Eagle Gathering

Ceramic parrot to honor Wilhelm Schimmel 's (1817 - 1890) brightly painted carved roosters, eagles, parrots.

In 1720 Germantown and Skippack, immigrants fought among themselves religiously. Boehm's endless rages of "cunning unfaithfulness" (328) and Diemer's "church-robbery" (Dubbs, 66) ad infinitum were accepted functions of the time. Harangues of charge and counter charge, people from the same towns in the Palatinate fought tooth and nail. The early religions of Pennsylvania might be  pathologies, sociopathic anomalies, personal dysfunctions and jealousies but they had a certain tolerance too. The more they claimed the right the more wrong they were, the whole panorama of  Lutheran, Reformed, "Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, Socinians, Pietists," (John Philip Boehme), Labadists, Rosicrusians, Dunkers, German Baptists, Moravians, Ephratatites, Baumann, Beissel, Zinzendorf. A pollster would have said they were polarized, like the overthrow of the deep state by whole center of the country.

Mittelberger claimed in his Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) that Conrad Reiff was attacked by a  flight of golden eagles in his field and never left the house again. The truth is that Mittelberger fled the country because he couldn't take it. Eagles are symbolic of liberty. We don't think we have more freedom now when there is less, like there is also fewer eagles.  Philadelphia named the region, but further out in Salford, Skippack, Worcester, New Providence, Hereford, Oley, crowds of soap, butter and egg merchants, as a way of commercializing religions, battled in churches and markets to establish their brands. Their lives enter history from  their mishaps on the trail. The better scandalized the better they are remembered. Sued, advertised against, you can be sure the words of his enemies do not lie when we dredge complaint and self defense from their lives.. But in flights the folk transcend. A hundred years before New England invented transcendalism Pennsylvanists gathered in flights.

 Reiff Brothers' Schuippach (Skippack)

There were enough Reiffs in trouble in the 18th century merely from the four sons of Hans George (c.1659-1726) and Anna Maria Reiff (1662-1753) alone. It's a tossup as to who caused the greatest trouble, whether it was Jacob, called the Elder,alledged to have both founded and destroyed the first German Reformed church, or Conrad, scandalized by Mittelberger, a converted New Born through marriage to its adherents who turned back to his first faith.  Jacob, Peter, George, and Conrad, and Anna (Maria), but we do not feel sympathy for their plight until we realize their underdog status.

1) Jacob's lengthy defense in the Answer (September 1733) to a court complaint against him the previous year is his only extant writing, although he is quoted frequently in the letters of Boehm.
2) The Wills of Hans George, Conrad and George are also extant, with numerous deeds, records of transactions and agreements, formal petitions, newspaper notices and accounts, church records, and tax lists.
3) An important primary source for the funeral of Anna Maria Reiff in 1753 and of events in general in Perkiomen (1742-87) is the Journal of Muhlenberg and her name is on the first page of the Skippack Alms Book of 1738 for a gift.
4) Before 1742 the Letters (1728-1748) of the German Reformed pastor, John Phillip Boehm, reveal a wealth of particulars concerning Jacob Reiff, notably his calling the Philadelphia elders “church robbers.”
5) Conrad Reiff figures prominently in Gottlieb Mittelberger's disgruntled record of his Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) when he became the organist of Muhlenberg's church.

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 and frequently wrote of the people he met, 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.

  Eleventh gen descendant of these four brothers poses at the  Sacred Treaty Oak on the old Conrad Reiff property, September 2012

Anna Maria Reiff (1662-1753) 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. If she was ninety as he says then we may take common date of her birth as accurate, April 1662 (17). The journal gives Muhlenberg's 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 against him, we can take his judgment as evidence of exoneration.

At a funeral so important who didn't attend? Consider who performed the obsequies, Muhlenberg, and his relations to the event and personas. Muhlenberg takes us further into their lives. Likewise at this funeral of their mother we should assume various contacts among the frontier brothers, but also at the funeral and reading of the will of their brother George in Germantown in 1759. There also attended the conflicted Baltazar Gehr, son of Anna Maria II and Conrad Gehr, who had fiduciary and legal care of his cousin Philip Reiff, Conrad’s son, from 1786 to his death in 1815, sort of like an innkeeper in the Fellowship of the Ring.

George Reiff (1692-1759), the Innocent, we might christen him in contrast with his brothers, was among the elders and early founders of the Reformed Congregation of Skippack, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. This itself shows his concern for an unworldly way of life. With other elders he signed the authorization for his brother Jacob to go Holland with 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, which 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 good sons.

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 has 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.

The Oley Migration

Peter Reiff had already taken a patent on 100 acres in Oley (November 1735) when his brother Jacob  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 was 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.

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 on both occasions he was in Holland. 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 witnessed some wills.

Conrad Reiff (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 after. He sued the equally wealthy ironmaster Johannes Lesher in 1766. Conrad 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 included the whole region. Conrad 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), but in Oley he followed the Newborn of his wife's father until it seems he became reacquainted late with his roots via the Moravians.

  Individual cases illumine the whole ethnic, religious, political conflict of old orders against the new. Philadelphia had no wall. You could just disappear in the trees. Atavists, obstructionists, elitists who think the common man unworthy of free speech mind the liberty-happy flaw.