USA > Pennsylvania > Schuylkill County > Old Schuylkill tales, a history of interesting events, traditions and anecdotes of the early settlers of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania > Part 2
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George Zerbe had a retentive memory and related the story of the murder by the Indians of the two children of Frederick Reichelsderfer and the burning of their cabin. The killing of Jacob Gerhart, two women and six children, two of the children
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escaping by hiding under the bed clothes. The massacre oc- curred in 1756. The story with others was told him by his father, George Zerbe, Sr. There were Indian troubles at the old mill at Landingville, built by Swartz in 1755, and also at the Boyer mill near Orwigsburg, built in 1770.
A George Zeisloff, his wife, a son of twenty, and one of twelve, and a girl of fourteen they scalped, and killed their horses, carrying off their most valuable effects. Sometime later the Indians again troubled the early pioneers and carried off the wife and three children of Adam Burns. They murdered a man named Adam Trump and took his wife and son prisoners, the woman escaping. In her flight she was pursued and one of the redskins threw a tomahawk at her which cut a deep gash in her neck. In 1775, near what is now Friedensburg, a neigh- bor from the Panther Valley went over to Henry Hartman's house and found him lying on his face in the doorway. He had been scalped by the Indians. Two men were found scalped on the State road to Sunbury and they were buried by the settlers who turned out to hunt the red fiends.
DEFENSE AGAINST THE INDIANS
The avowed object of the French and Indian War was to wipe out every white settler from the face of the soil of Penn- sylvania. The Journals of Commissary Young and Col. Burd
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tell of a visit of inspection made the Indian forts, in 1758, and accompanying facts of deep interest. This chain of forts con- sisting of a system of over forty block-houses, stoekades and log forts, with shelter for the women and children enclosed, reached from the mouth of the Delaware river to Fort Augusta, the outpost at Sunbury.
They afforded the settlers a refuge if they could reach them but many were killed enroute or died from exposure or privation. One woman, Mrs. Frederick Myers, who was ploughing was shot through both breasts and then scalped. Her husband was found in the woods some distance away, scalped. A detachment of soldiers from Fort Lebanon took a ladder and carried the man to his wife and the neighbors buried both. The man had the one year old baby in his arms which he tried to save and which though scalped lived.
The Finscher family who lived at the mill at Schuylkill Haven, were massaered and also the Heims at Landingville and Everhards, at Pinegrove. Sculps, or Scalps Hill, was so called owing to the number of scalps taken by the Indians in that vicinity. It is believed that more than one hundred persons in this county and in this immediate vicinity were killed by the Indians.
Fort Lebanon, between Auburn and Pinedale, was erected by Capt. Jacob Morgan, in 1756; Fort Franklin, by Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, in 1756, on Bolich's farm, West Penn Twp; Fort Diedrich Snyder on top of the Blue Mountain and Fort Henry at Pinegrove; these were the defenses of Schuylkill County: Fort Allen, near the Lehigh river, and Forts Norris and Hamilton, farther south, afforded protection for the settlers
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of the lower counties. Fort Lebanon was later known as Fort William. It was located on the farm of Lewis Marburger.
These forts were block-houses enclosed with a stockade of logs. They were fortified and some of them had subterranean passages for short distances for escape in case of defeat.
WILL MARK HISTORIC SPOTS
It is the object of the Schuylkill County Historical So- ciety to erect markers on the historic spots of these old block forts and on the sites of the early Indian Massacres if the latter can be established. It has been so frequently asserted that, "as Schuylkill County was one of the later creations of counties in the State it had no history. That its early his- tory belonged to the counties of which it was first a part." This is a mistake. The occurrences narrated belong to the locality in which they existed, and Schuylkill County is rich in historical lore; the error has been that the early settlers neglected to transcribe the facts. From time to time parties have come to the region from other parts with the avowed purpose of creating histories of Schuylkill County. While the data of the compilations (already on record in the archives of Pennsylvania) is correct, little that is original has been added to these works beyond the lives of individuals of a later period who have been prominent (and some of whom
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who have not,) in the business circles of the County. The histories have been compiled for advertising purposes and a certain sum secured the privilege of perpetuating the business or life history of a patron. It must not, however, be over- looked that many of the early settlers were husbandmen, or men not identified in pursuits that brought them prominently before the public. That the real makers of history in any locality cannot be those who merely visit it for purposes of gain, they must necessarily be of those who are identified with it, since much that is of interest is imparted and preserved only through scant written records and so largely through recol- lection and substantiated tradition.
Our mountain rocks, with engraved plates inserted will furnish markers for the sites of the Indian Forts, these Indian tales and the massacres. They should be erected as speedily as possible. It will not be many years before those who are still able to impart information on these subjects will have passed away. To mark all historic spots in the County and individually assist in every way possible those who are attempting to preserve our local history should be the aim of all who are able to assist in the matter.
EARLY REMINISCENCES
It is not altogether the aim or purpose of the writer to compile the data of the early chronological facts of the history of Schuylkill County, but rather to preserve the tales and rem-
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iniscenees of the early settlers. To accomplish this properly it is necessary to draw upon recorded history to furnish the true faets as a foundation for the story teller's art and give the needed baek-ground for the word-pietures. Those who are familiar with these tales may, perhaps, complaisantly imitate the example of the good Viear of Wakefield and his family when Farmer Flamborough aired his old jokes and they gave them their due of mirth again. As for the erities, anyone ean eritieise. These stories were not written for crities to quib- ble at, but with the view of perpetuating the narratives as little pleasantries of the early days. With the thought that-"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the best of men" (and some women too) and no further apology, they are pre- sented to the reader.
HOW "OLD DRESS" SCARED THE INDIANS
The Indians in this section in the early days were a rem- nant of the Shawanese, Nanticoke and Delaware tribes. Three of the original six nations with whom William Penn made the treaty. The others being the Susquehannas, Hurons and Eries. There existed a continuous chain of Indian vil- lages from the Delaware to the upper waters of the Susque- hanna. One of the chain of war paths extended to Sunbury, where stood Fort Augusta, named in honor of a daughter of George the Second, who married the Duke of Saxony. Sehuyl-
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kill County was not on the chain of war paths, but the savage marauders raided the locality as history shows.
Shamokin an Indian village stood on the present site of Sunbury, from which Shamokin afterward took its name.
The Indians that remained in this vicinity after the Indian War were not of one powerful tribe but included some Mochicans in addition to those indicated above. The Moravians farther southeast made strenuous efforts to Christianize the red man, Rev, David Zeisburger converted Shekilling,, the chief of the Delawares, and the county paid for their scalps. The war of extermination waged against them so reduced their number that those that scattered beyond the pale of their tribal restrictions were considered harmless, but falsely as the settlers discovered to their undoing.
How "Old Dress" scared the Indians in the great Indian massacre just after the French and Indian War shows what a strategist can do if he has courage and is endowed with enougli presence of mind. The Dress family lived in the Panther Valley (Bender Thal) on or near the farm now owned and oc- cupied as a summer country home by Doctor B-, a leading Physician in the town of P-, about six miles nothwest.
The Indians had been friendly at first, but since success was beginning to crown the efforts of the hardy pioneers, there were mutterings of discontent among them, and they had upon one or two occasions shown their hostility, but no real depreda- tions had been perpetrated as yet.
Murders had been committed farther south, defenseless women and children were scalped or taken into captivity, their homes burned and their cattle driven away and the settlers were
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tortured beyond measure, but "Bender Thal" remained unmo- lested.
Word came one day that there was an uprising among the Indians and that they were headed for the Valley. The block stockade, Fort Lebanon, near what is now Auburn, had served upon several occasions as a place of refuge for the settlers when in danger of being attacked; and thither the now thoroughly frightened pioneers in "Bender Thal" made their preparations to flee.
The women and children were gathered together and placed in charge of Zerbe; and Kemerling and Markel gathered the cattle to drive them to a place of safety. The Dress family formed part of the little caravan that turned toward the fort, but "Old Dress" was obdurate. He would not go.
He was the first settler to discover the rich farming land in that locality. He had spent several years in the "Thal" re- turning again and again to it and finally brought to it his wife and family. The Indians had given him the first kernels of corn which he planted as seed and in turn he had shown them how to fashion the rude farming implements he used, the iron for which he brought from the Pott furnace on Maxatawny creek.
Once he had opened a great abscess for "Sagawatch" the chief of the mongrel tribe and dressed it with home-made salve. Not without some display of the necromancer's art, it must be confessed, for he knew he was powerless among them, and "Sagawatch" was cured. He had frequently treated their "boils" with which they were afflicted, the result of dirt and squalor and improper food, for they were a lazy set, and looking
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upon him as something of a medicine man, the Indians called him the "Little White Father ;" and believed, some of them, that he had supernatural powers.
It was only the week before that an apparently friendly set had visited him. The mother had just completed the family baking in the huge Dutch oven back of the log cabin and on the plea of wanting a present from the "Little White Father" every- one of the large brown well-baked loaves of bread had found their way into a sack with other things they managed to lay hands on, and the good wife had another batch of bread to make. In the meantime the family subsisted on potato "buf- fers," (a species of hoecakes made of grated potato and flour and baked on the hearth) until the leaven had raised and the new bread was again baked.
Just a glance at "Old Dress" would show that he was not a man to be trifled with. Short, stout, broad of girth, and with sinewy muscles that stood out like whip cords, he was the picture of health and alert activity. His face was smooth and red and as has often been said of men who wear that type of whiskers, around the face from ear to ear underneath the chin, it was easy to be seen he was a man of determination. He wore his hair, which was scant, for he was partially bald, all combed up after the fashion of those days into a single tuft on the top of his head. This tuft from long practice stood up straight. If any- one could circumvent the Indians, the settlers knew he could. There was little time for parleying and the women and children with their leaders were soon out of sight.
Dress made his way hurriedly to the hillside and screened from view by some friendly bushes watched the approach of the
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redskins. They came some seated on their Indian ponies, the young braves running at the sides of the old men. Smeared with their war paint and with their war toggery on, beating their tom-toms and yelling like mad, they struggled up the defile.
He could not count them, although he at first tried. There was Sagawatch, too, the greasy villain and traitor. What could he do single handed against so many, with his one old flint lock musket and home-made cartridges and Marie not here to help load.
He fingered the tuft of hair, his top-knot which he knew would soon be hanging with the other smoking and gory scalps from the belts of the foremost of the band, and his mind was made up. Taking an extra hitch at his rusty brown linsey wool- sey trousers and rolling up the sleeves of his yellow grey woolen shirt, he ran as hard as he could in the direction of the oncoming murderous crew and in full view of them to the crest of the near-by hill. Screaming and yelling at the top of his voice and wildly gesticulating with his long bare arms and pointing with his fingers : "Come on, Boys," he yelled. "Here are the In- dians." (Cum Buva, dah sin Sie, Die Incha. ) He screamed un- til he was purple with rage and told one imaginary party, with the wildest of signs and commands, to close up the defile and prevent their escape, the others should file up the left and right and surround them, and the rest should follow him. "Saga- watch" the murderous "tuyfel" could understand German, he knew, for he himself had taught him many words in the current vernacular. And then still screaming as loud as he could and doubly gesticulating, he ran down the hill with all his might to-
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ward the red warriors, who thought they were being attacked by: at least a battalion of soldiers under command of "Old Dress," and they showed the white feather and turned tail and fled as fast as they could in the direction in which they had come.
All night "Old Dress" watched at the single window of the little log hut. His blunderbuss and old musket ready, hc would sell his life as dearly as possible, if they returned; but they never did.
When the Kemerlings, Zerbes and the others returned, "Old Dress" was quietly sitting in front of his cabin mending an old fish net. The cattle had all been recovered by him from their impounding in the clearings in the mountain fastnesses and returned to their rightful owners. The cows had been milked, the cream was ready for the good wives to churn and everything was going on as usual. The Indians never molested the settlers again, and even to this day "Old Dress" is a hero to the descendants of the families of the early settlers of "Bender Thal."
ELIZABETH'S MAD RIDE
The Pennsylvania Germans, whose ancestors werc exiled from their homes in the beautiful valley of the Rhine and Neckar by furious religious and political persecution, did not find life in their adopted home one on a bed of roses. The Miller and the Stout families originated in Alsace and Lo-
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raine. During the many fierce wars, in which these provinces were made a mere football by the contending forces of the Romans, Gauls and Germans, they migrated farther north to the Rhine Palatinate, which was then one of two divisions of an independent State of Germany. Again they migrated from the region of the Schwalm River to Switzerland from where they embarked for the United States of America in 1754.
The story of the Rhine Pfalz is one of great interest. There is no region or country on the globe that has witnessed so many bloody conflicts as the Palatinate on the Rhine. The Romans struggled for more than five centuries to subdue the Germans only to leave them unconquered and when the Romans withdrew, the rich valley was coveted by European nations. The crimes committed in the Palatinate in consequence of re- ligious intolerance, fanaticism and political persecution are nın- paralleled in the history of human savagery. And this region continued to be the theatre of conflict after the great exodus of the German Palatines, which took place in the last half of the eighteenth century.
The German emigrants to New York who had suffered untold miseries with internal difficulties in the Schoharie Valley, with regard to the settlement of their lands and the titles to them, had again taken wing; and many of them turned under the leadership of John Conrad Weiser and his son, Con- rad, to Pennsylvania. It was about 1754-1756 when the large influx of the Pfalzisch Germans came to Pennsylvania and settled in Berks County, which has since been subdivided into Berks, Dauphin, Lebanon, Schuylkill and parts of other counties.
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The Millers and the Stouts came over with the great exodus. The lands in the vicinity of the sites of Womelsdorf, Reading, Bernville, Tulpehocken and along the fertile Schuyl- kill Valley were soon taken up by the settlers. The families settled first near Tulpehocken, where both Andrew Miller and Elizabeth Stout were born, the former in 1756. The Stouts were represented in the five full companies that enlisted from the German settlers for immediate service after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, and the Millers, too, had sons that took the field and rendered conspicuous aid during the early part of the war, at the close of which the two families with several others removed to Bear Creek, east of what is now Auburn, between the Blue Mountain and the Summer Berg.
John Lesher, brother-in-law of John Wilhelm Pott, operated a forge and small furnace on Pine Creek and therc was another near the site of Auburn, and here the men of the Miller and Stout families worked when not employed on their farms. The women occupied themselves with the milking of the cows, churning and making butter and raising the hemp from which was spun the flax that afterward made the coarse, soft linen that formed the bed sheets, towels and linen underwear of the families, some of which is still cherished among their descendants as the most precious of heirlooms. They also manufactured on rude looms the coarse homespun cloths, dyed them with home-made colors and fashioned them into the clothes their families wore. Those were busy times, but not unhappy ones.
No more beautiful country exists anywhere than that in-
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cluded in the tract from Bear Ridge and the Summer Berg to the Old Red Church below Orwigsburg. All around were primeval forests. The silvery Schuylkill uncontaminated by coal washings glistened in the distance. The roads through the forests were mere bridal paths and the first slow, gradual taming of the wilderness, the rolling hills to the edges of the Blue Mountain, the advance from the low log cabins, the scat- tered, scratch-farms to the first dwellings and farms of greater pretentions as the rich country grew in wealth and ambition, made a picture that excites the liveliest imagination.
It was past the noon mark on the sundial at the little low farm house on Bear Ridge, when Elizabeth Stout completed the chores for the morning. The milk in the spring-house was all skimmed, the log floor and huge hearth swept up with the birch broom, the linen bleaching on the meadow had been turned and wet anew, the blue delf china after the nooning was washed and spread on the great mahogany dresser. Elizabeth's deft fingers soon bound up her abundant brown hair with the snood that con- fincd it; she slipped into her short bright brown cloth skirt, red pointed bodice with surplice of bright green, a concoction of colors she had made with home-made dyes and fashioned and copied the dress from the picture of a grand dame she had once secn.
Her sleeves just reached the elbow disclosing a pair of plump and shapely arms that would have been the envy of any city belle. Her stockings were bright red, knitted by her own nimble fingers. Her feet were encased in a pair of heavy shoes, for she must save the pretty low slippers adorned with the huge silver buckles that had remained among the few relics of the
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struggle under General Washington at Valley Forge and which were given her by her father. She had worn the buckles at various times on her bodice, at her waist, and now on her slip- pers, which were safely encased in the saddle bags together with a new cream cheese and some brodwurst tied firmly in snowy cloths and destined for a gift to the mother of the friend Eliza- beth was about to visit.
She knotted a gay-colored 'kerchief about her bare neck and tied with its single plain black ribbon over her hair, the white turned back half hood and half sunbonnet or Normandy cap she wore; and adding the snowy white linen spencer for evening wear on her bosom and a few trinkets and necessaries to the little stock of clothing in the saddle bags, her prepara- tions were complete. The black mare whinnied when she saw her approach with riding paraphernalia in hand and permitted herself to be caught without any remonstrance.
What a picture Elizabeth was. One that Joshua Rey- nolds would not have disdained to copy. Just eighteen and above medium height, well-developed and yet with not an ounce of superfluous flesh on her lithe form, well-rounded limbs and well-knit body. Large soft brown eyes, rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, smooth skin that the bright green and red in her raiment lighted brilliantly and harmonized with.
She was soon in the saddle and cantered off, waving her hand to her mother who sat at her spindle in a little building near the farm house, where the maid of all work was busily en- gaged in paring and stringing apples for drying and a little farther on her father with such scanty help as he could gather was with the yokels engaged in shocking the late corn.
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A few miles of swift riding along the ledge brought her to the river which was soon forded. There were no wandering nomads to disturb the peaceful soliloquy of the traveler. The Indians wcre quieted down, at least for a time, and Fort Lebanon, the old log fortress of defense against the red-skinned marauders, looked deserted as she cantered by.
Nature was lavish to that valley. The huge mountains were dim with the Fall haze and looked blue and golden and red- tinted in the bright rays of the sun. The early sumacs had turned blood red and the golden maples painted the landscape with their dying beauty and brilliant splendor. The horse sped easily along the path and Elizabeth aroused by the beauty of the scene broke into the well-known Lutheran hymn "Ein feste berg ist Unser Gott," and sang the words to the close, the moun- tains re-echoing the song of praise of the German nut-brown maid. Then she dismounted and bathed her face in a running mountain stream. Shaping a cup from a huge wild grape leaf, she drank and gave the mare a loose rein that she, too, might slake her thirst. Drawing a small porcelain picture, that hung suspended about her neck by a narrow black velvet ribbon, from her bosom, she adjusted her white Normandy cap and taking a sly peep at herself in the limpid water, she kissed the picture and mounted the mare who neighed with delight at the prospect of once more starting toward the bag of oats she knew awaited her. The picture was that of Andrew Miller and they were betrothed.
The sun was already hanging low in the horizon when they entered the heart of the forest through which their path lay. The great oaks cast gigantic shadows over the entrance but the
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fragrant pines were well-blazed and the pathway plain and Elizabeth was a brave girl and there was nothing to fear; but she well knew that they must make haste if they would make the clearing near the mill below the Red Church before dark, where her friend Polly Orwig lived and where the corn husking would take place that evening. And where she expected to see her affianced, Andrew Miller, who had assisted at the raising of the new barn as was the custom in those days, and the husking was given in honor of the new building.
Elizabeth kept the mare at as brisk a pace as she could through the tangled underbrush and morass. She thought of Andrew how sturdy he was, surely of all the suitors for her hand she had the finest, the best looking man and the best in- formed. They had been lovers from their childhood, com- panions always but this brotherly affection liad deepened into something more intense, something that fairly frightened her when she recalled how he had looked when he told her of all the girls around and about the country she was the handsomest. But her mother had told her, "it was a sin to think of one's looks," and had promptly removed the high stool from in front of the dresser, in the top of which was a huge looking glass, when Elizabeth attempted to see for herself if there was any truth in the asscrtion.
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