Page:Historical and biographical sketches.djvu/62

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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

exploits of one of the most daring Indian fighters in Western Virginia.

I have now gone over two decades of the earliest history of Germantown. It has been my effort to give the names of all those who arrived within that time, and as fully as could be ascertained the dates of their arrival and the places from which they came, believing that in this way the most satisfactory information will be conveyed to those interested in them as individuals, and the clearest light thrown on the character of the emigration. The facts so collected and grouped seem to me to warrant the conclusion I have formed that Germantown was substantially a settlement of people from the lower Rhine regions of Germany and from Holland, and that in the main they were the offspring of that Christian sect, which, more than any other, has been a wanderer,[1] which, endeavoring to carry the injunctions of the New Testament into the affairs of daily life, had no defence against almost incredible persecutions except flight, and which to-day is sending thousands of its followers to the Mississippi and the far West after they have in a vain quest traversed Europe from the Rhine to the Volga.[2]

  1. Says Löher in his Geschichte und Zustände der Deutschen in Amerika, p. 35, “As the true pilgrims upon earth going from place to place in the hope to find quiet and rest appear the Mennonites. They were the most important among the German pioneers in North America.”
  2. In the compilation of this article I have been especially indebted to Dr. J. G. De Hoop Scheffer, of the College at Amsterdam, for European researches, to Prof. Oswald Seidensticker, of the University of Pennsylvania, whose careful investigations I have used freely, and to Abraham H. Cassel, of Harleysville, Pa., whose valuable library, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, is the only place in which the history of the Germans of Pennsylvania can be found. In giving the orthography of proper names I have, as far as practicable, followed autographs.