USA > Pennsylvania > Bucks County > The history of Bucks County, Pennsylvania : from the discovery of the Delaware to the present time > Part 56
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Sometime previous to 1750, Thomas Penn wrote to Doctor Græme and Richard Peters to lay out ground at the Forks of Delaware, for a town. The town plat was surveyed by Nicholas Scull, assisted by William Parsons, in the spring of 1750, the ground being then covered with trees and bushes. Mr. Parsons left Philadelphia the 7th of May, and on his arrival at the site of the new town, he was met by Mr. Scull. The survey was commenced the
10 We believe there is an error in this date.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
9th, and occupied about ten days. They lodged and boarded at the tavern of John Lefevre, about six miles up the Bushkill, the nearest public house. The workmen received eighteen pence a day, and boarded themselves, and Lefevre's bill for boarding Scull and Par- sons ten days .was £2. 11s. 9d. "inclusive of slings." William Parsons, the god-father of Easton, was living in Philadelphia in 1722, which year he married. He was a shoemaker by trade, and a member of Franklin's club. He was appointed surveyor-general about 1743, but resigned in June, 1748, and removed to Lancaster. He was appointed to fill the county offices of Northampton in the fall of 1752, and died at Easton in 1757, where his remains lie in a neglected graveyard. From his tombstone we learn that he was born May 6th, 1701, but where is not stated. The town was called Easton,u after the seat of Lord Pomfret, in Northampton, England, 12 the father-in-law of Thomas Penn. Several of the streets were named after his family-Fermor, Pomfret, Juliana, names long since discarded-and Penn gave two squares of ground on which to erect a court and prison, the consideration being the payment of a red rose forever to the head of the house, annually, at Christmas. Some years ago, when Easton wished to build a new jail and court-house in another part of the town, application was made to Granville John Penn, for his consent to use the ground for other purposes, which was granted for a valuable consideration.
The first house erected in Easton was David Martin's ferry-house, in 1739, on the point of land at the junction of the two rivers, and probably one or two others were put up before the county was organized. When Northampton county was erected there was a demand for town-lots, which were sold subject to an annual ground- rent of seven shillings, conditioned that the purchaser should erect thereon, in two years, a house not less than twenty feet square, with a stone chimney. The town-plat surveyed embraced about one hun- dred acres. In December, 1752, there were eleven families, about forty persons in all, wintering in Easton, and the jail was building. The inhabitants were isolated ; not a single wagon road lead to or from the place, and their only outlet was along Indian paths. The country between Easton and Bethlehem was considered a desert
11 The Indians called it Lechauwitonk.
21 " I desire that the new town be called Easton, from my Lord Pomfret's home, and whenever there is a new county, that shall be called Northampton." (Thomas Penn to Doctor Græme and Secretary Peters.)
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
waste, called "dry lands," and was thought to be unfit for settle- ment and cultivation. The court-house was not finished until 1766, at a cost of $4,589.67. The first attorney-at-law at Easton was Louis Gordon, member of the Bucks county bar, admitted at North- ampton June 16th, 1752, and died at Easton in 1777. His daugh- ter, Elizabeth, married a son of George Taylor, the Signer. Gordon came to this country from Aberdeen, Scotland, and in 1750 was employed in the office of Richard Peters, of Philadelphia. He was . the agent of the Penns at Easton, and was clerk of the courts for several years. Easton had two taverns at this early day. In 1763 there were eleven houses in the town, 69 in 1773, nearly all one- story log, 85 in 1782, and 150 in 1795, but faint promise of the beautiful and thriving little city it has grown to be. The Penns still owned Easton in 1800. At an earty day the Moravians erected a stone building there, intended for a " a brethren's house," but was never occupied as such. It now forms part of Bachman's hotel, and is one of the oldest buildings in the town.
Phillipsburg, on the opposite bank of tlie Delaware, was settled at an earlier date than Easton. It was the site of an Indian settlement when VanDer Donk's map was made, in 1654, and was called Chink- tewink. It is called by its present name on Evan's map of 1749, and is thought to have been named after Philip, an Indian chief and friend of Teedyuscung, who resided there. By the opening of the Morris canal, and the construction of the several railroads which pass through it, Phillipsburg has become a large and flourishing town.
The Arndts of Northampton county are descended from Jacob, son of Bernard, who was born in Bucks county, but we do not know what year. He was a captain in the Indian wars of 1755 and 1763, and commanded at Sunbury-Fort Augusta-in 1758 with the rank of major. In 1760 he purchased a mill-site on the Bushkill, three miles above Easton, on which he erected a mill. He was a member of the Northampton committee of safety in 1774, and a member of the executive council of the state in 1776. He removed to Easton in 1796, where he died in 1805. His son John was a captain in the Revolutionary army, and was wounded and taken prisoner at Long Island.
38
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
BETHLEHEM; NAZARETH; CARBON COUNTY.
1746 TO 1752.
The Moravians .- Purchase of site for Bethlehem .- William Allen .- Nitschmann settles at Bethlehem .- First house .- Other buildings .- Count Zinzendorf .- His arrival .- Settlement named .- Church organized .- Congregation house built. -Girl's school .- Mill built .- Water-works .- Gnadenhutten .- Nain .- Indian converts .- Community system .- Severity of disclipine .- Cultivation of music .- Grant of ferry .- The Moravians and education .- Township organized .- Doctor Matthew Otto .- The Sun inn .- Spangenberg, Edwards, Horsfield, et al .- NA- ZARETH: Grant to Letitia Penn .- George Whitefield .- Tract purchased by Mo- ravians .- First house finished .- Ephrata, et al .- Mill built .- Rose tavern .- Nazareth hall built .- Road laid out .- Healing waters .- Indians in the Forks .- Carbon county settled .- Northampton county cut off from Bucks .- Townships and population taken.
THE Moravians, who settled the wilderness north of the Lehigh, were an important accession to the sparse population of that region, and introduced a higher culture than any class of immigrants who had previously settled in the county. When the Moravians were noti- fied to leave the Whitefield tract at Nazareth, where they had spent the winter of 1740-41, they purchased five hundred acres of Wil- liam Allen, on the north bank of the Lehigh, where Bethlehem stands.
William Allen, who played an important part in the settlement of this county, and was one of its largest land-owners, was the son of William Allen, a leading merchant of Philadelphia. The son,
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
who acquired a large fortune in real estate speculations, was ap- pointed chief-justice of the province in 1750. His wife was a daugh- ter of Andrew Hamilton. In the Revolution Allen took sides with the mother country, and went to England, where he died in 1780, but his son James remained true to the cause of his country, and died in Philadelphia in 1775. In 1728 William Penn, the younger, granted ten thousand acres in Bucks county to William Allen, part of it in Forks of Delaware. He built "Trout hall," where Allen- . town stands, before 1755, for it is marked " William Allen's house" on a draft of the road from Easton to Reading drawn that year. What remains of the old hall is incorporated with the buildings of Muhlen- berg college. Allentown grew up around the hall. William Allen was one of the three gentlemen of the province who kept their own carriages. His was a landau, drawn by four black horses, and driven by a driver imported from England.
T.P.O.
FIRST HOUSE IN BETHLEHEM.
· Bishop David Nitschmann, who landed at Philadelphia in 1741, with a few immigrants commissioned to found a Moravian settle- ment in America, removed with his little flock from Nazareth to Bethlehem in the spring of 1741. The first house, of hewn logs,
I It stood until 1823, when it was taken down to make room for the Eagle hotel. The accounts of the building of this house are conflicting. Some authorities say that the little band of Moravians left Nazareth December 20th, 1740, and felled the first tree to build the house on the 22d, while Bishop David Nitschmann says, in his autobiography, that they all passed the winter at Nazareth, and in the spring "we went out into the forest and began to build Bethlehem."
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
forty by twenty-one feet, one story high, with peaked gable and pro- jecting eaves, was completed early in the spring; and the corner- stone of a more commodious building was laid the 28th of Septem- ber, in the presence of seventeen brethren. This was also built of hewn logs, two stories high, forty-five by thirty feet, chinched in with clay, and is still standing, the west wing of the old row on Church street. Two rooms were finished for Zinzendorf in December, and the building was occupied in the summer of 1742. An addition was afterward made to the east end that gave it a front of ninety-three feet. The remainder of the quaint old pile, somewhat in the style of the manor-houses of Europe, was built at several times, the cen- tre in 1743, and the third side of the square between 1744 and 1752. The west wing was not completed until 1751, and the extreme east wing as late as 1773. It constituted the settlement for a number of years, and all divisions of the congregation lived in it.
Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian colony north of the Lehigh, descended of a noble Austrian family, was born at Dres- den, May 26th, 1700, was educated at Halle and the University of Wittenberg, and afterward spent some time in travel. In 1732 he married the Countess Erdmuth Dorothea Von Reuss, and shortly afterward became a convert to the Moravian faith. He visited England in 1736, the West Indies in 1739, and came to America in 1741, accompanied by his daughter Benigna, and others on their way to join the colony at Bethlehem. He spent little less than a year in the province, traveling and preaching, passing through sev- eral parts of this county. In June, 1742, he organized the Mora- vians at Bethlehem into a congregation. He preached his farewell sermon at Philadelphia December 31st, and left the same evening for New York to embark for Europe, where he passed the remainder of his life, dying May 9th, 1760.
Zinzendorf arrived at Bethlehem the evening of December 21st, 1741. On Sunday morning, the 24th, the immigrants celebrated the Lord's Supper, and that evening the festival of Christmas-eve, at which the new settlement was named Bethlehem. John Martin Mack says, in his autobiography, that as the services were about closing, between nine and ten o'clock, the count led the way into the stable adjoining the dwelling, singing the beautiful hymn which begins, "Not Jerusalem, but from thee, oh Bethlehem," etc., from which incident the new settlement received its name. Mack, who was born in Wurtemberg in 1715, and died in 1784, was a Mora-
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
vian missionary among the Indians. He came with the Moravians from Georgia in 1740, and was employed by Whitefield to erect his building at Nazareth. He assisted to fell the first tree and to erect the first house at Bethlehem, and his daughter died there in 1851, in her ninetieth year. The church was organized June 25th, 1742, in presence of Zinzendorf, Nitschmann, and Peter Bæhler in the up- per story of the large stone house on Church street, next above the present Moravian church. The settlers then numbered one hun -. dred and twenty, and there was only one other building, the log cabin that stood on the site of the Eagle hotel stables.
On the arrival of the first colonists, in 1742, the community at Bethlehem consisted of fifteen married couples, five widows and twenty-two single men. That summer the "congregation house," a dwelling-place for ministers and their families, was built, and is still used for that purpose. A large room in the second story was used as the church for nine years, and in it the first Indian convert was baptised, September 16th, 1742. The old school building, of stone, was built in 1745-46, a brass clock and three bells being put in the belfry, and additions were added in 1748 and 1749. A board- ing-school,2 for girls, was opened in the old school building January 5th, 1749, and was continued until 1815. The western end of the Sister's house was built in 1742, and the eastern end in 1752, when its occupation was celebrated, May 10th, by a shad-dinner. Among those who accompanied Zinzendorf to America was David Bruce, a Scotchman, who afterward married Judith, daughter of John Stephen Benezet. He labored several years in the destitute Eng- lish neighborhoods of Bucks county, and died in 1749.
In 1743 the Moravians built their first mill at Bethlehem, on the Monockasy creek, on the site of Luckenbach's mill, which was under roof in April, and ground its first grist the 28th of June. The miller was Adam Schaus, who ground the grain for all the settle- ments to the north. It was re-built in 1751, and under the same roof was a flour and fulling-mill, clothier's shop, and dye-house. The iron work came from the Durham furnace. This old mill ground its last grist the 27th of January, 1869, and the same night was burned to the ground. A mill for pressing linseed oil was built in 1745, and burned down in 1763. The water-works, the first in the United States, were projected and built in 1750 by Christian Christianson, a Moravian from Denmark, who was the
2 Probably the first in the county.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
principal millwright in building the first mill. One account states that Henry Antes, of Frederick, Montgomery county, was the mill- wright that built the mill. Antes immigrated prior to 1726, and settled at Falckner's swamp, where he died in 1755. He resided at Bethlehem between 1745 and 1750, and directed many of the im- provements there. He had great influence among the Germans, and his son, John Antes, was an accomplished musician. He was sent a missionary to Egypt, where the Turks punished him with the bastinado, and while abroad made the acquaintance of Haydn, who played some of his compositions. The first store was opened in 1753. Soon after the place was settled a brick and tile-factory was erected on the Monockasy, a mile north of the town, and here were made the first bricks used at Bethlehem. In October, 1752, a stone house, fifty-two by forty feet, was built on the west bank of the Monockasy to lodge Indian visitors, and a log building was afterward added for a chapel. In this building were accommodated all the Indians who escaped from the massacre of 1756. Before 1752 the Moravians were raising silk-worms, and in that year they were transferred to Christian spring by Philip C. Bader. The mulberry tree appears to have abounded at Bethlehem.
The Moravians established a missionary station, called Gnaden- hutten, or "Tents of Grace," on both sides of the Lehigh near the mouth of Monockasy creek, and also three miles north-west of Bethle- hem, on the Geisinger farm, near a village of Christian Indians called Nain. They were evacuated in 1765 on the removal of the Indians to the Susquehanna, when the chapel and several other buildings were taken down and re-erected at Bethlehem. The society soon exercised a softening influence on the character of the surrounding Indians, and many of them became converts. They visited the settlement in large delegations, and never went away without presents. Down to February 22d, 1751, one hundred and fifty-three Indians were buried in the cemetery at Bethlehem ; and among the Indian converts buried there was " Brother Michael," a famous Munsey chief, whose face was covered with tattoo-marks. As late as 1756 Bethlehem was a frontier settlement, and during the Indian troubles of that period it was surrounded by a stockade for protection from the hostile Indians, with log watch-towers, on which a sentinel was always kept. In 1754 the whole site of the present town was covered with a dense forest. In 1751 the popu- lation was two hundred, which had increased to five hundred and
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
ten in 1756. There was a prosperous shad-fishery in the Lehigh, which was conducted by the Indians when they were refugees there. From fifteen to twenty thousand were caught in a season, and as many as two thousand in a single day. Large quantities were salted down. The country abounded in all kinds of game, and at intervals there was a large pigeon-roost on the Lehigh above Bethlehem.
For the first twenty years after its foundation the inhabitants at Bethlehem were united as one family, with a community of labor and housekeeping. All worked for the church, and the church gave to each a support. The community system was dissolved in 1762. During the " Economy" period the training of the Moravians was very strict. The children were taken from their parents when very young, and given into the care of disabled brethren and sisters appointed to watch over them. They were not allowed to be out of their sight a moment, even at recreation. The boys were pro- hibited associating with the girls in any wise, and if they ever met they were not permitted to look at each other, and punishment was sure to follow such offending. If a grown girl was caught looking toward the men's side, at church, she was called to account for the misdemeanor. When they took walks along the Lehigh, Sunday afternoon, attended by their keepers, the sexes walked in opposite directions, so as not to meet, but if perchance they should meet both parties were commanded to look down or sideways. The girls were never allowed to mention the name of any male, and it seems an effort was made to have the sexes forget each other. The clothing of the sexes was not allowed to be put into the same tub to be washed. The society tried to make worldly angels of these young Moravians, beings which have no place on this planet ; but while the girls were brought up in pristine innocence and simplicity they were kept in ignorance as well. The males were kept less strict than the females, as they were obliged to come more in contact with the outer world. When the Moravians first settled on the Lehigh there were but few white families in that vicinity on either side of the river. In 1747 Bethlehem was visited by Bishop John de Watteville, son-in-law of Count Zinzendorf, who held the first synod there in 1748.
The cultivation of music was an early feature of Moravian life. Instrumental music was used in their religious services as early as 1743, and three years later a noted Indian chief was buried amid strains of music. The first organ was put up in 1751, in the old
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
chapel, where it still stands. When the first harvest was ready for the sickle a procession of reapers, male and female, proceeded to the harvest-field, where South Bethlehem now stands, accompanied by the clergy and a band of musicians, where the occasion was gratefully celebrated by religious exercises. Troops of reapers, with their musical instruments, met to repair to Nazareth and other points, to assist their brethren to harvest their crops. Great atten- tion has always been paid to the cultivation of music, and to the Moravians at Bethlehem belong the honor of having introduced into America Haydn's Creation, the score for which was furnished by one of her inhabitants. We are told that an Indian attack was averted in 1755, by the sound of the trombones, the savages sup- posing it to be an alarm.
The site of the ferry across the Lehigh was chosen in January, 1743, and the first ferry-boat passed on the 11th March. The grant and patent were obtained from the Proprietaries in March, 1756, for the term of seven years, at an annual rent of five English shillings in silver. The ferry-house, which stood just above the railroad bridge, was torn down in 1853, when work was commenced on the Lehigh Valley railroad. Adam Schaus was ferryman for one year from February, 1745. In 1794, immediately before the building of the first bridge, 3 there was a rope-ferry across the river. A strong rope was stretched from bank to bank, along which a large flat-boat was run by the force of the current.
We owe the Moravians a debt of gratitude for what they did for education in the upper end of this county, and the counties carved out of it, at an early day. As early as 1746 they had established fifteen schools among the Scotch-Irish settlers, where their children were taught gratis, as well as those of German parents outside of the Moravian communion. Between 1742 and 1746 at least six hundred Moravians had settled north of the Lehigh, who, being educated, and many of them highly cultivated, exerted a powerful influence in moulding the future generations of Germans and Scotch-Irish in Northampton and adjoining counties-an influence that is felt to the present day.
The 10th of March, 1746, the inhabitants of Bethlehem, Naza- reth and Gnaden petitioned the court of quarter sessions to lay off and organize a township north of the Lehigh, "to run in breadth east and west about seven miles across the Managus+ creek, and in
3 The first foot-bridge across the Monockasy was built August 19th, 1741.
4 Monockasy.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
length about nine or ten miles toward the Blue mountains." The prayer of the petitioners was granted.s The report and draft of the township were presented at the June term following. The draft places the Moravian tract in the south-west corner of the township, but the number of acres is not given. On it Robert Eastburn is marked one hundred and fifty acres at the head of the " Manakasie ;" Thomas Græme, five hundred, John George, "now William Allen," five hundred, and William Allen six hundred and seventy-three. The survey and draft included the Nazareth tract, but neither is the number of acres in that mentioned. The township was again sur- veyed in 1762, by George Golkowsky.6
In April, 1749, John Jones, of Upper Merion township, Mont- gomery county, settled with his family near Bethlehem. In 1751 he bought five hundred acres on the left bank of the Lehigh, of Patrick Græme, a brother of Doctor Thomas, which touched the east line of the Moravian tract. Doctor Matthew Otto, the first regular apothecary in the county, and certainly north of the Lehigh, opened his laboratory at Bethlehem about 1745. As early as May, 1746, we find him called to attend the sick and disabled at Durham furnace, and the doctor's bill against one Marcus Duling was £3. 5s. Joseph Keller, an early settler in Plainfield township, five miles north-east of Naza- reth, supplied the brethren at Bethlehem with butter, as early as 1746.
Our notice of early Bethlehem would not be complete without mention of the "Sun inn," one of the oldest and most historical public houses in the country. The matter of a house of entertain- ment on the north bank of the Lehigh was agitated as early as 1754, but the project did not take shape until four years later. The plans were submitted in January, 1758, the cellar dug and walled the following May, and the house opened in May, 1760, but license was not obtained until June, 1761. It was furnished at an expense of £39. 17s. 2d., and its cellar was well stocked with liquors. At this time Bethlehem was a small village, consisting of the old pile on Church street, with the middle building of the seminary, the
5 The signers of the petition included all the leading men of the Moravians, such as Spangenburg, Antes, Weis, Neisser, Brownfield, Pyrlaeus, Camerhoff, Seidel, and Burnside.
6 The Moravians were not the first land-owners on the Monockasy. Jeremiah Langhorne owned five hundred acres on that stream as early as 1736, John George, one thousand, and Thomas Clark, five hundred. But it is not known that any of these tracts were settled upon, and probably they were not.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
out-buildings that clustered around the first house, in the rear of the Eagle hotel, the mills and workshops on the Monockasy, a dwelling on Market street, and a second in course of erection on the site of the Moravian publication house-with a population of four hundred. During the Revolutionary war this inn was visited by all the leading characters of the period, civil and military, in- cluding Washington and Hancock. Among its guests were most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and many distin- guished men from other parts of the world. In May, 1777, Lady Washington, with her retinue, under the escort of Colonel McClean, traveled from Bethlehem down the Durham road through Bucks county to join the general at Philadelphia. The Sun inn has been in charge of twenty landlords, since it was first opened in 1760, and is yet maintained as one of the best public houses in the state.
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