except that Gehr went his brother-in-law one better and mixed scoff with drink.

Such tavern philosophy is reported in practically every contemporary account of the Newborn. Gehr's metaphysic implicates both brother and brother-in-law in the Newborn practice. While Boehm's summary of the sects names Puritans, Baptists and Pietists it is really the Newborn of Gehr's metaphysic that he exposes:

"Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc., among whom dreadful errors prevail; indeed heinous blasphemies against our great God and Savior and their own exaltation over His Majesty; for they claim that they have essential divinity in themselves; that they cannot sin…they believe there is no other heaven or hell than what is here on earth; they even deny Divine Providence, and assert that nothing needs God's blessing, but that all products of the ground and all offspring of animals and of the human race, come simply from nature, without any care on the part of God, and that prayer also is useless. (Life and Letters, (1728) 161."

Prodigal Son

While Conrad became a prodigal in joining the Newborn at midlife, he later seems to repudiate them in word and deed, which suggests that he came home. for that story you have to get the Review.

He was not a recent immigrant to Philadelphia, had lived in Skippack with his family from at least 1717, the first mention of his father's land. His brother Jacob was named in 1723 as an agent for the government. Though Reformed, his father, Hans George, was a signatory witness of the trust agreement for the Salford Mennonite Meeting House in 1725. There has been some suggestion that Conrad's mother, Anna Maria, was the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed church minion.

His first explicit mention occurs in his father's will of 1726 where the estate was equally divided between himself and his siblings. His name next appears with his brothers, Peter and George, in their petition to Governor Gordon of April 29, 1728 where 74 "Back Inhabitors," residents along Skippack Creek, sought protection against the Indians. He was an executor (with Henry Funk and Christian Allebach) of the will of Claus Upleger, drawn up August 3, 1730: "Guardians or Executors over my wife, children and all the goods which I left behind" (Heckler, History of Franconia Township, 10-11).

About this time he began to prepare to leave Skippack for Oley, where he bought 300 acres in 1730. Remaining yet a while, he again petitioned the Assembly with his neighbors in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). He is doubtless included with his brothers in the recriminations of the rival Reformed shepherds, George Michael Weiss and John Philip Boehm which preoccupied the founding of the Reformed Church in Skippack. These disputes began with Weiss's arrival in September 1727. Boehm includes them all in the phrase, "Jacob Reiff and his brothers" (Letter of 1730 in Life and Letters, 217). In these years, 1727 – 1731, Conrad probably took care of his brother Jacob's farm while Jacob was abroad, that is, from the end of 1727, with one six month respite, until September 1731 when he returned from his second voyage.

Conrad may have bought the land in Oley in anticipation of his marriage of 1733. Maybe he was tired of being of the "party of Reiff" that Boehm so incessantly argued his brother Jacob ran in Skippack, sort of an out of the frying pan into the fire thing. Maybe it was the expression of a pioneering spirit. If however he was seeking peace and quiet from religious disputes he could not have gone in a worse direction. He was one of those worldly sons that Muhlenberg disapproved. Ruminating over the matriarch Anna's obsequies in 1753 he says, "she had several married sons who are well thought of, and some of these profess the Reformed religion while others believe in nothing but the transitory riches of this earth" (Muhlenberg, I, 352).

Conrad moved to Oley in 1733 and married Anna Margaretha Kuhlwein, Mary, daughter of Philip Kuhlwein, brother-in-law of Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborn. Kuhlwein had pioneered that area as an advance for Baumann in 1709. When Kuhlwein chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene colony he and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers (Pendleton, 106). Since Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise, it is no surprise that Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after Baumann's death in 1727.

We should probably assume Conrad Reiff's acceptance of Newborn beliefs, although they were pretty different from those in which he was raised. In marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons, he would have to inherit extensive land holdings. Marriage transported him into the bosom of the Newborn community. Thus, he immediately is identified with the twenty or so families that originally settled the north Oley valley starting about 1712 (Pendleton, 27): Baumann, Bertolet, Levan, DeTurk, Joder (Yoder), Kuhlwein, Huffnagel, Schenkel, Keim, Schneider, Hoch, Ballie, Peter, Herbein, Weber, Kersten, Aschmann, Ritter, and Kauffmann (Pendleton, 18). No one benefited more from the Newborn than he, who gained a wife, a homestead, two sons and inherited Philip Kuhlwein's estate in less than four years, ranking him among the largest landholders and candidate for richest man of Oley, far surpassing his brother Jacob down in Skippack. He had a little success in the "transitory riches."

Not only did Conrad Reiff inherit Kuhlwein's estate upon his death in 1736 (Pendleton, 108), he seems to have inherited Baumann's as well. Comparing Pendleton's maps of the Oley Zone of 1725 with 1750, the configurations of the Baumann and Kuhlwein estates of 1725, which adjoin on a southwest axis, are roughly equivalent to the Conrad Reiff estate of 1750. In the 1750 map which indicates Conrad Reiff's holdings (the estate of Philip Kuhlwein), the two tracts seem to join, as if Baumann's estate were inherited by Kuhlwein and then that augmented section inherited by Conrad Reiff. When Baumann died in 1727 did he deed it to his brother-in-law? The two estates that became one were then inherited by Reiff in 1737. Why wouldn't he remain stanch when after Baumann's death the Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736) founded the Oley Reformed Church ( Hinke, Life and Letters, 34)? Conrad must have seemed in 1733 a good prospect to his father-in-law for all that he, even then, intended to trust him with.

Conrad's Religion

Whatever the outcome, the reputation of Conrad Reiff was materially damaged, for the Journey was "widely read and quoted" at the time of its publication in Frankfurt in 1756. "Writers in the latter half of the eighteenth century borrowed freely from it" and "the book remained well known in the nineteenth century" (Mittleberger, Handlin and Clive, xvii). Folks back home and in subsequent generations must have wondered what happened to Conrad Reiff. But folks closer to Skippack and Germantown also wondered what happened to him, as if the geography of Oley had spiritual connotations.

The Collection

That Conrad Reiff didn't die until more than 20 years after the report of his death suggests there may be more truth to the eagles than we can literally recognize. How dramatic did it have to be? His change of heart is evidenced in a collection taken in September 1764 for the building of the Wentz Church, successor to the previously established Reiff Church.

"The Evangelic Reformed Congregation in Skippack found themselves necessitated for building of a House of Worship by Reason of the Great Distance they have to church or meeting, which is Six miles or more." Their intention, "their indispensable Duty" was so that "their Youth might be the better brought up in the Nurture of the Lord and to the Praise of His Holy Name." The fundraising efforts however had fallen short, "they find themselves obliged to apply to the Charitable Benevolence of all well disposed Christians to contribute their Mite towards the finishing of the said Meeting House according to their good Will and Abilities-Knowing that the Lord will richly reward all Such Charitable Gifts or Alms, Which are given with a Simplicit Heart" (The Perkiomen Region, I, 38). Since the first collecting tour raised only 12 pounds, 4 shillings a second effort was made outside the immediate congregation. George Alsentz, the Evangelical Reformed minister, urged (August 1764): "In as much as the generous contributions hitherto received from kind friends were far from sufficient to defray the expenditures of our church we are obliged to turn to other benefactors to find out their benevolent disposition toward our enterprise…May the God of all mercy send his richest blessing upon all benefactors, such is my wish, and in witness of the foregoing I hereunto set my hand" (4l). This tour raised 15 pounds, 9 shillings.

Three collections in all were made, the first in New Jersey, the second throughout Goshenhoppen and the third "through Frederick township to Falckner's Swamp and then up towards Oley" (44). Over 400 names are listed with the amount of their contributions. For example, from Goshenhoppen, Philip Boehm gave l shilling, Peter Miller gave l shilling, Friedrich Hilligass gave 5. In Oley, Casper Griesemer gave 7 shillings and so did Abraham Lewan, a comparatively generous gift. This tour raised 14 pounds, 7 shillings.

The two largest gifts of 10 shillings each were given by Georg Welker and Conrad Reiff (39-44). Considering the language of the subscribing petition, its references to "pious exercises," "the Nurture of the Lord " and "the Praise of His Holy Name," it is obvious that Conrad Reiff is no longer sympathetic to Newborn practices which "called the Holy Scriptures old, outworn fables, tomfoolery, and the like, and said that the parsons had to make so and so out of it in order not to lose their bread and butter"(Muhlenberg I, 139). Not only does his acceptance of such pious language witness a change, but we also discern in the gift a reaffirmation of his Reformed roots, supporting the attempt to restart the Skippack Reformed Church in a permanent structure again: "When George Alsentz first reported this congregation to the coetus in 1763, he called it Skippack, a name which was often used during its early years to identify it" (Gladfelter I, 384). The Newborn were never politic in their beliefs but "harsh and uncharitable" as Philip Bayer had been before his reconciliation (Muhlenberg I, 357).

To demonstrate how short funds were when the first church was dedicated in November 1763, the "costs of this undertaking were greater than anticipated. Moreover, they were incurred just as a depression hit the colonies following the French and Indian War" (Gladfelter I, 384). The assembly authorized a lottery to pay the debt, since "the members of the German Reformed church in the township of Worcester, in the county of Philadelphia, have erected a church and school house in the said township, the expense and costs whereof have been so great as to amount to a debt of six hundred pounds more than they are able to pay" (Gladfelter, I, 384).

Notes

[Speaking of those pastors of the first Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, Boehm and Weiss, Sachse observes that it is "a strange coincidence that both Boehm and Baumann came to Pennsylvania about the same time from Lambsheim, in the Palatinate" (The German Sectarians, I, 157). Five years separated them. Hinke has Baumann arriving in Philadelphia in 1718, Sachse in 1719, but Pendleton (176) cites land office records that show Baumann already residing in the Oley Valley in 1714. Since Baumann had left Lambsheim in 1714 and Boehm did not resign his position as schoolmaster in Worms until November 22, 1715 (Hinke, 15) their paths did not cross in Lambsheim and at least his one indignity can be spared Mr. Boehm.]

If it is wondered why this sect rejected the Bible and its teachings, the text recorded above by Spangenberg (6) should be noted, that is, I John 1.8: "if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."

We don't really need to prove Conrad was a Newborn from his reputation or his speech. Interesting as it might be, it is a much bigger topic. We know he was a Newborn from his marriage and we know the Newborn mockeries of religions from testimonies from nearly every contemporary source.

when the Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736) founded the Oley Reformed Church (Hinke, Life and Letters, 34). By 1736 however, with both leaders gone, the Newborn were on their way out.

A broader case for Newborn membership includes every spirit of anticlericalism and unbelief. As with Boehm's catalogue of sects, this seems to be focused by the more spectacular Newborns. Mittelberger laments: "In Pennsylvania there exist so many varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to name them all. Many people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone. Furthermore there are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but who do not even want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments and to the Holy Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in the existence of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think that everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not only is everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to express these beliefs publicly and freely" (Journey, 22).

The reason the Newborn speak so fully for all such ideas is that they are a genera. Thus the farmer says his situation good is because "I have worked hard" and none other. "I am perfectly without sin" is the metaphysical justification. Being without sin had been the contention of Newborn founder Matthias Bauman, taught in his pamplet of ..... As the Chronicon says, "there arose about that time [1720] a people in the neighborhood of Oley" (16). Through a series of propositions Bauman ends with the notion that "with the body one cannot sin before God" (Chronicon, 17) which to the Calvinists was of course impossible. Worse that these "dangerous conclusions" (17) was their technique, "...to confound men, a work they also diligently carried on during ten years, so that their disputations at market times in Philadelphia were often heard with astonishment" (17).

All the Church folk, Lutheran, Reformed, non church sectarians say "Ishmaelites,
Laodiceans, Naturalists... Atheists, of whom the country was full... had forsaken their mother-church" Pennsylvania (Chronicon Ephratense. Translated by J. Max Hark. Lancaster: S. H. Zahm & Co. 1889, 71).

How exactly Mittelberger knew of the attack he doesn't say. Embellishment may swell the breast. A provocateur of all that had gone wrong in his eyes with the freedoms and frail order of Pennsylvania, Mittelberger would not himself know what he would write when he began the following year. Presumably he was taking notes. The funeral occurred about a year and a half before he left to return to Germany.
Conrad Reiff's change of faith occured when he moved to Oley and married Anna Margaretha Kuhlwein c. 1733, Mary, daughter of Kuhlwein pioneered the area for Baumann in 1709, chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene colony. Kuhlwein and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers (Pendleton, 106). Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise but didn't last long; it is no surprise Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after Baumann died in 1727. In marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons, Conrad Reiff became a rich planter. He was the richest man in the area.

(Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990.

Chronicon. Abstract of the diary of the Brotherhood, which had been kept by Brother
Lamech, and continued and edited by Brother Jaebez (Agrippa) i.e. JohanPeter Miller. Brother Lamech has been identified as Jacob Gass bySeidensticker (First Century of German Printing in America, p. 117). Evans19558: "This biography of Johann Conrad Beissel, the founder of the EphrataCommunity, is the principal source of information regarding that remarkableinstitution. Brother Agrippa is Johann Peter Miller; and Brother Lamech'ssecular name is said to be Jacob Gass

ouˈgoost gôtˈlēp shpängˈənbĕrk, 1704–92, a bishop of the Moravian Church and a founder of that church in America, b. Prussia. While at the Univ. of Jena, he met Graf von Zinzendorf, and in 1730 he paid a visit to the Moravian colony, Herrnhut. In 1732, Spangenberg joined the theological faculty of the Univ. of Halle, but disagreement with the views of his superiors led to his dismissal. He became assistant to Zinzendorf and was sent by him on a mission to America in 1735. There, for a large portion of his life, Spangenberg was active in establishing settlements, churches, and schools in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In 1744 he was made bishop. Zinzendorf died in 1760; two years later Spangenberg returned to Herrnhut, where he held a place of leadership among the Brethren. His Idea Fidei Fratrum (1779, tr. 1784) was adopted as the declaration of faith of the Moravian Church. Among his other writings is a biography of Zinzendorf. If you read around the Blake entry in Flowering Heart you will find this Zinzendorf was a freak of tantric sex.

On Baumann, by Stoudt, xvii,

Further, “Herbein was hardly alone in suspecting that the real intent of the missionary effort was make everyone into good Moravians” Pendleton, 114

“One of the authors forebears was banished from Germany because he refused to accede to the magistrate’s domination of his conscience. On 3 January 1702 he told the Court at Grankfurt-am-Main that magistrates are established merely to punish evil and encourage good. In matters of faith they have no authority. This is an American principle, for Matthias Baumann became an American….

The lives of the Reiff brothers, especially Conrad (c. 1696-1777) are a target for social equalizers. Conrad was one of the richest men in Oley, but he and his younger brother Jacob (1698-1782) of Skippack so ran afoul of contemporary piety that they are both immediately likable to the modern mind. In matters of religion the Reiff brothers, Conrad (c.1696-1777) and Jacob (1698-1782) ran afoul of contemporary piety, but they are likeable to the modern mind. Their biographies document as much about Pennsylvania religion as about either of them. This stream of events concerning battling shepherds, religion founders and feuding families was pretty much concluded between the death of their father in 1727 and their mother in 1753. The mutual offenses of religious practices was enough for several lifetimes. Of the four sons, George was a Reformed elder and Jacob could "discern good as well as evil" (I, 353), but Conrad and Peter lived in the Oley of ill repute. That tears it. Also, the husband of the only daughter of that family, Conrad Gehr,gets significant mention, for he too had "despised and ridiculed," according to Muhlenberg, the "means of grace." When we compare Muhlenberg's description of Gehr with Mittelberger's of Reiff a pattern emerges. There are odd facts that seem to run counter to patterns, much as in real life. For instance how was Conrad Reiff executor of Claus Upleger of Franconia, when he then lived in Lower Salford, and that his co-executor was Henry Funk, the Mennonite Bishop. Common sense suggests that this was some other Conrad, except there was no other. Was he acting as a translator like his brother? Obviously the relations of the community were more wide than narrow. What did Reiff and Funk have in common that Upleger chose them, unless there was some Mennonite influence on Conrad, unlikely as this seems. In any case the question makes us take more seriously than we otherwise would the note in the Sunday Eagle Magazine (January 12, 1969) of Reading, PA, that Conrad was a "Mennonite preacher."

Peter Reiff had already taken a patent on 100 acres in Oley (November 1735) when Jacob Reiff deeded 193 acres on the Little Branch to him in August of 1737. Conrad sold Peter 300 more acres in 1742, certainly the same 300 he had initially acquired in 1730. On April 17, 1745 Peter and his wife Margaret sold the 193 acre Skippack property to John Ulrich Stauffer and went to Oley. Brother George lived in Germantown, but his transactions mimic Peter's. In 1734 he owned 100 acres in Skippack and Jacob deeded him157 acres in 1740. He acquired an adjoining 84 acres from neighbor Casper Ulstar making 241, kept this tract about a year and sold it in 1741 to Jacob Shoemaker. There is no precise record of George's owning land in Oley, but he appears on the tax list of Rockland Township (Oley) in 1757 and 1759. He went a little Oley. According to James Heckler, Jacob the Elder's daughter Catharine, was a widow living in Oley "at the time of her father's death," that is, in 1782. Holy Oley!

II. Some Sources for the Reiff brothers of Schuippach.

There were plenty of Reiffs in trouble in 18th century Philadelphia, especially the four sons of Hans George (c.1659-172 6) and Anna Reiff (1662-1753). The greatest attention attaches to Jacob Reiff, called the Elder, brother of Peter, George, and Conrad, and Anna, but we do not feel sympathy for his plight until we realize his underdog status.

1) His lengthy defense in the Answer (September 1733) to a court complaint against him the previous year is his only extant writing, for he seems to represent himself. He however is quoted frequently in the letters of Boehm.

2) The Wills of Hans George, Conrad and George are extant, with numerous deeds, records of transactions and agreements, formal petitions, newspaper notices and accounts, church records, and tax lists.

3) The Journals of Henry Melichor Muhlenberg is an important primary source for the funeral of Anna Reiff in 1753 and of events in general in Perkiomen (1742-87). Muhlenberg lived in New Providence or Trappe, 8 miles from Skippack where the four Reiff brothers grew up. He traveled extensively in that region and beyond in his service as a pastor, frequently wrote of the common people he met, of their problems, births, baptisms and deaths with names and details. His Journal was kept mainly as a record for himself, but he writes with veracity. Muhlenberg sounds a keynote in remarks in his Journal after the funeral address he gave to a "large and distinguished assembly" on the occasion of the Reiff matriarch's death, January 8, 1753 (I, 353). These reflections are an excellent jumping off point into the labyrinth of civil and religious fratricides of that day. Anna Reiff, widow of her husband, Hans George, who died in 1726, was one of three women at whose death Muhlenberg presided in the month of January 1753. The journal gives his private thoughts on the course and significance of her life, things he would not have said out loud. These are not the official remarks, except for the biblical text. His thoughts sum up the Reiff brothers' reputations:

"In the same month of January I was called upon to bury a ninety-year-old pious widow who fell asleep in the Lord. She lived eight miles from New Providence and was buried in the so-called Mennonite cemetery. She lived in this land for a long time.” Muhlenberg calls Jacob Reiff, his father's executor of years before, "her best and most reasonable son who cared for her as was right and proper." "At her son's request I visited her in this last home of hers and ministered to her with the Word of God and the Holy Communion." Continuing the meditation Muhlenberg says, "at her funeral her son, who can discern good as well as evil in others, testified with tears that she had been a pious widow, a domestic preacher, an intercessor, and a model of godliness (I, 353)." If Muhlenberg says Jacob Reiff can discern "good as well as evil" long after the many vicious allegations had passed, we take his judgment after the fact as evidence of exoneration of the many charges against his character.

4) John Phillip Boehm before 1742 in his Letters (1728-1748) gives a wealth of particulars concerning Jacob Reiff, notably his calling the Philadelphia elders “church robbers.”

5) Gottlieb Mittelberger's disgruntled record of his Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) where he had gone in 1752 to become the organist in Muhlenberg's church famously details Conrad Reiff.

George Reiff (1692-1759). The Innocent, we might christen him in contrast with his brothers, was among the elders and the early founders of the Reformed Congregation of Skippack, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. This itself is evidence of his concern for a more unworldly way of way of life. With other elders he signed the authorization for his brother Jacob to go Holland with Pastor Weiss to collect the ill-fated funds donated to the Reformed congregations. (Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm, 209. He is sometimes confused with his father of the same name. Referring to Dotterer's report of the tradition that Hans Georg Reiff, arrived in Pennsylvania 'before Penn set up his government' " Boehm’s editor, Hinke, mistakes the father for the son, unless we consider the son a junior, saying in the next sentence that "in 1730 Hans Georg Reiff (d. 1726) was a member of the Reformed Church at Skippack" (21). That George had no progeny and seems at all accounts to have been a faithful and steady member of the community should not be held against him. He did sign the two petitions of 1728 and 1731 mentioned below. In 1757, two years before his death, he is taxed for owning land in Oley about eleven miles south of Reading, near Peter and Conrad. It would seem George was allied with Jacob in Muhlenberg's mind as one of the sons well thought of.

Peter Reiff (c.1694-c.1782) was a smith like his father (who however left his smith's tools to Jacob), but although he was the son of Hans George Reiff he managed to confound a generation of genealogists by founding a strain of Riffes in West Virginia. The antecedents of Daniel Boone also lived in Oley (Riffe, 29) and that association according to Riffe was the primary cause of Peter's childrens' southward descent. He did not leave a will but lived in Skippack from youth to sometime after 1745 when, having accumulated 400 acres or so in Oley near his brother Conrad, he moved there.

All three brothers, Conrad, Peter and George, appear on the tax rolls of Oley in 1757, the first year of the organization of that township (Rockland Township). Peter may have lived there some years prior, as perhaps had George. Before moving to Oley Peter was much involved in the area of his father's settlement in Skippack. His first son, Peter Jr. was born there (c. 1728). Peter Sr., with George, Conrad and 74 other inhabitants along Skippack Creek, calling themselves "Back Inhabitors," petitioned then Governor Gordon in April 29, 1728 for protection against the Indians (Riffe, 26). Likewise with George and Conrad, Peter petitioned the Assembly in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). Brother Jacob did not sign any of these petitions because he took two trips to Holland etc. in those years. Three of Peter’s children were born in Rockland Township after his relocation, Jacob (1755), Henry (1756) and Daniel (1759) He started a school (c. 1750) and employed a teacher and was as well known to witness wills.

Conrad Reiff

Conrad (1696-c.1777) had two sons, Daniel and Philip, with the rank of Captain and Lieutenant respectively, who maybe fought in revolutionary battles of 1777. Conrad operated a large farm, some 970 acres by 1775, with its own sawmill and gristmill. Based on the 1767 tax assessment Pendleton says he was one of only three men "who did not have to work with their hands" (44). This tax assessment lists 20 acres of grain, a gristmill, sawmill and several tenant farms. He had taken on several indentured servants in 1745 and following. He sued the equally wealthy ironmaster Johannes Lesher in 1766.

He began the move to Oley, buying land there in 1730 and moving in 1733. His two sons Daniel (b.1736) and Philip (b.1739) are registered as being born in Philadelphia County, but at this time Philadelphia County demarked the region. He deeded 300 acres to Peter in 1742 and the two were associated after that date. When the taxes for the new township were assessed in 1759 Conrad paid more than anybody, for he had some 925 acres. There is a spiritual odyssey denoted in his beliefs. At the outset he was Reformed, lived in Skippack, signed the petition of 1728 (and 1731?) and no doubt was included in Boehm's (1730) passionate denunciation of "Jacob Reiff and his brothers" (Letters, 217).

How rich is rich?

Conrad's Organ connects the two protagonists. Reiff willed it to his son Daniel in 1777. At that time "the organ can be considered to have been somewhat of a rarity as a home instrument. Those individuals who did own an organ were often wealthy persons of the community" (Brunner, 10). Conrad Reiff may have inherited the organ from his father-in-law Philip Kuhlwein in 1737, he certainly inherited all of his land. The organ mentioned in the will of Matthias Zimmerman in Philadelphia is of 1734. Conrad Weiser had one prior to 1760 in Tulpehocken (10). A schoolmaster and organist of Old Goschenhoppen c.1779 was paid five pounds a year. A schoolmaster-organist at Trappe, 11 pounds in 1760. Compensation could include other items such as use of the schoolhouse as living quarters, free use of church land, donations of firewood, food and clothing. An average for the middle of the eighteenth century, including playing the organ, free rent, singing at funerals and conducting the singing school was approximately 20 to 25 pounds a year. (Ingenious Bus, 44). Mittleberger got 10 pounds in his last year (43).

Works Cited

Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990

Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Tr. By J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943.

Ernest, James E. Ephrata A history. Allentown: Schlechter's, 1963.

James Y. Heckler. History of Franconia Township. 1901. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Glatfelter, Charles H. Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, l7l7-l793. 2 Vols. Breinigsville, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, l980.

Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Motherwell, Robert, tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets, NY: 1951.

Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. The Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Fortress, 1958. Reprinted by Picton Press, Camden, ME.

The Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm. Edited by the Rev. William J. Hinke. Philadelphia: Sunday School Board of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1916.

Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994.

Pennypacker, Samuel Whitaker. The Settlement of Germantown Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1899. Reprinted 1997 by Higginson Book Company, Salem, MA.

The Perkiomen Region. Vols. 1-5. Adams Apple Press, Bedminster, PA, 1994.

Reiff, Harry E. Reiff Families in America. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1986.

Riffe, Fred J. Reiff to Riffe Family in America. 1995.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1742. 2 Vols.
Philadelphia: 1899, AMS:1971.

Wallace, Paul. Conrad Weiser: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.

Weiser, C. Z. The Life of (John) Conrad Weiser. Reading, PA: Daniel Miller, 1899.

George Whitefield's Journals (1737-1741). Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969.

Conrad Reiff and the Journey to Pennsylvania

2009-03-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Journey to Pennsylvania was Pennsylvania's comeuppance in 1756, a foible of its religions especially regarding Conrad Reiff, a serious malefactor. For more than two centuries the allegations of Gottlieb Mittelberger were unchallenged, except recently with Pendleton and Brunner. Biographers such as Fred Riffe pass over these events in Conrad's life in embarrassed silence. The situation is worsened by Conrad's younger brother Jacob, who got in as much trouble with the Reformed about 1727 as Conrad ever did in his odyssey then with the Newborn. A dozen Reformed historians with selective memory and rhetorical edits broke their pens to exonerate themselves and their principals in the founding of the Reformed church in Pennsylvania. Two brothers scandalizing two different religions at the same time is almost too much to be hoped for. But a gathering of eagles occurred outside middle earth. Pennsylvanians were transcendentalists a hundred years before Emerson, not single or in small groups, en masse, in flights the whole folk transcended. More of Conrad Reiff's odyssey can be found at Outbreaks of Pennsylvania Lawless.

Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) and Succeeding Families

2008-08-16T16:57:00.001-07:00

Jacob Reiff the Elder (15 November 1698 – 16 February 1782)was the youngest son of Hans George Reiff (d. December, 1726) and Anna Maria (1662-1753), his executor and a man of wide reputation in Skippack and Lower Salford. Evidence now suggests that his wife was Anna Landis (1709 – 28 October 1788) who he married at Skippack in 1733.

Jacob the Elder had two sons, Jacob Jr. and George III. It is hard to conclusively prove whether he was a Mennonite later in life because of the records which Mennonites essentially did not believe in keeping, but a summary of some of the argument goes like thiHis oldest son, Jacob Reiff Jr., the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), who voted for the Pennsylvania convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, seems to have followed his father's Reformed tendencies since he participated in the founding of the Wentz Reformed Church. His brother George, as we have married a Mennonite.

Jacob Jr.'s children however got him into the Mennonites in a big way, especially his son John Reiff (5 December 1759 – 6 February 1826) who married a daughter of Bishop Christian Funk and became a minister with that prescient, if defrocked divine, who endorsed the American Revolution. This John Reiff signed the preface, with other ministers, of the English version of Funk’s Mirror for all Mankind (Norristown, Pa.,1814). In 1814 Jacob Reiff (Jr.) donated land for the first Funkite meetinghouse in Skippack (Wenger, 350), the same land that his son John later retitled to the Dunkards after the Funkite demise.

So much more can be said of Jacob the Elder’s activities in every way that they must be given a separate article unto themselves.

George Landis Reiff (4/7/1740 – 1/24/1808), George Reiff III. That is, George I was Hans George. George II was John George Reiff (c.1692-1759), oldest son of Hans George Reiff. Genealogists were unsure of the maiden name of Jacob Reiff wife so they took to differentiating in this way, but the mother of George Landis Reiff mother was Anna Landis. George III is of course the second son of Jacob the Elder. He married Elizabeth Hendricks on 2/15/1764. Along with his father and brother Jacob, he was recorded as a private in Captain Barnet Haines Company for Lower Skippack in the Revolution, but the same provisos for Mennonites at war may apply to him as to his son (below) in the War of 1812. He and his wife, Elizabeth Hendricks are buried at Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery. Hendricks of course is an illustrious name in Pennsylvania, forever dignified by the signing of the protest against slavery by Gerhard Hendricks in 1688.

Elizabeth Hendricks (4/9/1740 – 6/25/1817) was the daughter of Leonard

Hendricks (b. Krefeld, 1698-1776, buried Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery) and
Elizabeth Turner (born c. 1712 in Pennsylvania). Leonard had named his son-in-law coexecutor of his will, probated 3/8/1776.

If it had not begun sooner with Jacob's wifeAnna Landis, it is thought that the Mennonite affiliation began with George’s marriage to Elizabeth. The genealogist and historian Harry Reiff says: "Elizabeth Hendricks who married George Reiff III was a daughter of Leonard Hendricks, who in turn was a son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks. The Hendricks were part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled/established Germantown in 1683 and later. These people were called Dutch Quakers-induced by William Penn to come to Penn’s colony in America. Apparently there was a strong Mennonite population in the Krefeld/Munchen-Gladback area, and Quaker-Mennonite-Reformed families at times were mixed. At any rate, Leonard Hendricks owned land in the Towamencin area of present Montgomery Co., and was considered a Quaker.”

Leonard’s father, Lawrence Hendricks (b. ca. 1670 Kriegsheim Germany, d. 1749 at Towamencin, Montgomery Co.), a Quaker and then a Mennonite, arrived in PA with his father Willem Hendricks (1649-1691) on the "Francis and Dorothy" on 12 October 1685. Lawrence’s father, William, was a Holland Dutch Mennonite who had arrived with Pastorious in 1682 and brought his sons Lawrence and Henry with him.

Lawrence Hendricks signed the 1728 petition for the Susquehanna Road or Line" Of this list Alderfer says "the list of signatures attached to the 1728 petition contains about twelve Mennonite names. The first six signatures are of men from the Towamencin Mennonite community. The first four (Jacob Godshalk, Godshalk Godshalk, Henry Hendricks, and Lawrence Hendricks) were the original 1714 settlers in what would later become the Towamencin Mennonite community…the Hendricks brothers may have been brothers-in-law to Godshalk Godshalk, oldest son of Jacob Godshalk, the first Mennonite bishop in America, who settled first at Germantown.”
(Alderfer, 19-21).

George Hendricks Reiff (23 Dec 1768 - 28 Nov 1847) married Elizabeth Clemens (30 Jan 1773-13 Jun 1840) on 7 Feb1792, the daughter of Garret Clemens (1/2/1745 - 5/1/1820) of Lower Salford Township. Garret was the oldest surviving son of Jacob (d. 1782) and Barbara Clemens ( whose will of 1782 is extant) and the grandson of Gerhart Clemens (1680-c.1744-45, the Mennonite settler who arrived in 1709, married Anna H. (Anneli) Reiff in 1702 and who first makes mention of Jacob Reiff the Elder in his diary, "Anno 1723, July 2: “I settled with Jacob Reiff and remain in debt to him for the land yet L14 18s." This is the first chronological reference to Jacob Reiff the Elder. The marriage of Jacob Reiff’s grandson with Clemens’ great granddaughter marks another notable crossing of family trails.

Elizabeth Clemens herself is mentioned once, in a note in the famous diary which had belonged to her great grandfather, to which her grandfather Jacob made some later additional notes. Jacob states that “Elizabeth was married in 1763. She was then twenty years of age.” (Strassburger, 473) She had some nine sisters and five brothers. Jacob Clemens ended his years living with son John, but he had several sons. He called Gerhard the oldest but born before him were Michael, 1729, Jacob 1739, twins Gerhard and Christian 1741. There were at least some five other sons and nine daughters (471). Garret’s parents sold him two parcels of land in 1768 totaling 135 acres. Here he is called Garret Clements, Jr. after his grandfather.

George Landis Reiff, the father of George Hendricks Reiff.

George Clemens Reiff (1/14/1793 – 3/4/1860)

was the father of Abraham S. Reiff, although we must distinguish two contemporary cousins, both named George Clemens Reiff. That is, the two brothers, George and Jacob, married the two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Clemens, daughters of Garret Clemens. Each of these named a son George. The George C. Reiff (6/13/1804 – 11/16/1886), who married Elizabeth Detweiler in 1830, was from our point of view the cousin, the son of Jacob Hendricks Reiff, a storekeeper in Skippackville, and Sarah Clemens. This George is younger than his brother by 11 years. He is mentioned by Heckler in his History of Lower Salford (87) and in the History of Franconia Township as living in Skippackville and as having married the oldest daughter of Abraham Detweiler (d. 12/10/1830). There is a letter of his in the Henry S. Dotterer collection at the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Riffe, 108).

The older George C. Reiff, father of Abraham S. Reiff, married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814. As his son Abraham had been in Worcester, this George Reiff was also a trustee for purchase of Mennonite land in Skippack where he lived. He was one of "three Mennonite trustees, Jacob F. Kulp, Daniel Landes, and George Reiff," who executed a trust for land donated by Issac Kulp to build the new meetinghouse erected by the Old Mennonites of Skippack in 1848” (Wenger, 99).

The New Meetinghouse

This new meetinghouse ties several Old Mennonite strands together and illustrates aspects of the division between Old and the New. The seceding "new" Mennonites took over the meetinghouse in Skippack which the undivided congregation had built in 1844 (Wenger, 97), where both Old and then Old and New met for a time. But the Old or original group refused to prosecute their expropriation of property from scruples of conscience against litigation. They built a new building in 1848, slightly smaller than the old, although the deed was not made until August 21, 1849 (Wenger, 99). This was the land of which George Reiff served as trustee.

According to John F. Funk (1878) the building of a new meetinghouse illustrates what true Mennonites were all about. It also gives us a concrete means to understand the division of 1847.

“During the difficulties which occurred in the church, in eastern Pennsylvania, in 1847-48 on account of the disobedience and innovations of John H. Oberholtzer, in Bucks County, and the Hunsicker faction in Skippack, Montgomery County, there still remained, in the Old Church, so much love to God and the teachings of the Savior as to enable them, by the grace of God, to fulfill the teachings of Christ in a most noble manner, and leave to the world one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to their religious principles, presented to us in modern times.”

“The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions “not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,” and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (Funk,128)

This account highlights the unworldly Old Mennonite belief as well as some of the deep interrelations of the Mennonite Reiffs. In acting as trustee for the new building in Skippack, George C. Reiff, was doing there exactly what John B. Bechtel was doing in Hereford, when, at the 1847 division, he became the Old Mennonite pastor at the age of 41. Bechtel’s granddaughter, Anna Mack, was subsequently to marry George C. Reiff’s great grandson, Howard R. Reiff. Neither ancestor knew the other, but they acted in accord. Their children however, Anna and Howard, became new Mennonites in 1911.

The Old Mennonites of Skippack then became the "Upper Skippack" congregation, but while they surrendered the meetinghouse they kept the Skippack Alms Book, that record of alms money with annual audits conducted yearly from 1738, the oldest such record of its kind in Pennsylvania. This Alms Book gives “a list of all the ordained men of the Skippack circuit since 1738" (Wenger, 97) and records the signatures of the three Reiffs of succeeding generations, starting with George [C.] Reiff who kept the Alms Book from 1835 to 1842, signing it four times (Wenger, 103). His son Abraham S. Reiff of the Worcester congregation, part of the Skippack circuit, signed the Alms Book three times, from 1877-79. Abraham's son, George L. Reiff, as noted, signed 34 times. Thus the Alms Book and meetinghouse document these three generations. [Prior to the Oberholtzer division of 1847 the hierarchy of the Franconia conference had been comprised of districts overseen by a bishop, but " the Skippack bishop district retained the 'circuit system' which evidently obtained in all the districts at first" (Wenger, 98). That is, the ministers of this district would rotate among the three congregations, from Skippack, the seat, to Worcester and Providence.]

Executor

George C. Reiff also served as executor of his father-in-law’s will, Abraham Schwenk (5/25/1759 – 8/6/1843) and was named as guardian of the six children of Schwenk’s deceased son, also named Abraham. Here he is again simply called, George Reiff:

"Gaurdian[sic.] of the persons and Estates of the minor children of my late Deceased Son Abraham named as follows, to wit, Isaac, Abraham, David, William, Margaret & Sarah—from the first Day of April last past, until each of the said minor Children shall attain the age of 21 years.—The sum of $500 being due to each of them on the said first day of April, and in the hands of the said George Reiff; and of the further sum or sums that will be due to them immediately after my decease…" (Strassburger, 301) We know that George Reiff adequately fulfilled that trust, because in “1854 others of the heirs acknowledged the receipt of their full inheritance from George Reiff…"(Strassburger, 303).

Nonresistence

Paradoxically for a Mennonite, but before his marriage in 1814, George Reiff was listed as a private in the War of 1812. This might explain his intimacy with his father in law, who was a Sergeant Seventh Class in the Philadelphia County Militia during the Revolution and in the Montgomery County Militia in 1786. Abraham Schwenk was "a tanner in Germantown at the time of the [Revolutionary] war, nineteen years old, a tall, fine man, he was under age, but because of his size the officers did not know it. At the battle of Germantown he went upstairs in a house as he was wounded, where a woman said that British were coming. He replied, 'Let the devils come,' and he took a large stick from the fireplace and drove them back" (Strassburger, 296).

As a son of Mennonite parents it might seem important to explain how George Reiff was a Private in the War of 1812 (Captain John Wentz's Company, Sixth Class, Fifty-first Regiment), when, "apart from believers' baptism, the most distinctive doctrine of the Mennonites is their Biblical nonresistance" (Wenger, 57). That is, that "a Christian may not participate in, or support, war or violence in any form whatever" (Wenger, 57).

Mennonites were sometimes said to have served when they did not, but were included in the rolls anyway. Philip Geisinger, Henry Geisinger and John Geisinger had petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778 for exemption from military service (Wenger, 60-2) and been penalized. Wenger reports that there are "about a dozen and half graves at the Saucon burying ground on which are Grand Army of the Republic, G. A. R. markers of the Revolutionary War, including …Johannes Geissinger (1739- 1811)…Henrich Geisinger (1737-1817)…Philip Geissinger (1732-1809) and Abraham Geissinger, (1749-1825). As John L. Ruth says, these are “the crowning irony which was to mark the memories of Jacob Yoder, John Geissinger, and their friends who sacrificed all they had to separate themselves from the Revolutionary War for conscience’ sake. For all their pains, their graves are yearly marked with American flags placed by modern patriotic organizations, who, having carelessly read the rosters of Colonel Siegfried’s militia, in their myth-making zeal designate these defenseless, dispossessed Christians as soldier heroes of the American Revolution.” (Ruth, 173) Of course there were also many Geissingers and Rosenbergers in the Saucon Valley not in the Mennonite Church. In fact however the opposite of the case is true. Some of those people were imprisoned for not serving.

If they did serve there were two ways around the prohibition. First, after the war to make a confession to the congregation and be reinstated. The second out was to not yet have been baptized, therefore not yet to be held accountable to Mennonite doctrine (Wenger, 64). Mennonites were baptized as adults. The minority of Mennonites who did serve in the American Revolution joined other denominations. The way back to the Old was not easy. To be reinstated in the offender would have had to publicly repent the war before the congregation and then submit to their vote.

Although much later, an example of this issue occurs in the nonresistant dilemma of the two sons of Henry Mack, step brothers of Anna Mack Reiff and nephews of Bishop Andrew Mack, that is, Harvey and Philip. Harvey went to France in 1918 as a conscientious objector and stayed to work for the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee (Wenger, 75). Philip went to Officer's Candidate School at Fort Meade and became a 2nd Lieutenant with every intention of going to France as a combatant, but the war ended.

Mennonite spokesmen downplay such opposites. Wenger says that Philip G. Mack "accepted noncombatant service at Camp Meade; was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). But he didn’t “accept” service, he sought it out and he wanted to fight. He was only noncombatant because he couldn’t get to France in time. Philip's mother, Sarah Ann Geisinger came of a long Old Mennonite tradition of noncombatants. She wouldn’t let Philip in the house with his uniform on. Also he went from the “new” Mennonites to the Presbyterians shortly after his marriage. His nephew, JH Reiff, who lived across the street, remembered that when Philip came home in his uniform his mother wouldn't let him in the house or let him stay there. As his niece Elizabeth Reiff put it, "Philip got thrown out of the communion for going to OCS instead of registering as a CO."

Wenger says Philip was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70), but it is more accurate to say that for his mother's sake Philip confessed and repented to the church and was received in that fellowship again, after which he lived at home until he married in 1925, but shortly followed the way of his sister Anna into the new Mennonites and from there, with wife Catherine became Presbyterian.

A similar situation exists perhaps with Gottshall Gottschalk, who signed the Skippack Alms Book twice in 1791 (Wenger, 102), although 6 others signed that year also. If it is the same person, Godshalk (Boorse) Godshalk (1762-1835) who is buried in Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery is on the Muster Roll of Towamencin Township under Captain Daniel Springer on 11/24/1780 (Perkiomen Region, 387-8)

Another striking example of Mennonite military service seems to exist in the life of Bishop Heinrich Kolb Hunsicker (3/7/1752-7/8/1836), who while being both a farmer, a minister of the Lower Skippack Mennonites and a Bishop, was also listed as a member of the 6th Class of Captain Dull's Company of Militia, 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Co. under the command of Col. Daniel Heister in 1778. He began signing the Skippack Alms book in 1781 even while being listed as a member of the Philadelphia Militia that same year. He signed the Alms Book 33 times, until 1832

There is a divergence of theory and practice. It is possible to suppose that the military connection was watered down, whether in the life of George C. Reiff or Philip Mack. George C. and Maria Reiff are buried in the Lower Skippack Mennonite cemetery. While Mennonites would bury strangers for the sake of charity or geography, for the most part they buried their own in their graveyards.

Most of George C.'s children are explicitly denominated as Mennonites in the immediate area.

Schwenks/Bauers

But more can be said of the Schwenk family of George C.’s wife. In 1779 Abraham Schwenk lived in Claytonville, the home of Henry Mack and Jacob L. Reiff a hundred years later. He subsequently bought a large farm in Frederick Township at Delphi, also called Zieglerville Station where he built a tannery and farmed till about 1808. Subsequent to that he owned 176 acres in Skippack Township along the Perkiomen Creek opposite Schwenksville. The Schwenks were members of Keeley's Lutheran Church to which Abraham Schwenk gave the ground on which the Lutheran Church was erected in Schwenksville. His estate was divided equally among nine children. In the will his daughter who married George Reiff is sometimes named Maria, sometimes Mary. Intermixing Mennonites and Lutherans as in Maria Schwenk’s family occurred also with Andrew and Henry Mack’s brother Peter, who was a Lutheran minister in Hummelstown in the 1880’s.

Maria Schwenk’s mother, Veronica Landis Bauer (4/10/1756 – 9/13/1840), was a Mennonite whose father, Michael Bauer (c. 1720-1784) married Veronica Landis about 1744-45. This Michael Bauer was just sitting down to a wedding banquet in 1776, celebrating his oldest daughter’s marriage to Christian Meyer, when soldiers of the Continental Army plundered the feast and carried off a wagonload of spoils to their camp (Ruth, ‘Twas Seeding Time, 91).

Michael Bauer was in turn the son of Hans Bauer (d. 1748), who owned land on the Perkiomen in 1734. In 1742 he bought 105 acres in Butter Valley in Colebrookdale and in 1743, 134 acres in Douglas Manor (also later the residence of Henry Mack). Both these properties were annexed into Hereford Township in 1753. (Strassburger, 316f). Strassburger says that Hans was "no doubt" buried in the Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, but the tombstone has been effaced so he does not appear in the Hereford Burial List compiled by Henry Mack in 1934. This Hans Bauer (d. 1748), a Mennonite, is said to have emigrated between 1708 and 1717 before settling in Colebrookdale (Strassburger, 315). Veronica Landis' mother was the daughter of another prominent Mennonite settler, Johannes Landis, of Bucks County (Strassburger, 320).

Butter Valley was a very fertile area containing Hereford and Colebrookdale, both Mennonite colonies. The first Hereford meetinghouse was built about 1743 and is the location of the oft-mentioned Hereford burial ground. In 1749 Michael Bauer inherited lands in Colebrookdale from his father. He signed the petition of 1753 to the Philadelphia Court to erect the new Hereford Township and was among the Hereford residents taxed in 1758. Michael and his wife Veronica Landis are probably also buried in the Hereford ground. Their son Samuel (1746-1822) is. There were only three children, Samuel, Fronica and Anna. Veronica married Abraham M. Schwenk in 1779.

Like Abraham S. Reiff and John B. Bechtel in the Oberholtzer Division, the Bauer and Landis trails cross very profoundly with another tributary of the Reiffs, the Bechtels and the Macks in the Mennonite church of Hereford.

Abraham Schwenk Reiff ( Jun 1817 - 30 Aug 1879) the last unchanged Old Mennonite, married Sarah (Sallie) Detweiler Landis (4 Oct 1820 – 18 Jan 1891) in 1840. Between 1843 and 1860 they reared nine children. Most notable was their first son George (1846-1932), known as Uncle George to succeeding generations, who maintained the farm in Worcester much visited by his youngest brother Jacob with his son, Howard, his wife Anna and family, (Howard, Elizabeth and Florence). He also maintained the Old Mennonite ways. One purpose for which his brother Jacob first bought a car was to stay in touch with this brother, the farm and his roots; somewhat contradictorily, because Old Mennonites did not much drive. He used that car in the 20’s to travel to Worcester to take communion with those he had grown up with. Among Mennonites the week prior to communion is an important service of repentance, it and the yearly communion not to be missed. Jacob, Abraham's youngest child, stood between the Old and the New and was still going to worship with Uncle George in Worcester in 1929 when he could. In one letter to his grandson Howard, Jacob refers to his father Abraham:

“My father was always willing to pay a bill which he did know was correct in all its items. I can recall my father sent me to Norristown for a load of feed with 3 horses and in making the turn at Jeffersonville, through my carelessness, I tore off another man’s wheel of his wagon. The man went to my father and told him what I done and demanded him to pay the damage and father was willing. As I grew older I came to realize that extreme carefulness has been one of the foundation stones of my father’s success” (Letter of 27 Jan 1929).

We surmise that Uncle George obtained his father’s land in Worcester (Methacton) after his father’s death in 1879. The Worcester Mennonite burial ground there, begun about 1744, is the final resting place of Abraham and Jacob L. and probably other Reiffs, along with many soldiers who died after the battle of Germantown. Christopher Sauer, the polemicist and printer of the German Bible is also buried there with other first settlers.

Actual details are scarce, but a signal one occurs with the name "Abraham Reiff" inscribed upon a beam in the attic of the third meetinghouse. Such actualities are always wonderful, like the ornate signature of John Bechtel below in The Wandering Soul or the signature of Jacob and Anna Reiff carved in the old mill in Skippack. Sometime prior to 1771, maybe as early as 1739, that first meetinghouse had been used as a school, then rebuilt about 1804 and again in 1873. Abraham Reiff was a member of the building committee of this third meetinghouse when he so inscribed his name (The Perkiomen Region [PR] I, 104).

Trustee

He was also one of three designated trustees for the receipt of land in 1860 when that congregation had added to the "Mennonist Society burying ground of Worcester" (Wenger, 107) and he served as trustee, August 9, 1873, for the purchase of the land where the third meetinghouse was built. So his Abraham Reiff's name is preserved in relation to the Mennonites three ways, trustee for the cemetery addition, trustee for land for the new building and member of the building committee. He was ordained in 1877 as a deacon at Worcester "as an old man" (Wenger, 99) and served until his death two years later. His son, George L. Reiff (12/8/1846 – 10/8/1932), the above “Uncle George,” continued his father's service to this church, Deacon from 1881 until his death in 1932.

All these generations knew one another. Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack, refers to George Reiff’s advice in his letter of 8 Oct 1874, “that is what George Reiff said we should do.”
Worcester is notable also as a Schwenkfelder settlement. Church, school and burial ground there hold antiquarian interest, but Abraham Reiff had originally came from Skippack and Salford where preceding Reiffs had lived.

Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929)

Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927)

Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994)

The roster is;

1. Hans George Reiff (c. 1659-1726) Buried Salford Mennonite Cemetery.
2. Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery
3. George Landis Reiff (1740-1808)
4. George Hendricks Reiff (1768-1847) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Church
5. George Clemens Reiff (1793-1860) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Meetinghouse
6. Abraham Schwenk Reiff (1817-1879) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
7. Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
8. Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927) Buried Northwood Cemetery, Top of Broad St.
9. Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994) Buried Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd.
10. Andrew Edwin (Yeo) Reiff (1941-

The Meaning Of Reiff

2008-08-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

Reif

Three languages produce twenty variant spellings of reiff. The German reif means “ripe or complete," the borrowed Scandinavian reif "to plunder,” and the English, rife, “frequent occurrence.”

“Reiflich" in German means a deliberate judgment, a decision which gradually takes shape in the mind. A mature man is ein gereifter Mann. Wine matures with age, reift durch langes Lagern. Reif (raif) denotes ripeness and roundness in fruit and grain, maturity in wine and cheese. Reife prufung is meiosis, reif graupeln a meteor, Stirnreif a circlet, Armreif a bracelet, reifen heber, an automobile tire. Mit dem Reifen spielen means playing with a hoop.

All these involve the circular, thus the poet is also a ring maker. Es reift, means frost. Completion and maturity of the ring symbolize completion in the seasons of a year, whiteness of age, winter crowned with hoar frost on the ground, Reif a circle of life well lived, whitened to a grandfather's head at rest, effort satisfied, timely completion echoing in progeny and ancestry, thus also a ring, life eternal.

Reiff

Its Scandinavian cousin reif (reef) is an anachronism in English meaning plunder. Tolkiens’s glossary of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (Oxford, 1925, l. 2046) gives "ryue" or "rife" as “abundant,” translated as "great," but at line 1341, "to rip or cut open.” Reif is also spelled reaf, reiff, rieff, reife. In it we see Norse pirates plundering the coasts of Europe and Britain in the 8th to 10th centuries. Reif has linguistic affinities as diverse as from the Common West German reif to Old English reaf, Old Frisian raf and Old High German roub, or roup, which becomes the German raub.

The first appearance in English of the Scandinavian reif is the Lindisfarne Gospel’s (950 A.D.) translation of Luke 11.22, naturalized in Old English as, "alla woepeno his zenimeth. . .& reafo his todaelde" (OED). Reafo his todaelde means “plunder his entire house.”

In the context Jesus had been charged with casting out demons by the power of demons, viz. Beelzebub. Remnants of the story yet exist in public memory. He says that if Satan casts himself out his own kingdom will fall, “but if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you (v. 20). Thus reafo his todaelde implies a spiritual plundering, for when "a strong man armed keeps his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall overcome him, he takes from him all his armor wherein he trusted, and divides his spoils.” Reif despoils the strong man with a stronger.

Scandinavian plundering had wide usage: "the King gert be de partit then / All hail the reif among his men" (1375). "Through cowatice gud Alexander was lost; And Julius als, for all his reiff and bost" (1470). "Let richt, not reif, my pensioun bring againe" (1585).

In seventeenth century Scottish ballads "John Armstrong was executed, for he did great robberies and stealing in England, maintaining twenty four men in household every day upon reiff and oppression." So “Dick of Dryup is complained of, with others, for reif and burning." (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Edited by James Child, Vol. III, (1618-1635) 365, 47). Dover, 1963. 365, 47)

So when we ask what is the outcome of all these "reiffs, spulzeis, oppressions, slaughters, allegit to have bene committit" (OED, 1546), as late as 1815 Sir Walter Scott persisted, "Saint Michael and his spear/ Keep the house from reiff and wear.” Conundrums of it would include: be reiff to prevent reiff so reiff shall be no more; and, there is a Reiff deliverance rife with peace.

Rife

The English rife in common use today is mostly confined to rumor and frequency.

Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “wars are rife” (“To Seem the Stranger”), that Andromeda “hears roar / A wilder beast from West than all were, more / Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd” (“Andromeda”).

The English rife begins to occur in southern England after 1120 A.D., "native in English, rather than an adoption from Scandinavian" (OED). Derived from the four related languages, Old Norse (rifr), late Old English (ryfe, rife), Middle Low German (rif, riv(u)e, ryue) and Low German (rife), ryfe, rif, riffe, rief (riefe) means frequent, widely known, often harmful rumors, "rife and catching" (1705).

So "King Pelleus…Helde a feste, as hit is ryfe" (1407) and "fools are so rife in this nation"(1732); "this great world is all too rife with calamity" (1787); "the reports which they circulate…grow more rife than ever “(1792). Suddenness is implied in its translation of Psalm 94.21, "they are rife to shed the guiltlesse blood" (1549), and "the highest tree in all the woode is rifest rent." (1552)

Should we want to explain the interrelations between the German, Scandinavian and English we would trace the first presumed instance of the word to riew or rife in Low German. This is a survival from the so-called Ingvaeonic, the oldest known form of English, Frisian and Old Saxon. The Ingvaeonic rife precedes the German and the other early forms of the word, but when it survives in Low German it branches into the English and Scandinavian forms.

Reifen in Low German means "hoop;" it coexists with the Middle High German reif and with the verb "rifen," to ripen ( R. Priebsch and W. E. Collinson. The German Language. London: Faber & Faber, 1968.193, 251). Low German forms also include reif, reifen, rifen, and rife, but the Ingvaeonic rife links the opposed meanings of the German and Scandinavian. Before "rife" and after "rife" we might say.

A sound change occurs when Old English breaks from Old Saxon and Old High German that helps explain these opposites of war and peace. The German reif, shortened into rife and reif, emigrated to England, but the earlier dipthong of the Anglo-Saxon stayed home in Germany.

That is, in sounds shortened from a dipthong toward a single syllable, the dual sound ai changed to single e (Priebsch 40-41), called a monophthongization,which emigrated. The German diphthong ei (which sounds like ai) kept its suggestion of completeness while the shortened English ie (e) that crossed the water took the suggestion of plunder.

English rife typically never occurs with e following r and the Scandinavian reif never occurs with i following r, but both forms occur in the German. The German reif and the English rife sound the same and share with the migrant Scandinavian reif their spelling. These spellings are so closely intertwined they may be indistinguishable in origin. But reif and reif, closest in form, often spelled identically, are pronounced differently and have virtually opposite meanings, yet all three are thought to have a common origin in the Ingvaeonic reif, complexities which more or less coexist together in the widest sense of the Germanic Languages East, North and West, Goth, Norse and Saxon.

Other relevancies in the Ingvaeonic blogs here consider futhorc here and discussions here

Note: In regard to the Nordic origins see also Full text of "Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples"

THE ANGLO-SAXON RUNIC POEM

13. Bad (Salz. AS. rada, Goth, reda), as in other alphabets. It is most satisfactory on the whole to take rad as " riding," cf. rseiif, reiff of the Norwegian and Icelandic poems. "Biding seems an easy thing to every warrior while he is indoors, and a very courageous thing to him who traverses the high-roads on the back of a stout horse," though it is doubtful whether byf> can mean "seems," and neither hw&t nor any of its compounds are used of things. Professor Chadwick has, however, suggested to me that the proper name of this letter is rada of the Salzburg Codex, corresponding to the ON. reiffi, "tackle (of a ship)," " harness," hence "equipment" generally. Here it would be used in a double sense, in the first half as "furniture" (cf. ON. reiffustol, "easy-chair," AS. rsadesceamu), in the second as "harness."

A Roster of Families, 1659-

2007-12-11T13:32:00.007-08:00

In reverse order the roster is:

10. Andrew Edwin (Yeo) Reiff (1941-
9. Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994) Buried Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd.
8. Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927) Buried Northwood Cemetery, Top of Broad St.
7. Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
6. Abraham Schwenk Reiff (1817-1879) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
5. George Clemens Reiff (1793-1860) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Meetinghouse
4. George Hendricks Reiff (1768-1847) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Church
3. George Landis Reiff (1740-1808)
2. Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery
1. Hans George Reiff (c. 1659-1726) Buried Salford Mennonite Cemetery.

Those ancestors who emigrated to Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century were part of a homogeneous population of Swiss-German immigrants from the Palatinate. Initially Reformed, then predominantly Mennonite, they intermarried among people like themselves for nine succeeding generations. I am the tenth. My father, Jacob Howard Reiff, was the first to marry out of this community. His children, this tenth generation who lived in America, began with merely formal lives as Mennonites or none at all. I was consecrated at six months, 29 Mar 1942, by John J. Henert, Pastor of the First Mennonite Church at Reese and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia where our great grandfather Henry Mack used to lead the singing.

This was the only Mennonite church inside the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The ninth generation had been members there with both their parents and grandparents. But the three generations who worshiped at “New” First Mennonite Church of Philadelphia were a step removed from their rural “Old” Mennonite forebearers of Skippack and Worcester, so removed that the children of our tenth generation were not taught any Mennonite doctrines or customs at all, old or new. Shortly following the consecrations of their first two sons, these parents joined the mother's Tioga Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.

Not to consider religion such a deciding factor, even if it seems it is. Their values were not abstractions hidden in the ground, but real. Was it Faith or Community? It was both, and both were radically different from any present experience. It was around and in me all the time.

All sides are supported by documents of varying detail dividing "New" Mennonites from the rural "Old.” The urban New Mennonites, Jacob L. Reiff and his son Howard R. Reiff, were members of First Mennonite of Philadelphia, but hey were “New” with this proviso, both had been Old Mennonites much of their lives. Their move to the city separated them from the Old, but any philosophical differences came at the insistence of Howard's wife, Anna, whose principled disagreement with the “Old” was the result of much deliberation, especially as we have seen, since she came of a family deep in Mennonite pastors and bishops. By the time of Anna’s choice for the new, her father, Henry Mack, had already begun a butter and egg business in the city (1906) and both Reiff and Mack families, who had known each other in the country, worshipped together in the city. These too left letters and documents of significance. Nineteenth century events underlay subsequent attitudes in the 20th century, which made an “Old” Mennonite into a “New.” Apologists for the new say that the public school system, choosing ministers by lot, plain dress of the clergy, their advancing age, the growing use of English, mechanical innovation and the wind of change led to the divergence ( Good, 13-14).

Abraham Schwenk Reiff ( Jun 1817 - 30 Aug 1879) the last unchanged Old Mennonite, married Sarah (Sallie) Detweiler Landis (4 Oct 1820 – 18 Jan 1891) in 1840. Between 1843 and 1860 they reared nine children. Most notable was their first son George (1846-1932), known as Uncle George to succeeding generations, who maintained the farm in Worcester much visited by his youngest brother Jacob with his son, Howard, his wife Anna and family, (Howard, Elizabeth and Florence). He also maintained the Old Mennonite ways. One purpose for which his brother Jacob first bought a car was to stay in touch with this brother, the farm and his roots; somewhat contradictorily, because Old Mennonites did not much drive. He used that car in the 20’s to travel to Worcester to take communion with those he had grown up with. Among Mennonites the week prior to communion is an important service of repentance, it and the yearly communion not to be missed. Jacob, Abraham's youngest child, stood between the Old and the New and was still going to worship with Uncle George in Worcester in 1929 when he could. In one letter to his grandson Howard, Jacob refers to his father Abraham:

“My father was always willing to pay a bill which he did know was correct in all its items. I can recall my father sent me to Norristown for a load of feed with 3 horses and in making the turn at Jeffersonville, through my carelessness, I tore off another man’s wheel of his wagon. The man went to my father and told him what I done and demanded him to pay the damage and father was willing. As I grew older I came to realize that extreme carefulness has been one of the foundation stones of my father’s success” (Letter of 27 Jan 1929).

We surmise that Uncle George obtained his father’s land in Worcester (Methacton) after his father’s death in 1879. The Worcester Mennonite burial ground there, begun about 1744, is the final resting place of Abraham and Jacob L. and probably other Reiffs, along with many soldiers who died after the battle of Germantown. Christopher Sauer, the polemicist and printer of the German Bible is also buried there with other first settlers.

Actual details are scarce, but a signal one occurs with the name "Abraham Reiff" inscribed upon a beam in the attic of the third meetinghouse. Such actualities are always wonderful, like the ornate signature of John Bechtel below in The Wandering Soul or the signature of Jacob and Anna Reiff carved in the old mill in Skippack. Sometime prior to 1771, maybe as early as 1739, that first meetinghouse had been used as a school, then rebuilt about 1804 and again in 1873. Abraham Reiff was a member of the building committee of this third meetinghouse when he so inscribed his name (The Perkiomen Region [PR] I, 104).

Trustee

He was also one of three designated trustees for the receipt of land in 1860 when that congregation had added to the "Mennonist Society burying ground of Worcester" (Wenger, 107) and he served as trustee, August 9, 1873, for the purchase of the land where the third meetinghouse was built. So his Abraham Reiff's name is preserved in relation to the Mennonites three ways, trustee for the cemetery addition, trustee for land for the new building and member of the building committee. He was ordained in 1877 as a deacon at Worcester "as an old man" (Wenger, 99) and served until his death two years later. His son, George L. Reiff (12/8/1846 – 10/8/1932), the above “Uncle George,” continued his father's service to this church, Deacon from 1881 until his death in 1932.

All these generations knew one another. Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack, refers to George Reiff’s advice in his letter of 8 Oct 1874, “that is what George Reiff said we should do.”
Worcester is notable also as a Schwenkfelder settlement. Church, school and burial ground there today hold antiquarian interest, but Abraham Reiff had originally come from Skippack where all the preceding Reiffs had lived.

George Clemens Reiff (1/14/1793 – 3/4/1860)

was the father of Abraham S. Reiff, although we must distinguish two contemporary cousins, both named George Clemens Reiff. That is, the two brothers, George and Jacob, married the two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Clemens, daughters of Garret Clemens. Each of these named a son George. The George C. Reiff (6/13/1804 – 11/16/1886), who married Elizabeth Detweiler in 1830, was from our point of view the cousin, the son of Jacob Hendricks Reiff, a storekeeper in Skippackville, and Sarah Clemens. This George is younger than his brother by 11 years. He is mentioned by Heckler in his History of Lower Salford (87) and in the History of Franconia Township as living in Skippackville and as having married the oldest daughter of Abraham Detweiler (d. 12/10/1830). There is a letter of his in the Henry S. Dotterer collection at the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Riffe, 108).

The older George C. Reiff, father of Abraham S. Reiff, married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814. As his son Abraham had been in Worcester, this George Reiff was also a trustee for purchase of Mennonite land in Skippack where he lived. He was one of "three Mennonite trustees, Jacob F. Kulp, Daniel Landes, and George Reiff," who executed a trust for land donated by Issac Kulp to build the new meetinghouse erected by the Old Mennonites of Skippack in 1848” (Wenger, 99).

The New Meetinghouse

This new meetinghouse ties several Old Mennonite strands together and illustrates aspects of the division between Old and the New. The seceding "new" Mennonites took over the meetinghouse in Skippack which the undivided congregation had built in 1844 (Wenger, 97), where both Old and then Old and New met for a time. But the Old or original group refused to prosecute their expropriation of property from scruples of conscience against litigation. They built a new building in 1848, slightly smaller than the old, although the deed was not made until August 21, 1849 (Wenger, 99). This was the land of which George Reiff served as trustee.

According to John F. Funk (1878) the building of a new meetinghouse illustrates what true Mennonites were all about. It also gives us a concrete means to understand the division of 1847.

“During the difficulties which occurred in the church, in eastern Pennsylvania, in 1847-48 on account of the disobedience and innovations of John H. Oberholtzer, in Bucks County, and the Hunsicker faction in Skippack, Montgomery County, there still remained, in the Old Church, so much love to God and the teachings of the Savior as to enable them, by the grace of God, to fulfill the teachings of Christ in a most noble manner, and leave to the world one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to their religious principles, presented to us in modern times.”

“The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions “not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,” and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (Funk,128)

This account highlights the unworldly Old Mennonite belief as well as some of the deep interrelations of the Mennonite Reiffs. In acting as trustee for the new building in Skippack, George C. Reiff, was doing there exactly what John B. Bechtel was doing in Hereford, when, at the 1847 division, he became the Old Mennonite pastor at the age of 41. Bechtel’s granddaughter, Anna Mack, was subsequently to marry George C. Reiff’s great grandson, Howard R. Reiff. Neither ancestor knew the other, but they acted in accord. Their children however, Anna and Howard, became new Mennonites in 1911.

The Old Mennonites of Skippack then became the "Upper Skippack" congregation, but while they surrendered the meetinghouse they kept the Skippack Alms Book, that record of alms money with annual audits conducted yearly from 1738, the oldest such record of its kind in Pennsylvania. This Alms Book gives “a list of all the ordained men of the Skippack circuit since 1738" (Wenger, 97) and records the signatures of the three Reiffs of succeeding generations, starting with George [C.] Reiff who kept the Alms Book from 1835 to 1842, signing it four times (Wenger, 103). His son Abraham S. Reiff of the Worcester congregation, part of the Skippack circuit, signed the Alms Book three times, from 1877-79. Abraham's son, George L. Reiff, as noted, signed 34 times. Thus the Alms Book and meetinghouse document these three generations. [Prior to the Oberholtzer division of 1847 the hierarchy of the Franconia conference had been comprised of districts overseen by a bishop, but " the Skippack bishop district retained the 'circuit system' which evidently obtained in all the districts at first" (Wenger, 98). That is, the ministers of this district would rotate among the three congregations, from Skippack, the seat, to Worcester and Providence.]

Executor

George C. Reiff also served as executor of his father-in-law’s will, Abraham Schwenk (5/25/1759 – 8/6/1843) and was named as guardian of the six children of Schwenk’s deceased son, also named Abraham. Here he is again simply called, George Reiff:

"Gaurdian[sic.] of the persons and Estates of the minor children of my late Deceased Son Abraham named as follows, to wit, Isaac, Abraham, David, William, Margaret & Sarah—from the first Day of April last past, until each of the said minor Children shall attain the age of 21 years.—The sum of $500 being due to each of them on the said first day of April, and in the hands of the said George Reiff; and of the further sum or sums that will be due to them immediately after my decease…" (Strassburger, 301) We know that George Reiff adequately fulfilled that trust, because in “1854 others of the heirs acknowledged the receipt of their full inheritance from George Reiff…"(Strassburger, 303).

Nonresistence

Paradoxically for a Mennonite, but before his marriage in 1814, George Reiff was listed as a private in the War of 1812. This might explain his intimacy with his father in law, who was a Sergeant Seventh Class in the Philadelphia County Militia during the Revolution and in the Montgomery County Militia in 1786. Abraham Schwenk was "a tanner in Germantown at the time of the [Revolutionary] war, nineteen years old, a tall, fine man, he was under age, but because of his size the officers did not know it. At the battle of Germantown he went upstairs in a house as he was wounded, where a woman said that British were coming. He replied, 'Let the devils come,' and he took a large stick from the fireplace and drove them back" (Strassburger, 296).

As a son of Mennonite parents it might seem important to explain how George Reiff was a Private in the War of 1812 (Captain John Wentz's Company, Sixth Class, Fifty-first Regiment), when, "apart from believers' baptism, the most distinctive doctrine of the Mennonites is their Biblical nonresistance" (Wenger, 57). That is, that "a Christian may not participate in, or support, war or violence in any form whatever" (Wenger, 57).

Mennonites were sometimes said to have served when they did not, but were included in the rolls anyway. Philip Geisinger, Henry Geisinger and John Geisinger had petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778 for exemption from military service (Wenger, 60-2) and been penalized. Wenger reports that there are "about a dozen and half graves at the Saucon burying ground on which are Grand Army of the Republic, G. A. R. markers of the Revolutionary War, including …Johannes Geissinger (1739- 1811)…Henrich Geisinger (1737-1817)…Philip Geissinger (1732-1809) and Abraham Geissinger, (1749-1825). As John L. Ruth says, these are “the crowning irony which was to mark the memories of Jacob Yoder, John Geissinger, and their friends who sacrificed all they had to separate themselves from the Revolutionary War for conscience’ sake. For all their pains, their graves are yearly marked with American flags placed by modern patriotic organizations, who, having carelessly read the rosters of Colonel Siegfried’s militia, in their myth-making zeal designate these defenseless, dispossessed Christians as soldier heroes of the American Revolution.” (Ruth, 173) Of course there were also many Geissingers and Rosenbergers in the Saucon Valley not in the Mennonite Church. In fact however the opposite of the case is true. Some of those people were imprisoned for not serving.

If they did serve there were two ways around the prohibition. First, after the war to make a confession to the congregation and be reinstated. The second out was to not yet have been baptized, therefore not yet to be held accountable to Mennonite doctrine (Wenger, 64). Mennonites were baptized as adults. The minority of Mennonites who did serve in the American Revolution joined other denominations. The way back to the Old was not easy. To be reinstated in the offender would have had to publicly repent the war before the congregation and then submit to their vote.

Although much later, an example of this issue occurs in the nonresistant dilemma of the two sons of Henry Mack, step brothers of Anna Mack Reiff and nephews of Bishop Andrew Mack, that is, Harvey and Philip. Harvey went to France in 1918 as a conscientious objector and stayed to work for the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee (Wenger, 75). Philip went to Officer's Candidate School at Fort Meade and became a 2nd Lieutenant with every intention of going to France as a combatant, but the war ended.

Mennonite spokesmen downplay such opposites. Wenger says that Philip G. Mack "accepted noncombatant service at Camp Meade; was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). But he didn’t “accept” service, he sought it out and he wanted to fight. He was only noncombatant because he couldn’t get to France in time. Philip's mother, Sarah Ann Geisinger came of a long Old Mennonite tradition of noncombatants. She wouldn’t let Philip in the house with his uniform on. Also he went from the “new” Mennonites to the Presbyterians shortly after his marriage. His nephew, JH Reiff, who lived across the street, remembered that when Philip came home in his uniform his mother wouldn't let him in the house or let him stay there. As his niece Elizabeth Reiff put it, "Philip got thrown out of the communion for going to OCS instead of registering as a CO."

Wenger says Philip was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70), but it is more accurate to say that for his mother's sake Philip confessed and repented to the church and was received in that fellowship again, after which he lived at home until he married in 1925, but shortly followed the way of his sister Anna into the new Mennonites and from there, with wife Catherine became Presbyterian.

A similar situation exists perhaps with Gottshall Gottschalk, who signed the Skippack Alms Book twice in 1791 (Wenger, 102), although 6 others signed that year also. If it is the same person, Godshalk (Boorse) Godshalk (1762-1835) who is buried in Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery is on the Muster Roll of Towamencin Township under Captain Daniel Springer on 11/24/1780 (Perkiomen Region, 387-8)

Another striking example of Mennonite military service seems to exist in the life of Bishop Heinrich Kolb Hunsicker (3/7/1752-7/8/1836), who while being both a farmer, a minister of the Lower Skippack Mennonites and a Bishop, was also listed as a member of the 6th Class of Captain Dull's Company of Militia, 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Co. under the command of Col. Daniel Heister in 1778. He began signing the Skippack Alms book in 1781 even while being listed as a member of the Philadelphia Militia that same year. He signed the Alms Book 33 times, until 1832

There is a divergence of theory and practice. It is possible to suppose that the military connection was watered down, whether in the life of George C. Reiff or Philip Mack. George C. and Maria Reiff are buried in the Lower Skippack Mennonite cemetery. While Mennonites would bury strangers for the sake of charity or geography, for the most part they buried their own in their graveyards.

Most of George C.'s children are explicitly denominated as Mennonites in the immediate area.

Schwenks/Bauers

But more can be said of the Schwenk family of George C.’s wife. In 1779 Abraham Schwenk lived in Claytonville, the home of Henry Mack and Jacob L. Reiff a hundred years later. He subsequently bought a large farm in Frederick Township at Delphi, also called Zieglerville Station where he built a tannery and farmed till about 1808. Subsequent to that he owned 176 acres in Skippack Township along the Perkiomen Creek opposite Schwenksville. The Schwenks were members of Keeley's Lutheran Church to which Abraham Schwenk gave the ground on which the Lutheran Church was erected in Schwenksville. His estate was divided equally among nine children. In the will his daughter who married George Reiff is sometimes named Maria, sometimes Mary. Intermixing Mennonites and Lutherans as in Maria Schwenk’s family occurred also with Andrew and Henry Mack’s brother Peter, who was a Lutheran minister in Hummelstown in the 1880’s.

Maria Schwenk’s mother, Veronica Landis Bauer (4/10/1756 – 9/13/1840), was a Mennonite whose father, Michael Bauer (c. 1720-1784) married Veronica Landis about 1744-45. This Michael Bauer was just sitting down to a wedding banquet in 1776, celebrating his oldest daughter’s marriage to Christian Meyer, when soldiers of the Continental Army plundered the feast and carried off a wagonload of spoils to their camp (Ruth, ‘Twas Seeding Time, 91).

Michael Bauer was in turn the son of Hans Bauer (d. 1748), who owned land on the Perkiomen in 1734. In 1742 he bought 105 acres in Butter Valley in Colebrookdale and in 1743, 134 acres in Douglas Manor (also later the residence of Henry Mack). Both these properties were annexed into Hereford Township in 1753. (Strassburger, 316f). Strassburger says that Hans was "no doubt" buried in the Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, but the tombstone has been effaced so he does not appear in the Hereford Burial List compiled by Henry Mack in 1934. This Hans Bauer (d. 1748), a Mennonite, is said to have emigrated between 1708 and 1717 before settling in Colebrookdale (Strassburger, 315). Veronica Landis' mother was the daughter of another prominent Mennonite settler, Johannes Landis, of Bucks County (Strassburger, 320).

Butter Valley was a very fertile area containing Hereford and Colebrookdale, both Mennonite colonies. The first Hereford meetinghouse was built about 1743 and is the location of the oft-mentioned Hereford burial ground. In 1749 Michael Bauer inherited lands in Colebrookdale from his father. He signed the petition of 1753 to the Philadelphia Court to erect the new Hereford Township and was among the Hereford residents taxed in 1758. Michael and his wife Veronica Landis are probably also buried in the Hereford ground. Their son Samuel (1746-1822) is. There were only three children, Samuel, Fronica and Anna. Veronica married Abraham M. Schwenk in 1779.

Like Abraham S. Reiff and John B. Bechtel in the Oberholtzer Division, the Bauer and Landis trails cross very profoundly with another tributary of the Reiffs, the Bechtels and the Macks in the Mennonite church of Hereford.

George Landis Reiff (4/7/1740 – 1/24/1808) was also known as George Reiff III. That is, George II was John George Reiff (c.1692-1759), oldest son of Hans George Reiff or George I. George II was George III’s uncle. Because genealogists were unsure of the maiden name of Jacob Reiff the Elder’s spouse they took to differentiating George from his uncle and grandfather in this way. But evidence now exists that the mother of George Landis Reiff mother was Anna Landis (not Anna Maria Fischer). George III is of course the second son of Jacob the Elder.

George III married Elizabeth Hendricks on 2/15/1764. Along with his father and brother, he too is recorded as a private in Captain Barnet Haines Company for Lower Skippack in the Revolutionary War, but the same provisos for Mennonites at war may apply to him as to his son in the War of 1812. Both he and his wife, Elizabeth Hendricks are buried at Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery. Hendricks of course is an illustrious name in Pennsylvania, forever dignified by the signing of the protest against slavery by Gerhard Hendricks in 1688.

Elizabeth Hendricks (4/9/1740 – 6/25/1817) was the daughter of Leonard
Hendricks (b. Krefeld, 1698-1776, buried Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery) and
Elizabeth Turner (born c. 1712 in Pennsylvania). Leonard had named son-in-law George Reiff as coexecutor of his will, probated 3/8/1776.

If it had not begun sooner with Jacob the Elder’s wife, Anna Landis, it is thought that the Mennonite affiliation began with George’s marriage to Elizabeth. The genealogist and historian Harry Reiff says: "Elizabeth Hendricks who married George Reiff III was a daughter of Leonard Hendricks, who in turn was a son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks. The Hendricks were part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled/established Germantown in 1683 and later. These people were called Dutch Quakers-induced by William Penn to come to Penn’s colony in America. Apparently there was a strong Mennonite population in the Krefeld/Munchen-Gladback area, and Quaker-Mennonite-Reformed families at times were mixed. At any rate, Leonard Hendricks owned land in the Towamencin area of present Montgomery Co., and was considered a Quaker.”

Leonard’s father, Lawrence Hendricks (b. ca. 1670 Kriegsheim Germany, d. 1749 at Towamencin, Montgomery Co.), a Quaker and then a Mennonite, arrived in PA with his father Willem Hendricks (1649-1691) on the "Francis and Dorothy" on 12 October 1685. Lawrence’s father, William, was a Holland Dutch Mennonite who had voyaged with Pastorious in 1682 and brought his sons Lawrence and Henry with him.

Lawrence Hendricks signed the 1728 petition for the Susquehanna Road or Line" Of this list Alderfer says "the list of signatures attached to the 1728 petition contains about twelve Mennonite names. The first six signatures are of men from the Towamencin Mennonite community. The first four (Jacob Godshalk, Godshalk Godshalk, Henry Hendricks, and Lawrence Hendricks) were the original 1714 settlers in what would later become the Towamencin Mennonite community…the Hendricks brothers may have been brothers-in-law to Godshalk Godshalk, oldest son of Jacob Godshalk, the first Mennonite bishop in America, who settled first at Germantown.”
(Alderfer, 19-21).

Jacob Reiff the Elder (11/15/1698 – 2/16/1782)was the youngest son of Hans George Reiff (d. December, 1726) and Anna Maria (1662-1753), his executor and a man of wide reputation in Skippack and Lower Salford. Evidence now suggests that his wife was Anna Landis (1709 – 10/28/1788) who he married at Skippack in 1733.

Glenn H. Landis has discovered an estate settlement in 1750 for the estate of Jacob Landes who had a son, Jacob (c. 1711 – c. 1793), but also two daughters, named in the settlement as Anna Reiff and Margreth Smith. This, it is thought, is the Anna who married Jacob Reiff the Elder. Anna Landis’ father, Jacob (c. 1685 –1749), another Mennonite émigré of about 1726, bought land from Derick Johnson in Germantown in 1727, bought further land in Franconia, Montgomery Co. in 1734, and sold both plots to his son Jacob in 1748.

Harry Reiff puts the argument like this: "She (Jacob Reiff the Elder’s mother) died after her son Jacob (with whom she lived for the last years of her life) had changed from the German Reformed Church to the Skippack Mennonite meetinghouse, possibly because Jacob may have married Mennonite Anna Landis. I believe I told you of the Anna Landis theory that Jacob married the daughter of Skippack Mennonite Jacob Landis. Also Jacob had become disillusioned of the German Reformed congregations…and he may have changed religions in disgust" (Harry Reiff, Letter of 3/1/2003).
Jacob the Elder had two sons, Jacob Jr. and George III. It is hard to conclusively prove whether he was a Mennonite later in life because of the records which Mennonites essentially did not believe in keeping, but a summary of some of the argument goes like this:

The oldest son, Jacob Reiff Jr., the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), who voted for the Pennsylvania convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, seems to have followed his father's early Reformed tendencies, since he participated in the founding of the Wentz Reformed Church. His brother George, as we have seen, married a Mennonite.

Jacob Jr.'s children however got him into the Mennonites in a big way,
especially his son John Reiff (12/5/1759 – 2/6/1826) who married a daughter of Bishop Christian Funk and became a minister with that prescient, if defrocked divine, who endorsed the American Revolution. This John Reiff signed the preface, with other ministers, of the English version of Funk’s Mirror for all Mankind (Norristown, Pa.,1814). In 1814 Jacob Reiff (Jr.) donated land for the first Funkite meetinghouse in Skippack (Wenger, 350), the same land that his son John later retitled to the Dunkards after the Funkite demise.

So much more can be said of Jacob the Elder’s activities in every way that they must be given a separate article unto themselves.

Hans George Reiff

Hans George Reiff’s arrival in Pennsylvania and Skippack is so early that his name is used as a benchmark to identify the boundaries of Michael Ziegler’s first land purchase in 1717, “beginning at a reputed Corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” (Straussberger, 419). It seems evident from this first, that Reiff had been there long enough to identify Ziegler who came to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28) and second, that Reiff lived in close intellectual as well as physical proximity to these Mennonites. Ziegler, an early Mennonite minister, is designated as a trustee on the first deed of the Skippack Mennonite congregation (Alderfer, 28) that conveyed the 100 acres in 1717 for the Mennonite school house and burial ground.(Straussberger 415). He probably was the cause of Reiff being asked to witness the further trust agreement of that behest in 1725.

When Ziegler in 1734 applied to the Land Office for a resurvey of this tract of 100 acres new lines of demarcation were given, implying not only that Reiff was deceased, which he was, but also that he had originally been the only point of reference available for the deed, thus a very early landholder indeed. Instead of saying “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” the resurvey says, “beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending…to a post thence North East by the land of Jacob Colph (421). The resurvey gives the original survey date as December, 1717. “In pursuance of a warrant …dated the tenth day of September in the year 1717…there was survey’d and set out unto Michael Ziegler…in December, 1717 a certain tract…beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending thence…to a post…by the land of Jacob Colph.” (Strassburger, 423)

Much more can and will be said of Hans George Reiff and his son Jacob.

Works Cited

Joel Alderfer, "Several Documents Relating to Early Franconia Conference Mennonites." In Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter Supplement, July, 1984.

Richard Warren Davis. Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners. Vol. II. 1997.

Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation: A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church New Order. Bally, PA. 1988.

Christian Funk. Mirror for all Mankind. Norristown, PA,1814.

John F. Funk. The Mennonite Church and Her Accusers. Elkhart, Indiana: Mennonite Publishing Company, 1878.

The Perkiomen Region [PR] Originally published by the Historical and Natural Science Society of the Perkiomen Region, Pennsburg, PA, 1921, republished by Adams Apple Press, 1994.

Fred J. Riffe. Reiff to Riffe Family in America, 1995.

John L. Ruth. ‘Twas Seeding Time: A Mennonite View of the American Revolution. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1976.

Ralph Beaver Strassburger. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Gwynedd Valley, PA, 1922.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA. Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Mennonite Publishing House, Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Acknowledgments
From driving to Skippack with inchoate desire in 1974, finding old copies of the Goshenhoppen Region at the first stop, to the next day contacting the editor and going on a dig with him and his students at the Jacob Reiff farm, considering which removes it is remarkable that my brothers and I lived through aspects of the important Mennonite passages of life, 1) non-resistance 2) service among alien or deprived peoples 3) agricultural experience, 4) separation from the world. Unconscious origins without knowing.

Acknowledgments are due to my brother Robert A. Reiff who accompanied me in these searches of war records, ship lists and newspaper accounts in the beginning of this effort in 1974.

The modern work on many of the names included here stems from the geneology of Harry E. Reiff, Reiff Families in America, 1986. Reiff to Riffe (1995) by Fred J. Riffe pays tribute to him as does Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, (1997) Vol II by Richard Warren Davis. His influence extends beyond his printed works. He has long contributed to genealogy forums and has willingly corresponded at length with interested parties. He is the source for the first modern printed reference by Davis that Hans George Reiff “was in Pennsylvania by 14 Feb 1718 as he owned land next to Michael Ziegler at Bebber Twp., (later Salford twp.) according to the deed bearing that date from David Powell to Michael Ziegler.” Davis indicates his debt in a footnote as a “letter from Harry E. Reiff of Ambler, Pennsylvania, September 1994. He has generously corresponded on many subjects of the background and foreground of this present effort and has seen these manuscripts which pass here as biography, although none of the errors likely to be found are his doing, quite to the contrary, he has saved this narrative from error a number of times with his meticulous attention to detail and reasoned judgments.

Hans George Reiff (1659-1726)

2007-12-11T13:32:00.005-08:00

Some biographers insist he is John, that Hans is a diminutive (Riffe, 1), but the deed of 1717 is in the name of Hans George and his signature of the Mennonite agreement of 1725 is Hans George, so rebaptizing in this case is also anglicizing.

There was never a contemporary reference to him as "John" Reiff except the will. The geneologist Harry E. Reiff (HER), calls it "rather a cockeyed mark," suggests from the mark and mere initials JR on the will that he may have been illiterate, but we know he “wrote a neat hand” (Pennypacker) in the trust agreement and so consider that he was infirm or incapable of other signing at the end. Also, Hans’ son Jacob Reiff may have had ready to hand a seal denoting JR.

Anglicizing becomes more common later. HER says, (20 Nov 2002) “I’ve heard that the original will was in German, but no proof of that either,” except of course for the sudden appearance of “John” at the end of it. He adds, “the archives in Philadelphia City Hall are not at all always in German-far from it (11 Dec 2001).

Better evidence that current copies of this will are translations occurs in the correction of “Sulford” to Salford in the opening with the now Englished name, “John George Reiff of Salford Township,” that is, “Salford” corrected from “Sulford,” which the Historical Society document calls it, suggesting “John” corrected from “Hans.” John becomes more common thereafter.

In the records of the Pennsylvania Historical Society he is “John George” Reiff so there is pressure to conform to this if only for scholarly clarity: ”Copy of the last will and testament of John George Reiff, of Sulford Township, Philadelphia County, Pa., dated 15 December 1726.”

He is called John George Reiff in an article in 1922 identifying one witness to the will, Johannes Scholl (The Perkiomen Region, Vol I, 105), but of course that is because his name occurs as such in the will.

Riffe gives his name as “John (Hans) George Reiff” (20) on a lease agreement of 1724 and release of deed May 15, 16. He cites as his source James Heckler’s “History of Lower Salford Township & Reiff Family Sketch & Notes,” but Heckler there refers to Hans George’s son, “George, or John George” (24). Heckler in fact calls him “Hans George.” Later however in Heckler’s narrative, Henry S. Dotterer calls him “John George Reiff” (30), but reverts to “Hans George” in referring to land Jacob Reiff purchased in 1727 “adjoining lands of Hans George Reiff” (31) which doesn't prove much except that Hans George was a slightly more prevalent usage in 1886.

A Community of Families

Richard Warren Davis traces his old world origins to the Swiss Wadenswil as a son of Ulrich Ryeff, (b.1626), and his wife, Cathri Zäshler (347). HER says the possibility “cannot be ignored” that Hans George migrated to the Pfalz (Basel) and joined the German Reformed Church there. He identifies an unpublished manuscript in the Pennsylvania Historical Society where Henry Dotterer, in his visit to the Netherlands to the Dutch Reformed Church archive, finds data that Hans George married the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed church minion. This would explain the education of their children, especially Jacob, called by Heckler (108) one of the four most learned of the community.

His history in Pennsylvania involves a community of families.Some say Hans George may have arrived “in the latter part of 1600” (Riffe, 18). Heckler says there was a tradition in the Reiff family that he came before Penn. Maybe it was in 1709, or, as Davis suggests, with a large group of Mennonites who came in August of 1717 (347), but it is certain the land of Hans George Reiff and his wife Anna Maria (1662-1753) was a benchmark in Salford in 1717 to identify the boundary of their Mennonite neighbor Michael Ziegler. Ziegler, minister and trustee of the deed of Skippack Mennonites to dedicate 100 acres for a Mennonite school house and burial ground, also in 1717 (Strassberger, 415), was the likely cause of Hans George being asked to witness that agreement in 1725.

Ziegler had come to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28), but reapplied to the Land Office for a resurvey of this same tract of 100 acres in 1734, after Reiff was deceased, so new benchmarks were made. Reiff's land had been the best original point of reference for that first deed “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land” (Strassburger, 414).

The new deed says, “beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending…to a post thence North East by the land of Jacob Colph" (421). The resurvey gives the original survey date as December, 1717 (Strassburger, 423), so obviously Hans George owned this land prior to that date. Harry Reiff observes that the year of the recording of that purchase as 1724 vs. the 1717 date of the survey, “reflects the recording, not the date of purchase. The land was still in Philadelphia Co. and often years went by before the farmers went all that distance to Philadelphia (quite a trip in those days) to record the purchase/ownership.”

A Mennonite “Hans Reiff” also purchased 100 acres in 1718 that bordered those of Hans George. Old world census lists denote the religion of the head of household next to the name. “An “M” appears behind each who was a Mennonite” (Davis, 1). Also using this shorthand, biographers have denoted Hans George Reiff by religion in order to separate him from his Mennonite neighbor Hans Reiff (c. 1688-1750), even though Hans Reiff is the age of Hans George’s children. By 1717 Hans George’s family was grown. George was 25, Peter 23, Conrad 21, Jacob 19 and Anna Maria 15. According to Heckler he had “purchased the entire southern corner of the township containing two hundred acres” (History of Harleysville, 24). While the religious shorthand may imply social distinctions between Reformed and Mennonite, church and sect, Hans George had extensive relations with many. He could also have been called Hans George the blacksmith, Hans George of Salford, or Sulford, as in his will, instead of Hans George the Reformed.

The Mennonite Trust Agreement

It’s going to be significant who lives near who in these communities because they turn to their neighbors in time of need. In the case of Hans George, the neighbors who bordered his land were Ziegler and Hans Reiff, both Mennonites. Davis (347) thinks Hans Reiff and Hans George were relatives of some kind for their names and proximity of residence. Of his relations with his Mennonite neighbors however it overreaches to say that Hans George Reiff "assisted in the preparation" of the Mennonite trust agreement that he witnessed because "in the time when many of the colonists were unable to read and write, John George Reiff was considered an educated man," or, that "he was more than helpful in assisting the poorer immigrants, particularly those of the Mennonite faith," and "helped organize and build the Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse" (Riffe, 19-20). Such language might apply better to his son Jacob when he was deputy for the probate of wills c. 1743-48, “the object in having a German-speaking deputy located here, was doubtless, to accommodate those German inhabitants, who lived a great distance from Philadelphia and were ignorant of the English language” (Heckler, 31). However if both his parents knew English it is no wonder the career of son Jacob was so set apart, for he spoke and wrote English and German fluently and probably Dutch, since he traveled for those years in Holland. That his education can be traced back to his parents suggests that he was groomed by birthright for his responsibilities such as probating the will of Claus Jansen, the first Mennonite minister at Skippack, a settler in Skippack as early as 1703, whose will "dated June 1, 1739...was proven before Jacob Reiff, of Lower Salford, deputy register, October 30, 1745" (Heckler, 15). To argue that he was educated because his father was, somebody had to translate the Mennonite trust agreement and from the above it was not Pennebacker so either Hans George or Jacob might do.

Samuel Pennypacker argues that his ancestor, Heinrich Pannebecker, was the agent who set up that trust agreement and that the Mennonites must have been "acting under the guidance of some one more or less familiar with the forms of conveyancing" (Bebber’s Township and the Dutch Patroons of Pennsylvania, in The Creation, Founding and early Settlers of Bebber’s Township. William N. Detweiler, 1992. 6). But Pannebecker’s written English was a Dutch pidgin as bad or worse than schoolmaster Christopher Dock's poor German-English, of whom Heckler remarks, his “education was in German and [he] did not know what constituted good English (History of Harleysville, Lower Salford, 52).

We compare the two. The German-English of Christopher Dock's will says: "my order is dit, to chose Man, two upright Man can do it, let them bring it in two like part and worth as good she can, and so likewise if any fruit, every a thing shall come in two like part to Receive each of my Children one part" (The Perkiomen Region II, 25). Pennebecker is just as bad in a letter of 13 February 1742: "M. Frend Ed Ward Shippen. My keind Respek too Juer too let Ju under Stan tha I haffe spoken with the totters of Abraham op den Graff an by ther words ar willing too singe Jur deeds as ther broders haffe don…"(Bebber’s Township, 31). Pennebecker's letter of 13 February 1742

There was scant English excellence in Skippack. Heckler mentions that Hans George’s neighbor Michael Ziegler “made his mark” MZ, and that “while his wife wrote her name in German Catharine Zieglerin…we will not comment on his fitness as a minister of the gospel when he could not so much as write his name,” (History of Skippack and Vicinity, 13). The modern Pennypacker says, “the witnesses were Hans George Reiff; a member of the German Reformed Church, who wrote a neat signature, and Antonius Heilman, a Lutheran living at the Trappe. Whether this selection of witnesses was the result of chance alone, or had some purpose, it is impossible to determine” (6). Maybe, but in the career of their sons Jacob, and Conrad the Hans George Reiff family was set apart by its knowledge of English.

The trust agreement of 30 March 1725 designed that “the land should be held for the benefit of the poor of the Mennonites, and for the erection of a meeting house for the people of that sect, and, on the other hand to so restrict it, that only members in good standing in this meeting could act as trustees" (Pennypacker, 6).

Pennypacker observes that it was the recognition of a duty to provide for the education of all of the children of a township and the burial of all of the dead, and for all time. "Setting apart of so large a domain as one hundred acres, for the purpose and the expression of his affection for them are not at all characteristic of a mere sale of lands…(4-5).

Ruth is less ecstatic about the generosity of Dutch patronage: "there was a transaction back in Bebber's Town. . .the Mennonites on the Skippack bought. . .a 100 acre plot, at a somewhat reduced rate" (96). Pennypacker differs that the "annual rental of one shilling and four pence" (4) were "not intended in any sense as the consideration for the conveyance or any part of it" (6) but merely as a sign, insisted upon by van Bebber, that he was "a Patroon as well as a vendor" (6) in his dealings, "even in a gift to the Trustees of a charity" (7). Just to make it interesting, Riffe says they paid 15 pounds for it (19)! By way of comparison, in 1724 Pennepacker gave a lease on 200 acres to Hans George Reiff for 5 shillings, which Reiff however then purchased for 485 pounds, 13 shillings (Riffe, 20). So in terms of the lease the Mennonites got a reduced rate, but in terms of the value of the land an outright gift.

We have knowledge of Hans George’s wife Anna Maria in the eulogy of Muhlenberg at her decease in 1753. In his will his neighbors “Isaac Duboy and Lorrents Schweitzer” are charged to see that the will is adequately performed. “Jno Scholl” and “Garret InDehaven” are witnesses with a “Robert Jones,” and the inventory of his estate is signed by “Lorentz Livnya Mornn (sic)” and “Johannes Lefebe” which identities might tell a little more about Hans George, at least by association.

Hans George Reiff maintained friendly relations with Mennonites, Lutherans and a wide range of people. He did not participate in judgments made on narrow reading of doctrine, a parting of the ways his son Jacob perhaps had with Reformed pastor Boehm, who was doctrinaire. The construction of the Mennonite trust agreement above demonstrates this cooperation.

Presumably there is a sanitized version of Pennsylvania religious history and politics, but examining the originals, the letters, journals and reports by and about Boehm, Weiss, Muhlenberg, and the hundred, thousand tracts, pamphlets, books and private diaries indicates a diversity of community unlike New England's monolith. Philadelphia and its environs was extraordinarily diverse in all directions of experimentation, a free but often lawless environment. Hans George Reiff was an exception to the argumentative, contentious citizen, a wise man, who in his will asks that his five children take their parts in the estate under the supervision of "two indifferent men by the rule of their inventory that it may prevent discord" (Rife, 20).

Anna Reiff

Was it Anna or Anna Maria Wrote in English?

A continuing theme in this era is the perpetuation of German in these communities even until the 20th century. Not many German immigrants spoke or wrote English in those beginning years. There are further indications that Hans George Reiff and his family did. The first is that "Anna Reiff wrote in English," repeated by Hershey (MHEP, October 1995), who calls it "an unusual document which she wrote in 1773," but she does not say what the document was. This was first mentioned by Heckler (The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township, 1888) who said "there has been some inquiry as to who his [Jacob Reiff's] wife was, but it is not known. She probably was a woman of some distinction because she wrote a neat hand in English, which German women could not do." Efforts to identify this writing having failed, HER suggested in the absence of other information that it was Anna Maria, wife of Hans George and not Anna (wife of Jacob the Elder) who so wrote and that the writing was of Hans George's will. In explaining how this is so he observes the possiblity that Anna Maria was the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church official:

"the only document in English that I know of that may have been written by Anna Reiff is the Hans George Reiff will, now in the files in Philadelphia City Hall. Since the will was probated in 1727, it is unlikely that it was written by Jacob's wife Anna, [he means because Jacob did not marry until 1733] but possibly by Jacob's mother Anna. No proof of who or when; and additionally, I've heard that the original will was in German, but no proof of that either. Some years ago I read one of Henry Dotterer's reports from his European travels in which he noted the possibility that Hans George Reiff married Anna Maria, the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed churchman. If indeed she wrote Hans George's will, she was surely educated. Now, the historian Henry Dotterer wrote several books in his historical journeys. Two of the published books are in the stacks of the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Philadelphia, but there is a third unpublished one which I saw about 10 years ago. They wouldn't let me make a copy of it, but as I recall, Dotterer recounted his visit to the Netherlands and the Dutch Reformed Church archives, where he found data that Hans George married an educated daughter of a church minion (HER, 20 November 2002)." Nothing of Hans George’s wife Anna Maria is known that does not enhance her character and intelligence as witnessed in Muhlenberg's remembrance of her in his Journals (I, 352f) in 1753.

Confusion of the Annas arose when Jacob's wife was initially called Anna Maria (Fisher). Glenn Landis says,

"I have been in contact with Harry Reiff...and he states that he has investigated the Fisher connection and finds no evidence for it and now would omit the reference. The "Anna Maria" part may have come from confusion with Jacob's sister or mother who were both Anna Maria. James Y. Heckler...says that Jacob Reiff's wife was Anna. He repeats this in several different contexts. Harry Reiff now agrees with this and says he knows of no primary evidence that she was called Anna Maria. The graves of Jacob and his wife in the Skippack Mennonite Cemetery are marked Jacob Reiff and Anna Reiff" (Letter to Richard D. Davis, 18 Feb 1994).

Anna's "neat hand" is practically identical to Heckler's remark about what Samuel Pennypacker says of Hans George Reiff's witness of the Mennonite Trust Agreement: "Hans George Reiff, a member of the German Reformed Church, who wrote a neat signature" ("Beber's Township and the Dutch Patroons"). The neat hand, putative education of Anna Maria and signature of Hans George, coupled with the vocation of Jacob as deputy registrar of wills all suggest education and knowledge of English, if they were not virtually a family of scribes.

Hans George/Jacob: Reformed or Mennonite?

Both the German language and religion were consuming issues. Hans George and son Jacob lived in such close sympathy with Mennonites they became one with them in about a generation. The investigations of Glenn Landis increase this possibility. Wills not previously available indicate that Jacob Reiff married Anna Landes, a Mennonite:

"a recently discovered estate settlement for the estate of Jacob Landes (1750) shows that he in fact had two daughters in addition to the son Jacob II. These daughters signed as Anna Reiff and Margreth Smith (mark)" (To Whom It May Concern). In any case Jacob's son George married Elizabeth Hendricks and if not before was Mennonite thereafter. HER's reasoning on this is that"Jacob had become disillusioned of the German Reformed congregations after he was accused of thievery of the proceeds from his trip to Holland and Germany with the minister Weiss and he may have changed religions in disgust" (1 March 2003).

German Reformed historians never got over the embarrassment of their politics in this alleged fraud, even if their own investigator (Schlatter) exhonorated Jacob. The turmoil lasted a decade and more and took its toll since no religious affiliation can hereafter bve shown to exist for Jacob for the rest of his life. Not that there are not many opportunities. He probated the will of Claus Jansen, first Mennonite minister at Skippack (Heckler, Lower Salford, 15 (insert in Adams Apple ed.). His neighbors, Hans George's putative cousins, Hans and Abraham Reiff were long standing members of the Salford Mennonites and of course "many of his grandchildren married Mennonites" (Davis, 347). HER says that Jacob's mother, Anna Maria, "died after her son Jacob (with whom she lived for the last years of her life) had changed from the German Reformed Church to the Skippack Mennonite meetinghouse, possible because Jacob may have married the daughter of Skippack Mennonite Jacob Landis," and that, "the Mennonite lines seem to me to be quite clear from George III down..." because of the Reiff/Hendricks marriage.

We may joke that the Mennonites of that time were so eclectic, but didn't they ask Hans George to be their witness and didn't they lend their sanctuary for a Lutheran pastor to perform the funeral of a Reformed widow (that is, Anna, Hans George's spouse) and then bury her in their churchyard? Jacob could have returned to support the Wentz Church, successor to the Reiff Church, as his prodigal brother Conrad did (The Perkiomen Region, I, 39-44), but there is no evidence he did. He could have worshiped at Muhlenberg's church, who respected him as one who "could discern good as well as evil in others" (Journals, I, 353), but there is no record of it although there is that his sister did. It would not be difficult to disappear into the Mennonite meetinghouse since they kept fewer records than the "churched." Jacob is not going to make it easy to decide, which we may take as a motive to understand the much longer account of his life and trials when it appears (in process here)!

Acknowledgments

Modern works on the names here stem from the genealogy, Reiff Families in America (1986) by Harry Reiff (HER), a Ph.D. organic chemist (Minnesota, 1955) who long contributed to genealogy forums and corresponded at length with interested parties about Jacob Reiff's descendants. Reiff to Riffe (1995) by Fred J. Riffe pays tribute to him as does Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, Vol II (1997) by Richard Warren Davis. HER is the source for the first modern printed reference by Davis that Hans George Reiff “was in Pennsylvania by 14 Feb 1718 as he owned land next to Michael Ziegler at Bebber Twp. (later Salford twp.) according to the deed bearing that date.” Davis acknowledges this information in a footnote as a “letter from Harry E. Reiff of Ambler, Pennsylvania, September 1994."

Harry's influence extends beyond his printed work. He contributed much in the background and foreground of this effort. For example, in a letter about the Ziegler deed, he says "there is often confusion in the literature involving Mennonite Hans Reiff and German Reformed Church Hans George Reiff. Mennonite Hans Reiff's farm was about a mile or so from that of Hans George's home and even closer to Jacob Reiff's presumed home, now called the Jacob Reiff Home/Park." He has seen much if not all of the writing here in manuscript, and though none of the errors likely to be found are his, he has saved the narrative a number of times with his meticulous attention to detail and reasoned judgment. HER says his book is "not a family history, but just a genealogical record of Jacob's descendants."

History of Old Germantown: With a Description of Its Settlement and Some Account of Its Important Persons, Buildings and Places Connected with Its Development

By John Palmer Garber, C. Henry Kain, Naaman Henry Keyser, Horace Ferdinand McCann

Published by H. F. McCann, 1907.

Hendrick Pannebecker, Surveyor of Lands for the Penns, 1674-1754: Flomborn, Germantown and Skippach. By Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker. Published by Priv. print., 1894