The Shenandoah

Settlement

26 IV SETTLEMENT * * * THERE WERE THREE GREAT STRAINS in the early settlement of the Shenandoah Valley: the Germans, and the Scotch-Irish, both Protestant , both with a long tradition of religious persecution, a hatred of European quarrels; and the English settlers of gentle blood. The Germans , among whom were some Swiss, came first. In 1689 the Catholic soldiers of Louis XIV drove the Protestants from the Palatinate. Some fled to England, and then on to the New World. They sent back good reports and others followed. These German Protestants were careful people, serious people, who intended to work hard and to establish their families on a solid basis. Their wives did not mind working in the fields, or pulling a plow when draft animals were lacking. They went into New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, looking for good land which had not been taken up, and in Pennsylvania they heard fur traders extol the valley of the “Cenantua.” Between 1726 and 1735 many of them gathered up their wives and families, children and grandchildren, to go there in small groups, independently, but all searching for the same thing: land. Land upon which they could settle. Land which could be improved. They did not come into the Valley over the forbidding wall of mountains, but in a more natural way, down through the rolling fields settlement 27 of Pennsylvania and across the Potomac, near what is now Shepherdstown , which the Germans called Mechlenburg. An old tombstone indicates that there were settlers there as early as 1726, but their record has been lost. The pioneers found no town, of course, only a rich prairie with tall grass and flowering pea vine, good pasturage for cow or horse. They knew good land when they saw it, these Germans who had so little, who brought with them only their will to work, their strong wives, their healthy flock of children, a domestic animal or two, a few household utensils, and their massive German Bibles with the brass or iron clasps. They pushed southward up the Valley, and their children’s children remain there to this day, holding still the two things left to them: the land and the heavy German Bibles. Most of the settlers were obscure people, and their arrival is veiled in obscurity. It appears that the earliest, after those at Mechlenburg, was the Swiss Adam Miller, whose application for a naturalization certificate in 1731 stated that he had lived five years in the “fields of Massanutten ” (the Luray valley). History records of him one other fact. The house he built for his family burnt down on the day he was ready to move into it, and he patiently began that night to build another. John Van Meter, a fur trader, with his two sons Abraham and Isaac, saw the waving grasses five feet high, and obtained a grant in 1730 for 10,000 acres in the fork of the “Sherando.” A year later, at about the same time that the Quakers began their settlement on the Opequon, Van Meter sold his grant to a German of some wealth and substance, Hans Jost Heydt. Joist Hite, to Anglicize him as his neighbors promptly did, came from Alsace to Kingston, New York, in 1710. Family tradition says that he sailed in his own ships, the brigantine Swift and schooner Friendship , and that he carried his gold in sacks. Likewise it is told, on evidence which has not been produced, that he was a baron. With some frequency it appears that the early Americans escaped from the artificial distinctions of titles only to create them fairer still in the imagi- 28 the shenandoah nation. Baron or not, Hite moved southward little by little, crowded here, discouraged there by Indian raids, until in October of 1731,“cutting his road from York,” he crossed the Potomac and settled near the Quakers, five miles southwest of the site of Winchester. If the sacks of gold ever existed, there is no conclusive proof that he brought them to the Valley, but he did bring some evidence of wealth, and better still the native energy and sturdiness of his own character, and the strength of his blood. Of the sixteen families who came with him, three were families of his sons-in-law, George Bowman, Paul Froman , and Jacob Chrisman, and four were the families of his sons. In partnership with a Quaker, Robert McKay, and others...