USA > Pennsylvania > Philadelphia County > Philadelphia > Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania in the olden time; being a collection of the memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of the earliest settlements of the inland part of Pennsylvania, Vol. II > Part 3
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Germantown.
The Germantown settlement was first taken up by Francis Daniel Pastorius, the 12th of the 8th month, 1683, by a purchase from William Penn, and was surveyed and laid out by the surveyor general, 2d of 3d month, 1684 ; under a grant to him for himself and others for 6000 acres. It proved, however, to contain but 5700 acres
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
It was a part of Springetbury Manor, and was distributed among the proprietaries as follows, viz. :
200 acres to Dr. Francis D. Pastorius himself, on Chestnut Hill, 150 do. to Jurian Hartsfielder (the same who in 1676 owned all Campington,)
5350 do. To Pastorius, as agent to German and Dutch owners, called the Francfort company.
5700 do.
Pastorius and Hartsfielder were to pay yearly 1s. per 100 acres, quitrent : and all the others at the rate of 1s. per 1000 acres, (" they having bought off the quitrents,") for ever to William Penn and heirs.
The patent for all the preceding land from Penn is executed by William Markham, secretary for Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, the 3d April, 1689, and it therein specifies " the purchasers," as follows, viz. :
Jacobus Vandewalle
535
acres
Johan Jacob Sheetz
428
do
Daniel Spehagel
3563
do
John W. Uberfeld
-
107 do.
George Strauss
178}
do.
Jan 'Laurens
535
do
Abraham Hasevoet
535
do.
2675
do.
Jacob Tellner
989 acres
Jan Strepers
275
do.
Dirk Sipman
588
do.
Gobart Renckes
161
do.
Lenert Arets
501
do.
Jacob Isaacs
161
do.
2675
do.
The distribution of the lands was made as follows :
Germantown (proper) contained
2750 acres
Cresheim
884
do.
Somerhausen
900
do.
Crefelt
1166
do.
5700
do.
. All the above 2675 acres were sold in 1708, for £3000, to one Sprogel, by Daniel Faulkner, as agent to the Frankford Company, but as it was contrary to the wish of his principals, it was always deemed a fraud, and did not convey a transfer.
Vol. II .- C 2*
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
Germantown was incorporated as a borough town by a patent from William Penn, executed in England in 1689. Francis Daniel Pas- torius, civilian, was made first bailiff; and Jacob Tellner, Dirk Isaacs op den Graff and Herman op den Graff, three burghers, to act ex-of- ficio as town magistrates, and eight yeomen; the whole to form a general court to sit once a month. They made laws and laid taxes.
The town lost its charter for want of a due election, officers not be- ing found willing to serve ; somewhere about 1706. In a letter from Pastorius to William Penn, dated in 1701-2, he states his concern that he should not be able to get men to serve in the general court for "conscience sake;" and he trusts, for a remedy, to an expected arrival of emigrants. This difficulty probably arose from the oaths used in court proceedings.
All the settlers in Cresheim built on the Cresheim road, before settling a house on the Germantown road through Cresheim. There is an old map, made in 1700, in which all their residences and barns at that time are marked.
The Germantown town lots (55) were located in 1687, and were drawn for by lot in 1689, being 27} lots on each side of the road. Their side lots up town began from Abington lane, (at Samuel John- son's) and went up to the foot of the hill by Leibert's board yard. The original price of the township of Germantown was 1s. per acre.
The original of the following curious paper is in the hands of John Johnson, Esq.
" We whose names are to these presents subscribed, do hereby certify unto all whom it may concern, that soon after our arrival in this province of Pennsylvania, in October, 1683, to our certain knowledge Herman op den Graff, Dirk op den Graff, and Abraham op den Graff, as well as we ourselves, in the cave of Francis Daniel Pas- torius, at Philadelphia, did cast lots for the respective lots which they and we then began to settle in Germantown ; and the said Graffs (three brothers) have sold their several lots, each by himself, no less than if a division in writing had been made by them. Witness our hands this 29th Nov., A. D. 1709.
Lenart Arets Jan Lensen
Thomas Hunder Abraham Tunes
William Streygert Reiner Tysen.
Jan Lucken
The Frankford Land Company gave titles to much of the lands on each side of Germantown Main-street. The company at first con- sisted of ten gentlemen living in Francfort, on the Maine, in Ger- many ; their articles were executed in that city on the 24th Novem- ber, 1686. They bought 25000 acres of land from William Penn. The Germantown patent for 5350, and the Manatauney patent for 22,377 acres. F. D. Pastorius was appointed the attorney for the company, and after his resignation Dan. Faulkner was, in 1708, made attorney.
Most of the old houses in Germantown are plastered on the inside with clay and straw mixed, and over it is laid a finishing coat of thin
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
lime plaster ; some old houses seem to be made with log frames and the insterstices filled with wattles, river rushes, and clay intermixed. In a house of ninety years of age, taken down, the grass in the clay appeared as green as when cut. Probably twenty houses now re- main of the primitive population. They are of but one story, so low that a man six feet high can readily touch the eves of the roof. Their gable ends are to the street. The ground story is of stone or of logs-or sometimes the front room is of stone, and the back room is of logs, and thus they have generally one room behind the other. The roof is high and mostly hipped, forms a low bed chamber ; the ends of the houses above the first story are of boards or sometimes of shingles, with a small chamber window at each end. Many roofs were then tiled.
In modern times those houses made of logs have been lathed and plastered over, so as to look like stone houses ; the doors all divide in the middle, so as to have an upper and a lower door: and in some houses the upper door folds. The windows are two doors, opening inwards, and were at first set in leaden frames with outside frames of wood.
The Germans who originally arrived, came for conscience sake to this land, and were a very religious community. They were usu- ally called Palatines, because they came from a Palatinate, called Cresheim and Crefelt. Many of the German Friends had been con- vinced by William Penn in Germany. Soon after their settlement, in 1683, some of them who were yet in Philadelphia, suffered con- siderably by a fire, and were then publicly assisted by the Friends.
The original passports of the first inhabitants coming from Ger- many to Germantown were written with golden ink on parchment, and were very elegant.
Wishert Levering, a first settler, lived to the age of 109, and died at Roxborough in 1744.
Jacob Snyder lived to be 97.
Francis Daniel Pastorius was a chief among the first settlers ; he was a scholar, and wrote Latin in a good hand, and left a curious manuscript work called "the Bee," containing a beautiful collection of writing, and various curious selections. He once owned all Chest- nut hill on both sides of the road. He was a member of assembly in 1687 ; and attorney for the Frankford Land Company. He died about the year 1720. I have been indebted to the kindness of James Haywood, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an explanation of the old German pamphlet, 12mo., in the Cambridge Library, done by F. D. Pastorius, as a " Description of Pennsylvania." Its consists of sundry subjects, printed in Holland, viz. :
A voyage from London to Pennsylvania, in 1683.
Pastorius' Account of the condition of Pennsylvania, in 1683.
The Charter by Charles II. to William Penn, of March 1681- Penn's Constitution,-a Geographic Description of the Country, its Trade, and a History with some account of the Aborigines,-and
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Pennsylvania Inland .-- Germantown.
Extracts of several letters of Pastorius to his friends in Germany,- An extract of William Penn's account of Pennsylvania, in a letter to his friends in London, &c.
The whole seems to be an extract (im anszug) with notes, done from some larger work.
Arents Klincken came from Holland with William Penn in his first voyage in 1682. He had seen and known Penn in Holland. He built the first two story house ever raised in Germantown; and Penn was present and partook of the raising dinner; the same old stone house on Justus Johnson's premises. He died at the age of 80. He left a son whose name was
Anthony Klincken, a great hunter, who spent a long life in such exercises. He used to have the garret of the house filled in the win- ter with wild game, and had it marked with the date when he killed it, so as to eat it in due succession as an epicure. The same house next to Justus Johnson's premises. He even purchased a German Yager, celebrated for shooting, to aid him in his field sports ; he had iron prickers to the hands and feet to aid in climbing lofty trees for crows' scalps, which bore a premium. He used to wade the Wissa- hiccon in the depth of winter ; finally contracted rheumatism and gout, which so ossified the flesh of his knuckles, that he could scrape chalk from them when old! He never went to Philadelphia with- out taking his gun with him in the spring and fall, and never came home without several geese or ducks, which he had killed in a spat- terdock pond, then at the corner of Fourth and High streets! He called it the best game pond any where to be found. This was pro- bably about the years 1700 to 1710. He used also to speak with wonder of seeing hundreds of rats in the flats among the spatterdocks at Pool's bridge, and that he was in the habit of killing them for amusement as fast as he could load. He was born about the year 1677, and died about 1759, aged about 82 years.
As early as 1700 there were four hermits living near Germantown -John Seelig, Kelpius, Bony, and Conrad Mathias. They lived near Wissahiccon and the Ridge. Benjamin Lay lived in a cave near the York Road, at Branchtown.
John Kelpius, the hermit, was a German of Sieburgen in Transyl- vania, of an eminent family, (tradition says he was noble,) and a stu- dent of Dr. John Fabritius, at Helmstadt. He was also a correspond- ent of Mæcken, chaplain to the Prince of Denmark in London. He came to this country in 1694 with John Seelig, Barnard Kuster, (Coster,) Daniel Falkener, and about forty-two others, being generally men of education and learning, to devote themselves, for piety's sake, to a solitary or single life ; and receiving the appellation of the "So- ciety of the Woman in the wilderness." They first arrived among the Germans at Germantown, where they shone awhile " as a pecu- liar light," but they settled chiefly "on the Ridge," then a wilder- ness. In 1708, Kelpius, who was regarded as their leader, died “ in the midst of his days," (said to be 35,)-after his death the member
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
began to fall in with the world around them, and some of them to break their avowed religious intentions by marrying. Thus the so ciety lost its distinctive character and died away ; but previous to their dispersion they were joined about the year 1704 by some others, among whom was Conrad Mathias, (the last of the Ridge hermits,) a Switzer, and by Christopher Witt, (sometimes called Dr. Witt of Germantown,) a professor of medicine, and a " magus" or diviner.
After the death of Kelpius, the faith was continued in the person of John Seelig who had been his companion, and was also a scholar. Seelig lived many years after him as a hermit, and was remarkable for resisting the offers of the world, and for wearing a coarse garment like that of Kelpius. This Seelig records the death of his friend Kelpius in 1708, in a MS. Hymn Book of Kelpius', (set to music,) which I have seen-saying he died in his garden, and attended by all his children, (spiritual ones, and children whom he taught gratis,) weeping as for the loss of a father. That Kelpius was a man of learning is tested by some of his writings ; a very small-written book of one hundred pages, once in my possession. It contains his writ- ings in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German and English : and this last (which is very remarkable, he being a foreigner,) is very free and pure. The journal of his voyage to this country, in sixteen pages, is all in Latin ; some of his letters (of which there are several in German, and two in English) are in Latin : they are all on religious topics, and saving his peculiar religious opinions, reason very acutely and soberly. From venturing with the thousands of his day to give spiritual interpretations to Scripture, where it was not so intended, he fell upon a scheme of religion which drove him and other students from the Universities of Germany, and under the name of Pietists, &c., to seek for some immediate and strange revelations. He and his friends therefore expected the millennium year was close at hand-so near that he told the first Alex. Mack (the first of the Germantown Tunkers) that he should not die till he saw it! He believed also that " the woman in the wilderness," mentioned in the Revelations, was prefigurative of the great deliverance that was then soon to be displayed for the church of Christ. As she was " to come up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved," so the beloved in the wilder- ness, laid aside all other engagements, (i. e. being hermits, and trimming their lamps and adorning themselves with holiness, that they may be prepared to meet the same with joy.) " Therefore they did well to observe the signs of the times, and every new phenome- non (whether moral or preternatural) of meteors, stars, or colours of the skies, if peradventure the harbinger may appear." He argued too, that there was a three-fold wilderness, like state of progression in spiritual holiness : to wit, " the barren, the fruitful and the wilder- ness state of the elect of God." In the last state, after which he was seeking, as a highest degree of holiness, he believed it very es- sential to attain it by dwelling in solitude or in the wilderness : there- fore he argues Moses' holiness by being prepared forty years in the
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
wilderness -- Christ's being tempted forty days in the wilderness as an epitome of the other-John the Baptist coming from the wilderness, &c. He thought it thus proved that holy men might be thus qualified to come forth among men again, to convert whole cities, and to work signs and wonders. He was much visited by religious persons. Kelpius professed love and charity with all-but desired to live with- out a name or sect. The name they obtained was given by others. There are two of Kelpius' MS. Hymn Books still extant in Ger- mantown : one of his own composing, in German, is called elegant ; they are curious, too, because they are all translated into English poetry (kae for line) by Dr. C. Witt, the diviner or magus. The titles of some of them may exhibit the mind of the author :
" Of the wilderness-or Virgin-Cross love."
" The contentment of the God-loving soul."
" Of the power of the new virgin-body wherein the Lord revealeth his mysteries."
"A loving moan of the disconsolate soul."
" Colloquium of the soul with itself."
" Upon Rest after he had been wearied with Labour in the wilder. ness."
Although he looked for a qualification to go forth and convert towns and cities in the name of the Lord, it is manifest, that neither he nor his companions were enthusiastic enough to go into the world without such endowment. They often held religious meetings in their hermitage, with people who solicited to come to them for the purpose. Kelpius' hut or house stood on the hill where the widow Phobe Riter now lives. Her log house has now stood more than forty years on the same cellar foundation which was his ; it is on a steep descending grassy hill, well exposed to the sun for warmth in the winter, and has a spring of the hermit's making, half down the hill, shaded by a very stout cedar tree. After Kelpius' hut went down, the foxes used to burrow in his cellar ; he called the place the " Burrow of Rocks, or Rocksburrow"-now Roxborough.
Doctor Christopher Witt was born in England (in Wiltshire) in 1675 : came to this country in 1704, and died in 1765, aged 90. He was a skilful physician and a learned man; was reputed a magus or diviner, or in grosser terms a conjuror; and was a student and a believer in all the learned absurdities and marvellous preten- sions of the Rosicrucian philosophy. The Germans of that day, and indeed many of the English, practised the casting of nativities -and as this required mathematical and astronomical learning, it of- ten followed that such a competent scholar was called "a fortune teller." Doctor Witt. "cast nativities," and was called a conjuror : while Christopher Lehman, who was a scholar and a friend of Witt and could cast nativities, and did them for all of his own nine chil- dren, but never for hire, was called a notary public, a surveyor, and a gentleman.
SHOEMAKER'S FIRST FARM, GERMANTOWN .- Page 23.
Munford
MARKET SQUARE AND CHURCH, GERMANTOWN .- Page 24.
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
Benjamin Lay, the hermit, called the "Pythagorean, cynical, Christian philosopher," dwelt in a cave on the York road, near Dr. De Benneville's. He left it in the year 1741, and went to reside with John Phipps, near Friends' meeting house at Abington He was suddenly taken ill when from home, and desired he might be taken to the dwelling of his friend Joshua Morris, about a mile from Phipps', where he died on the 3d of February, 1759, aged 82 years. He was the first public declaimer against the iniquities of holding slaves. He was in communion with the Germantown Friends. It is to the honour of the German Friends of German- town, that as early as 1688 they addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting at Burlington, " protesting against the buying, selling, and holding men in slavery, and declaring it, in their opinion, an act irre- concileable with the precepts of the Christian religion."
Friends .- Their first meetings were held at Dennis Conrad's house, (then spelt Tennis Kundert,) as early as 1683. Part of the wall of that ancient house may now be seen on the north-west end of the two houses rebuilt and occupied by Lesher, as an inn. On the site where Dr. George Bensell's house now stands, there was an an- cient house, pulled down by Dr. Bensell, in which William Penn preached : it was low and built of frame work and filled in with bricks. He also preached at Schumacher's ancient house, built in 1686, and till lately standing in Mehl's meadow-of which see a picture.
In 1705, the Friends built a meeting house of stone, in their pre- sent graveyard on the street. It has been taken down. From the original subscription and account book, it appears that they bought fifty acres for £60, raised by subscription of individuals and other meetings, in sums of from 20s. to £10, 4s. In Philadelphia, one hundred and thirty persons of that meeting gave £12, 7s. 8d. Eighteen Friends in Frankford contributed £22, 8s. In Abington, thirty-seven persons gave £21, 6s. chiefly in wheat at 4s. Byberry meeting gave forty bushels of wheat, £8,3s. The prices of labour were then 3s. 6d., apples 1s. 6d. per bushel, boards 10s. per hundred, lime 14d., oats 2s. 6d., malt 4s. 6d., bricks 22s. per thousand, linseed oil 8s., nails 1s. 2d., shingles 10s. per thousand, timber 6s. per ton, sawing 10s. per hundred.
Tunkers .- In 1709, the Tunkards from Germany and Holland emigrated to Pennsylvania, and settled first at Germantown. Their first collected meetings were held in the log house in front of their present stone church in Beggarstown. Alex. Mack was then their prin- cipal leader. He was a very rich miller in Cresheim, gave all his property in common, and came with 8 or 10 to Germantown in 1708. He died old : and his son Alexander lived to be near 91 years of age That log house was built in 1731, by John Pettikoffer, for his dwell- ing, who procured his funds, by asking gifts therefor from the inha- bitants. Because it was the first house in the place and procured by begging, it was called " Beggarstown." The stone church on the
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
same premises was built in 1770. Alex. Mack, junior, succeeded his father as minister, and Peter Baker had been their minister as early as 1723. The original Tunkers from Ephrata, used to dress alike, and without hats covered their heads with the hoods of their coats, which were a kind of gray surtout, like the Dominican friars. Old persons now living remember when forty or fifty of them would come thus attired on a religious visit from Ephrata, near Lancaster, to Germantown, walking silently in Indian file, and with long beards ; also girt about the waist, and barefooted, or with sandals.
The Mennonists' first meeting house was built here in 1708, and was a log house, in the same lot where their present stone house (built in 1770) now stands. The log house was also a school house, kept.by Christopher Duck, in 1740.
The German Reformed erected their first meeting house, opposite to the market house, about the year 1733. The front half part was first built ; the back part was added in 1762. This old church, (of which a picture is given,) in the market square, originated as a Dutch Re- formed, and was built and used as one directly under the Reformed church in Holland. From thence it had its first pastor. It had an ancient shingle roofed steeple after the Dutch manner, and was sur- mounted by a well finished iron cock, being the Dutch sign of a church. From its low elongated form, of stone, with its adjunct additions and affixes, and bare beams to the gallery-with high and narrow pulpit and sounding board-it was in itself a venerable specimen of the ol- den time, and for that cause was to be prized for its associations. It seemed in itself calculated to bring up the recollections of the fore- fathers who once worshipped there. It seemed the very place to inspire the descendants with hallowed reminiscences of those who had gone before them. Among its recollections was that of its be- ing the place, in 1793, where General Washington and his family regularly went, as often as they had English preaching, which was sometimes done by Doctor Smith, from the Falls of Schuylkill. But time, and the passion for newness, resolved them " to pull down and build greater." They therefore lately made a new brick church in its place. The steeple was taken down with much skill, entire, and taken away to be preserved as a graceful summer house, by one who had the fancy for thus preserving it as a relic of the past ; and the rod and vane were taken and set up again upon Mr. Stokes' hall. The steeple at the summit had many rifle bullets in it, shot there by the Paxtang boys, when they shot at the vane as a mark. The old organ, too, with its trumpet angels in their golden array, just as the whole came from Holland, was discarded and cast aside.
The whole subject forcibly brings to mind the poetic description made by Mrs. Seba Smith, saying,
They all are passing from the land, Those churches old and gray, In which our fathers used to stand, In years gone by, to pray-
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
They never knelt,* those stern old men Who worshipp'd at our altars then.
No, all that e'en the semblance bore Of popedom on its face, Our fathers as the men of yore Spurn'd from the holy place- They bow'd the heart alone in prayer And worshipp'd God thus sternly there.
Through coarse gray plaster might be seen Oak timbers large and strong, And those who reared them must have been Stout men when they were young- For oft I've heard my grandsire speak, How men were growing thin and weak.
His heart was twined, I do believe, Round every timber there- For memory loved a web to weave Of all the young and fair, Who gather'd there with him to pray For many a long, long Sabbath day.
He saw again his youthful bride- His white hair'd boys once more All walk'd demurely by his side, As in those days of yore. Alas ! those boys are old and gray, And she hath pass'd in death away.
That sounding board ! to me it seem'd A cherub poised on high- A mystery I almost deem'd Quite hid from vulgar eye. And that old pastor, wrapt in prayer, Look'd doubly awful 'neath it there.
I see it all once more ; once more That lengthen'd prayer I hear- I hear the child's foot kick the door,- I see the mother's fear- And that long knotty sermon too, My grandsire heard it all quite through.
But as it deeper grew and deep- He always used to rise- He would not like the women, sleep- But stood with fixed eyes, And look'd intent upon the floor, To hear each dark point o'er and o'er.
Aye pull them down, as well ye may, Those altars stern and old-
. It was one of the points of early opposition to the Church, tnat dissenters should not kneel, as they said the others did, too much by rule.
VOL. II .- D 3
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Pennsylvania Inland .- Germantown.
They speak of those long pass'd away, Whose ashes now are cold. Few, few are now the strong arm'd men Who worshipp'd at our altars then.
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