There are two traditions among Pennsylvania German folk, high minded, peaceful,
struggling against war, and farcical,
profane, idolatrous, producing a Balaam of hexes
on barns and sex abstention in the Ephrata spiritual virgins, and and the opposite tantric sex of Count Zinzendorf, which some argue afflicted William Blake.
The high-minded tradition is composed of persecuted agonists of many stripes of contradiction as much as Moses or
David or Adam before them, but standing against the principalities and powers, which examples occur in the Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius, might be argued to follow after Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel the Elder, but in the flesh there was competition among this high-minded sort beween the many groups that might be considered loosely in aliance, Menonites, Reformed, Lutheran, Presby, all the usual protestant sorts which Count Zizendorf the Moravian, attempted to bring under one roof of ecumenism much resisted, and with some novelties,
These profane strain in the Germanic sects that practice such ludicrous perversions of their brother’s faith and mocking it in many forms while both practicing it and denying it, is entertaining to what minds we have left in the wilderness that remains. So the religious tenor of earlyPenna, the first hundred years, is full of absurdity and sincerity and its understanding will require identifying the names and biographs of these from 1683 to 1760 thereabouts, further delimited from 1709 to 1760, about 50 years. A list of names that will appear in these findings is not complete, and would imagine volumes 2 and 3 with different selections and names.
An attempt at true
understanding of the scriptures a rabbinical side and a cabbalistic perversion of Baal at work, as was the case with the Old Testament Israel,so that
on any given day we might have pages open from Second Temple understandings of
Psalm 8 confronting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to the slender archives of old Mennonites of the
Skippack and Franconia Conferences of the 18th cent, opposed to to the multiplicity of German sects of he as
Moravians and Dunkards,
When I first realized and
discovered the existence this community and its families and wanted to
reconstruct it by showing the relations in as great detail as possible the
identity of names places and biographies became important to know. These included,
Michael Ziegler
Hans Reiff
Peter Miller his intervention with Geo Wash for Michael Widman
Conrad Beissel
Gottlieb Mitteberger
Matthius Baumann, Oley
Philip Kulhwein
Conrad Reiff
John Philip Boehm
Jacob Reiff
Rev. George Michael Weiss
(1697-1762) The titular head of a colony that arrived en masse in 1727 whose
real powers were the Hillegasses, who immediately on landing deposed John
Philip Boehm from his pastorates bcause he was “unliscensd”, but whose desire
for advancement made him embark in 1730
on a fundraising tour to Holland etc on
a year and half trip, chaperoned by
Jacob Reiff, then unattached, with a history of public ventures that already by
then made him universally respected. This trip compromised both. Weiss abandoned
the effort, returned to PA but refused to carry the funds with him and
disappeared to New York, not to return for many years. He was author of the
second publication in the colony in 1729, Der In der Americanischen Wildnusz
(Bradford) on the New born (Tr in see Penn Germania I, 338-361)and of a work,
both lost and Account of the Indians (1743) on the indians, both first of their
kind, an example of the intellectual acumen common among many of these
immigrants.
Frederick Hillegas, Skippack
Peter and Michael Hillegas,
Phila
Dr. Jacob Diemer
Rev. Michael
Schlatter
William j. Hinke. THE EARLY HISTORY OF WENTZ'S REFORMED CHURCH, MONTGOMERY
CO., PA
Zinzendorf,
Strassburger
Betlemen
Skippack
New providence, Trappe
Salford
Ephrata
Oley
Henry S. Dotterer, James
Heckler, Alderfer-librarian,
Methacton, Strassburger (Ralph Beaver Strassburger, The Strassburger Family,
John Joseph Stoudt
Christopher Saur (Sower,
Sauer) 1693-1758 In 1738 Sauer began to publish almanacs, calendars,
books and newspapers in 1739 using a type face that his German readers could
more easily read. In 1743, Sauer published the first German-language Bible to
be printed in North America (Trinity Lutheran Church now stands on the site of Christopher Sower's printing establishment. 5300
Germantown Avenue).
German American origins in PA
are least subject to internet search.
Much is still in German, or not digitally available. Any search of a figure
like Peter Miller or Christopher Saur omits more than it reveals. These
fingernail sketches are meant to hit the high spots of the figures actions.
Official depositories of documents were almost unknown among
the Mennonites of America until the first half of the 20th century. The
descendants of Mennonite immigrants 1683-1873 from Switzerland, South Germany, and France kept few if any records in their
aftermath. Even membership lists could be considered evidence of pride. Written
minutes of conference meetings were not kept until about 1905. Few records
or correspondence letters before 1870
were preserved. One early exception is the Alms books of
the Skippack (1738- ) congregation of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The important records of the first Mennonite
congregation in North America, the Germantown congregation (1708 ff.), still extant in 1835, have since disappeared.
Archives. Harold Bender
The name of his wife Anna
appears on the first page of the Skippack Alms Book in 1738. Few or no membership
lists, letters or minutes of meetings were kept by Mennonites before 1870, so
the Skippack Alms Book is among the first of such. Anna’s (1662-1753) name appears in 1738 for a
gift of ten shillings, which it seems likely to have been given for a new
building and cemetery for the Salford Mennonite congregation which had become
separate from the Skippack Church by then. A deed of trust was issued to
trustees of the Salford and Franconia congregations 25 Jan 1738 (Wenger, 16 and
James Y. Heckler in the History of Lower Salford Township (1888) p 105. Heckler
says that the deed given by Henry Ruth for ten acres of land was made by lease
and release, October the 4th and 5th 1738 for a
meetinghouse and also to be used as “a burial place for the burying of all such
persons they shall allow.” Anna Marie Reiff’s gift was prophetic since she was
herself interred in that cemetery in 1753.
This funeral has become a
magnet for several different atrocities and in different ways, for it was the
most widely celebrated event, involving a funeral oration and extensive notes
by the Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg, a profane epicede by the unhappy
organist of Muhlenbergs’ church, Gottlieb Mittelberger, who wrote afterward of
the proceedings in his disgruntled Journey to Pennsylvania, and of Mennonite
historian John Ruth’s use of it as a pretext of the modern reconciliation of
Lutheran and Mennonite.
Henry Muhlenberg arrived in
New Providence or Trappe in 1742, about 8 miles in his reckoning from Salford.
His belief in the all sufficiency of faith enabled other positive aspects of
his character, which were many. He was able both to befriend beliefs while at
the same time discriminate his own, hence he preached in churches among the
English and the Germans, Baptists, Mennonites, Reformed. Muhlenberg’s Journals,
extant and translated, kept assiduously, describe many of difficulties he
encounters in his relations with people and other faiths in that lawless environ.
The 350 pages of these Journals, with the
Correspondence from Jan 1742 when he begins to Jan 1753 when he writes of this
funeral are first primary sources of those years. Sometimes what they omit is
as important as what they develop. For instance he at no time mentions the
organist who worked at his Augustus Lutheran Church in Trappe for 3 years,
Gottlieb Mittelberger, the same who published after returning to Europe the Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) who seems to describe the details of
this funeral. In those years Muhlenberg gives much account of Zinzendorf’s
Herrhutters, Baumann’s Newborns,
Mennonites, Baptists, Lawless and not. He writes with integrity and
authenticity of himself and others who of course being a pastor he sees often
in extremity.
In the rough decade before
this funeral of which we speak he had conducted a great many Since he singlehandedly built the Lutheran
presence in that area
Music in New Jersey, 1655-1860: A Study of
Musical Activity and Musicians in ...
By Charles H. Kaufman, 32 takes mittelbeger at face value
and believes he delivered organs when he did not , but is puzzled that
Muhlenberg never mentions him at all! It is likely he is omitted out of
courtesy since he is such a bore.
This family was known and respected by their Mennonite
neighbors even while they were embroiled in difficulties with the religionists
of the German Reformed church whose first building was on their land and
whose elders sent the Reiff son, Jacob, to Holland on a fund raising tour along
with their pastor Weiss. this voyage of a year and a half ended badly when
Weiss abandoned the mission and refused to take the collected funds with him on
his return. As soon as he returned to Philadelphia he moved to New York.
their sons and daughter’s
names occur variously in lawsuits, as with Jacob (1698-1782) , a disputed scion
of the German Reformed Reiff Church, first such in that area, of 1732 and 33,
and Conrad (1696-1777) of the Newborn of Oley in Mittelberger’s Journey to
Pennsylvania, who in the end returns to a faith more less in the Moravian
fashion, but also both mother, sons and daughter appear in Muhlenberg’s episode
of Anna’s funeral and burial in the Mennonite cemetery at Salford (1753) which
funeral is also celebrated by Mittleberger’s Journey (1756) for its own sake
and because he was employed by Pastor Muhlenberg as organist at that time, and
this is not all for the first German Reformed church
