USA > Pennsylvania > Lehigh County > Bethlehem > A history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741-1892, with some account of its founders and their early activity in America > Part 47
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The reconstruction did not, however, consist merely in these changes. Other new measures, fundamental and far-reaching, fol- lowed in the matter of property, productive industries and general financial arrangements. The enormous burden of debt under which the Unity had been struggling since the financial crisis of 1753, and was bravely laboring to pay off, necessarily brought financial legisla- tion into prominence in its Synods, and made the handling of its properties in Europe and America and the management of its sources of revenue of very great importance. One step after another was
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1762-1771.
taken to simplify the situation and to devise successful ways and means to bear the heavy burden and at the same time meet current expenses. The main source of income had been the Zinzendorf properties. After Zinzendorf's death, a settlement was made with his heirs whereby, at a great sacrifice, in loyalty to the interests of the Church for which their father had been ready to surrender every- thing he had, they accepted $90,000 for their interest in these estates and released them to the Unity, which became their owner. The real estate at Bethlehem and elsewhere in Pennsylvania was also the property of the Unity. When the General Synod met in 1764, more than $550,000 of its debt had been extinguished, but more than $770,000 remained. This load pressed so heavily and the involved condition of finances in many places, among others at Bethlehem, caused such difficulties in the effort to get these places properly established financially, to bring clearness into matters and to secure for the burdened Unity every available source of income from its estates and release from every needless drain, that it was decided, in 1769, to bring about a division of estates and sources of revenue be- tween the Unity and the Congregation. This was in a line with the tendency that manifested itself at the Synod of that year, and which, in the matter of finances, even went so far as to agitate the idea of dividing the debt of the Unity between the different church settle- ments in Europe and America and letting each one then struggle with its portion of it as it could.
While six years later, when the Synod met again, this decentral- izing tendency, thus applied also to finances, gave way, as already stated, to that of community of interests more strongly enunciated than ever before, it meanwhile gave impetus to the plan of division and settlement at Bethlehem, which was of much importance at that time. Three men were deputed by the Unity's Elders' Conference to come to Pennsylvania and re-organize the finances of the Church at Bethlehem, as well as at Nazareth and Lititz, and carry out their commissions. They were the Rev. Christian Gregor, later Bishop, the well-known Moravian musical composer and hymn-writer, and the Rev. John Loretz, both members of the Unity's Elders' Confer- ence, and the Rev. John Christian Alexander de Schweinitz, who came to remain at Bethlehem as Administrator of the property of the Unity, of which Bishop Nathanael Seidel, as stated in a previous chapter, was now the nominal Proprietor ; and in this capacity to act as an ex officio member of the Provincial Helpers' Conference. They arrived at Bethlehem, November 16, 1770, and set about their task.
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A HISTORY OF BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.
A great mass of complicated details had to be gone through and settled with the boards at Bethlehem, with the whole body of adult members in council assembled and with the Provincial Board. All was finally cleared up and arranged satisfactorily before the end of May, 1771. The finances of the Unity and those of Bethlehem were separated and Bethlehem was placed, like the European church villages, on its own financial basis. A Bethlehem "Congregation Diacony" was instituted on a new footing. This purchased of the Unity, represented by the "General Diacony," to which reference has been made, very nearly four thousand acres of land-not exact figures, but round numbers are given, as in references to the Unity's debt-at £2 Pa. per acre, besides those buildings and industrial establishments of the place which were owned by the General Diacony. The value of the whole purchase was figured at £29,000 Pa. This amount, about $87,000 of the debt of the Unity, was then assumed by Bethlehem.
It was arranged that a "Sustentation Diacony" for the American branch of the Church should be established, as had been done in Europe; also a special "School Diacony;" both to be controlled by the Provincial Helpers' Conference and managed by the Adminis- trator. The purpose of the first was to pay the expenses of the Provincial Board, to provide help for ministers at needy posts, and especially to pension superannuated or disabled ministers and widows of ministers and old people who had worked for the Economy. Later other obligations were added. The object of the School Diacony was to provide resources for the education of ministers' children.16 It was agreed that Bethlehem would contribute to the Sustentation Diacony two-thirds of the profits of the industries it controlled and that any surplus accruing at any time, beyond the combined needs of the Congregation and Sustentation Diaconies, should be applied to the work of Church Extension, or Home Missions in America.
Many details were also arranged in connection with the manage- ment of the various industries and concerns, the finances of the "choir-houses" and the support of the day-schools of the village. Tuition fees were fixed at six pence per week for each child. It was
16 The term Diacony was used for many years for the different financial systems and treas- uries. "The Pennsylvania Sustentation Diacony," as it was long called, was what is now known as the Sustentation Fund of the Moravian Church, with which the former School Diacony was consolidated more than fifty years ago. The Sustentation Diacony had no endowment, and a Sustentation Fund could not be spoken of until such an endowment was provided by the Bethlehem and Nazareth congregations about fifty years ago.
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stated that the rate was put within the reach of all so that the question whether they could afford to pay should not arise. The trifling income from tuition was to be supplemented by an appro- priation made by the Congregation Diacony to provide the meagre salaries paid the two men who taught the boys and the one woman who taught the girls of the village in one of the rooms of the board- ing-school. There was a re-organization of this latter institution, as well as of Nazareth Hall, which restricted their scope more than previously, as a matter of financial retrenchment; because, for the most part, the boarding scholars from elsewhere were there on a basis that was not financially profitable, and this could no longer be afforded. All of the accounts of the previous General Diacony, as well as the special accounts of the choir houses, the schools and the various establishments were audited and closed on May 31, 1771, and on June I, the new books of the Unity's Administration, the Sustentation and School Diaconies, the Bethlehem Congregation Diacony, the several Choir Diaconies, and of all the concerns doing business were opened. Thus the new period began financially.
In the course of these protracted settlements and arrangements several special new building and other enterprises were decided upon. The most conspicuous was the erection of a needed addition to the Sisters' House, to which the concurrence of the several boards concerned, and of the people of Bethlehem in Congregation Council assembled, was asked and received by the managers of the Diacony of that choir. This was the large eastern section of that mass of buildings which completed them as they now stand. It is stated also that a new farm was opened and a dwelling house built on it in the course of the year "back of the Burnside land" and occupied by a tenant ; and that the site of Nain, with the land belonging to it, was constituted a separate farm and rented. Thus began the history, as farms, of what have so long been known as the Geissinger Farms.
Finally a complete new code of statutes and ordinances for the village, after passing the approval successively of the Elders' Con- ference, the Board of Supervision-Aufseher Collegium-and the large Helpers' Conference, were adopted and signed by the entire adult male membership, November 21, 1771. This completed the re-organi- zation and fully opened the new period in the history of Bethlehem. Its population consisted at the close of that year of 138 married people, II widowers. 32 widows, 115 single men and older boys, 169 single women and older girls, 35 boys and 60 girls under thirteen years of age-total 560 souls.
CHAPTER XII.
INTO THE DEPTHS OF REVOLUTIONARY TROUBLE. 1772-1778.
Several peaceful and prosperous years followed the re-organization of 1771. Under the new order, arrangements were much simplified, were better understood by the common people of Bethlehem and therefore very generally had their intelligent and cordial concur- rence. The new basis established in the management of industries and in the matter of property and finances, awakened a feeling of local individuality-a kind of town spirit-that was needed for the best interests of the situation, at the stage which had been reached. People began to feel less like a camp of pilgrims amid foreign sur- roundings and more like a body of citizens with common local attachments, duties and aspirations. The influx of large colonies with the pilgrim feeling inculcated and sympathies clinging to that which had been left behind, or at least not located at Bethlehem, had ceased. There was also less shifting of persons than previously between Bethlehem and the places on the Nazareth domain. The general re-organization had laid the foundation for a more distinct local development there also, in accordance with the decision of the General Synod of 1769, that a regular church village on the Herrn- hut plan, like Lititz, Salem, N. C., and Hope, N. J., should there be laid out, as had been had in mind from the beginning. This village was to lie spread out at the base of Nazareth Hall; not farther up the hill to the west, where Gnadenhoeh was to have been built, with the original cemetery crowning the highest point back of it, nor where Gnadenstadt had been laid out to the north-east. The six hundred acres of land surveyed for the new village of Nazareth1 embraced what now came to be called Old Nazareth, together with
1 January 19, 1771, the Provincial Helpers' Conference resolved to proceed with laying out New Nazareth. The next day, the sites of the first buildings were staked off. March 7 its first code of statutes and ordinances was adopted. The first dwelling was built that summer and the inn was finished, January, 1772.
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1772-1778.
the Whitefield house premises, to which later generations gave their present name Ephrata. This was without adequate historical reason, and it gave some excuse to persons with nebulous ideas about the Moravians for occasionally confusing them with the Sabbatarian, Mystic Tunker fraternity of Lancaster County, whose settlement bore that name which survives in the flourishing town of Ephrata. There- fore, in 1772, Nazareth was no longer an affiliate of Bethlehem in an indefinite stage of transition from the old General Economy relations to autonomy-the last vestige of the old order, the common house- keeping at Old Nazareth was not abolished until 1764-but was now a distinct church settlement, with Gnadenthal and Christiansbrunn as its affiliates.
There were, furthermore, far fewer at Bethlehem than formerly who engaged by turns in local duties and in missionary work. There was less continual itineracy among the country congregations and preaching-places and the Indian missions were now established at a greater distance, with less traveling to and fro. Thus, in all these respects, there had been a gradual formation of a settled citizenship at Bethlehem, identified with those interests which were local. The end of Indian complications within the Forks of the Delaware caused the most conspicuous feature of the primitive and unsettled condi- tions to disappear from the scene. Those elements of the neighbor- ing population which had caused Bethlehem so much tribulation on this account, now had to leave the Moravians in peace until some- thing else that did not meet their approval, besides missionary work among the Indians, or some new pretext for manifesting ill will should again give occasion for hostile agitations. They did not have to maintain this irksome peace and quiet long, as the sequel will show. On the other hand, a better understanding, a more friendly feeling, greater mutual respect and the recognition of more interests in common had issued out of the turmoil of the preceding years between the Bethlehem people and the more orderly, peaceable and tolerant part of the population of Northampton County. There was more of the natural and ordinary kind of intercourse in matters of business and in general neighborly relations. People who had stood far apart began to be accustomed to each other's ways. The Bethlehem population, consisting now, for the most part, of persons who had lived some years in the country, felt less shyness towards people of the surrounding region than formerly, could deal with them in a more unconstrained manner and were better able to recognize
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personal worth and even sincere piety where they existed under racial characteristics, ecclesiastical traditions and social customs so different from their own. People of the neighborhood who went in and out at Bethlehem no longer looked upon its institutions and customs as oddities. They also manifested less of the common dis- position of rough back-woodsmen, to resent what they regard as pretentiousness on the part of people who venture to introduce any refinements amid prevailing rudeness. They gradually ceased to regard the religion taught at Bethlehem-without knowing anything about it-as something subversive of Protestantism and the State, for the blatant, rabid pulpit-controversialists who in former years stirred up ignorant prejudice, were no longer such influential men up and down the country as they once were.
If the political situation of the time had been a settled one, with peace ahead, instead of one that was bringing on a mighty struggle, to arouse-as one of its inevitable concomitants-such intolerant passion among the kind of men whose zeal was more fierce and riotous than heroic-for Bethlehem had ample opportunity to learn the difference between the high-minded, chivalrous patriot and the coarse, blustering zealot reveling in havoc for its own sake-the har- monious growing together of the missionary town and its surround- ings, which was arrested and retarded by the Revolution, would have proceeded with smooth rapidity after the local Indian problem was out of the way. It had even come so far that there was discussion, on common ground, of proposed public improvements, in which the people of Bethlehem, Easton, Allentown and the surrounding neigh- borhoods were jointly interested, with diverse opinions, as on all public matters. The Government of Pennsylvania had commenced to move in the direction of making inland waterways available for the development of traffic. Thus, on March 9, 1771, a bill had been made law by the signature of the Governor and the seal of the Prov- ince, entitled "an act declaring the rivers Delaware and Lehigh and a part of the Neshaminy Creek as far as Barnsley's Ford, and of the stream called the Lechawaxin, as far up as the falls thereof, common highways, and for improving the navigation in the said rivers." Projects for realizing results in the line of this move, so far as the Lehigh was concerned, were agitated along its course as matters which concerned Bethlehem and other places alike. It is true that the chief attention to this subject was awakened during that summer by events which were not peaceful, when the sending of men with
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provisions from Easton up to Wyoming, to relieve the garrison in the "Block House" during the first outbreak of violence in the boundary disputes between the Proprietaries and the New England colonists, gave special cause to discuss the matter. Then, when the boat-building facilities at Bethlehem were called into requisition to further such transportation, this remote connection between the Moravian town and a scene of strife was turned to account by some veteran fabricators of slanderous fiction, to implicate the Moravians even in the contention of the New Englanders to the detriment of Pennsylvania. It may be added in this connection, that when more serious trouble in that boundary dispute was at its height, in 1775, the favorite old story of powder and lead shipped from Bethlehem to aid the enemy was carried about the country by men who pro- fessed to know whereof they spoke, for did they not live along the way between, where they could watch the Moravians? Those powder and lead stories, as ridiculous as they were rascally, had been found by their inventors formerly to take so well among the credulous and unreasoning, that they brought them out anew with no fear that now they would fall flat. That before, it was to the French army and then to savage Indians and now to British subjects of another colony that this imaginary ammunition from Bethlehem was thus secretly supplied, did not disturb the faith of some who heard the tale. It even caused dignified official inquiry, and it does not seem to have occurred to any one to raise the question where the Moravians could possibly have procured all those quantities of powder and lead which certain men in the Irish Settlement saw them conveying through the country for several decades to so many different kinds of enemies of the State, in one war after another.
As to improvements in the Lehigh River, those which ruined the fishing were at that time yet things of the distant future. If the modern disposition to be incredulous about "fish stories" had then existed, it would have taxed the courage of the Bethlehem chronicler to record that a catch of shad in the Lehigh at Bethlehem, in the spring of 1772, amounted to more than five thousand. These large fishing exploits were among the things of interest that attracted the attention of the numerous visitors, and helped to supply the tables of the Sun Inn where many notables of the time dined on the fat of the land. Doubtless many of these, like "summer guests" of subsequent years, who found Bethlehem such an attractive point for rural jaunts, would have preferred to see all "improvements" suppressed perpet-
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A HISTORY OF BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.
ually, which would, in any way, interfere with either fishing or romantic scenery along the charming Lehigh. As a rule they had more regard for enjoyment at the place than for the prosperity of business enterprises with only utilitarian designs in connection with its waters and its banks. There was only one sentiment among visitors of that time in regard to the general appearance of Bethlehem and its environs, so far as their testimony has been preserved in diaries and correspondence. Remarks about the people of the place, its institutions and social arrangements and even its celebrated inn, so greatly superior to any then to be found about the country, vary somewhat. In some cases this difference is evidently due to the variety of temperament and disposition possessed by the guests, although, of course, things were not seen by all under the most favorable circumstances, the meals at the inn were naturally not always up to its best standard, and not every one who visited the place happened to encounter the most agreeable and intelligent of its people. One visitor, probably a slightly captious bachelor with little angularities and a contracted city horizon, whose observations have been published,2 refers to "Jost's"-Jost Jansen, inn-keeper at the Sun-as the only inn at the place, as if many were to be expected in a village of that size in those days, and his first comment was that the dinner was "bad." The supper, however, was "pretty good," the wine and the punch were also good, but the beer was "indifferent."
The evening service which he attended was "solemn and devout." Captain Garrison and his wife, who escorted the company about, "behaved with a great deal of politeness and were very obliging." On August 17, the day of the festival of the little girls, he saw the "female children at dinner" (lovefeast) and remarked the neatness and great decorum. He visited Christiansbrunn and Nazareth, and found Nazareth Hall "a neat, plain building" with "some tolerable paintings" in it, but did not consider knitting "fit work for boys." At Easton the dinner was indifferent, the wine not good, the supper "pretty so so," and "a neat court house the only thing worth remarking." Hunting and fishing excursions about Bethlehem were indulged in. At the Sun Inn there was a considerable company of people, among them several "sprightly agreeable Quaker girls" who evidently found him a good subject to be teased, for he mentions some tricks served him by "the merry little rogues." He finds the
2 Anonymous journal of a tour in August, 1773, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. X.
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1772-1778.
Moravians "an industrious, inoffensive people, much addicted to particular forms and in some respects resembling the Roman Cath- olics." Animadverting on the domestic and social arrangements- the single men and women living in separate houses and having nothing to do with each other-he ventures the opinion that such a plan is not in accordance with the "design of the wise Disposer of all things." When he and his company left for Reading, they stopped on the way at Allentown, "at the Sign of the King of Prussia," where he encountered such bad odors that he could not stay in the house. He says "Allentown is a pretty situation but seems to be a poor place."
During the summer of 1772, the last considerable building erected in Bethlehem for the space of nearly twenty years was commenced. This was the large eastern section of the Sisters' House which it had been decided the previous year to build, but which was not completed and formally occupied until October, 1773. The corner-stone was laid on May 4, 1772, the covenant day of the Single Sisters. Christian Gregor who with his fellow-deputy of the Unity's Elder's Conference, John Loretz, was yet in Bethlehem, officiated on this occasion.
Having finished their labors, they left on May 6, to return to Europe. John Christian A. de Schweinitz who came with them had entered upon his duties at Bethlehem as Administrator of the estates of the Unity, and as a member of the Provincial Helpers' Confer- ence. He was also chosen Vice-President of the village Board of Oversight-Aufseher Collegium-of which John Ettwein was Presi- dent. Dettmers, the Warden, was transferred to Nazareth to assume the difficult duties of that office in connection with the organization of the new village. His place as Warden at Bethlehem was taken by Jeremiah Dencke who filled this office during the Revolution. Another new official of importance who appeared upon the scene after New Year, 1773, was John Herman Bonn, the Warden of the Brethren's House during the Revolution. He was the successor of the eminently capable John Arbo who died, December II, 1772. Some time before that, the most historic figure had disappeared from among the old men of Bethlehem. This was Bishop David Nitsch- mann, the first bishop of the Renewed Church, one of its first two missionaries to the heathen, it first bishop in America and the founder of Bethlehem. His associations in the service of the Church had ranged from the presence of kings and queens, the palaces of dukes and lords and the council chambers of great ministers of state,
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A HISTORY OF BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.
to the backwoods cabin, the Indian's wigwam, the hut of the negro slave and the companionship in toil of rustic laborers, clearing the forest and tilling the soil, and of mechanics working in the carpenters' shop or building houses at the new settlements of the Church. His official labors had extended over various parts of Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, into Livonia, through England and Wales, besides the Danish West Indies and the short-lived settlement at Savannah, Georgia ; to all the fields of Moravian activity in Pennsyl- vania and New York including the various Indian missions prior to 1756, and the settlement in North Carolina ; and his travels embraced at least fifty sea-voyages. After 1761, when he returned finally to Bethlehem from Lititz, he had been living in retirement, in the utmost simplicity and plainness, and out of protracted sufferings, was gath- ered to his fathers on October 8, 1772. Early in 1773, another important man who had rendered very great service at Bethlehem, especially during the Indian troubles, departed this life. This was Justice Timothy Horsfield, who died, March 9 of that year. His successor in office, the third magistrate appointed at Bethlehem and the last under the Colonial Government, was John Okely, who received his commission, March 21, 1774. He filled this trouble- some position until the change of government during the Revolu- tion. The Horsfield house, treated of fully in a previous chapter, was purchased by Henry Van Vleck, merchant, of New York, who retired to Bethlehem and, in February, 1774, took up his residence in that building.
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