Did we have a question some time back about Sookie? Forgive me, it's a bit lengthy! davie -----Original Message----- From: Josephine Lindsay Bass <jbass@digital.net> To: CSA-History-L@rootsweb.com <CSA-History-L@rootsweb.com> Date: Saturday, October 24, 1998 11:17 PM Subject: THE GERMANS AMONG US This talk was given by Dr. Larry Fleenor to the E. TN. Genealogy Society in Oct. 1998. And post here with his permission. -sysop THE GERMANS AMONG US A Talk to the East Tennessee Genealogy Association Oct. 15, 1998 by: Lawrence J. Fleenor, Jr. copyright 1998 Big Stone Gap, Va. Suk-suk-sukie! Is there anyone among you who knows what I have just done? [some positive response] Were any of you gentlemen ever told as a boy that you were wearing “high water britches? [equal positive response ] What might any of this have to do with the fact that we are assembled here this evening in the Valley of the Holston River? Could any of this relate to my name, or to the name of Jerry Sharrett, who invited me here to speak? Did you know that the name the Confederates used for neighboring Bluff City was ‘Camp Zollicoffer’? What is it that all these things have in common? They are German in origin. “Sukie” is derived from the medieval Franchonian word “suggi”, which means “to suckle”. Franchonia was a portion of Germany that was once conquered and ruled by France centuries ago. How is it that an ancient cattle call from a portion of Germany under French influence wind up being commonly used in the Valley of the Holston? In my talk I hope to persuade you that the German influence in our area is considerable. I will provide more evidence for this, discuss historic Europe to describe what our German ancestor’s lives were like there, the events that caused these German ancestors to leave, what methods they used to leave, what happened to them when they got to the English American colonies, and the why and the how of their arrival in the Greater Holston Valley. We will then allow time for questions. Evidences of the German Settlers of the Greater Holston Valley Jerry Sharrett and I are distant cousins, as his grandmother’s maiden name was Fleenor. Jerry’s family and mine both lived in Rich Valley in Washington Co., Va, which runs roughly from US 58 at Valley Institute to US 19 at Greendale. using that valley as an example, one can go up that valley and move from clan name to clan name. I will name a few: Miller, Sharrett, Fleenor, Leonard, Kaylor, Sproles, Kegley, Hortenstine, and the non German sounding Blacks and Whites. There are few people living along that valley that are not related to at least some of these clans. They are all German. One can do the same thing for Poor Valley, which is the valley of the North Fork of the Holston all the way from Kingsport to Saltville. I took a quick look on the topographic maps for the Virginia Counties of Washington, Scott, Wise, and Lee and added some others off of the top of my head, and counted about 130 names of springs, cemeteries, and other geographic features bearing German family names. And this represents only the surface. Many more Germans passed through without leaving their names on the map. And even more than that, not included on this list are those Germans who directly translated their names into the English equivalent, and who can not be separated from their English neighbors. Among these are the following: Weiss-White, Schwartz-Black, Grun-Green, Baur-Farmer, Schwerd-Sword, Müller-Miller, Wilhelms-Williams, Wilhelmsohn, Williamson, Bishof-Bishop, Braun-Brown, Stahl-Steel, Strasse-Street, Heyl-Hale, Vogel-Bird, Steiner-Stoner or Stone, Schmidt-Smith, --- the list goes on and on ---these settlers will never be identified. These Germans are backed up back to back, up and down the valleys of the Holston. How is it that they came to be here? The Europe of the 17th and 18th Centuries The Reformation started by Martin Luther in 1521 unleashed 250 years of viscous warfare, with Germany being center stage. The affair was incredibly complex, and involved many more denominations that just Catholic and Lutheran. Important to our story are especially the followers of John Huss and of John Calvin. At this point in history, France existed as a nation fairly much as it does today, but Germany did not. Instead in Germany there were numerous quarrelsome small independent political entities, some no larger than Sullivan County. Between France and these German speaking principalities there were several dukedoms , a no man’s land, where neither of these great warring peoples had control. Foremost among them were Alsace, Lorraine, and the Palatinate, which at that time included much of what is now the German province of Würtemberg, and of Franconia. During the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Aug. 8, 1572, France ran all of these denominations out of France proper into the border provinces. The wars of the Reformation climaxed in the Thirty Year’s War of 1618-1648. Gradually the Catholics and the Lutherans began to divide the continent up between them, driving all other Christians out of the territories that the larger denominations controlled. Among those refugee Christians were the followers of Huss and of Calvin, such as the German Reformed Church, the Amish, the Moravians, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, the Dunkards, the Brethren and an unrelated denomination, the Schwinkfelders. All these diverse groups have been inappropriately lumped together under the term ‘Huguenots’. These groups began to migrate into these principalities between Catholic France, and Catholic southern Germany, and the Lutheran northern Germany. France, however, began to gain military control of this border country, both to consolidate its political power, and to drive these ‘heretics off of the face of the earth. French armies surrounded Alsace to prevent escape, and began forced reconversions to Catholicism. Beheadings and mass burnings at the stake were the fate of those caught in this process. By the mid 18th Century there was no place left for these religious refugees to hide on the continent of Europe, except for Holland. These Protestant refugees, most having come originally from Germany, poured into Holland in an attempt to escape overseas to England, South Africa, or to America. These was not enough shipping to carry them away, and an unorganized refugee camp sprang up outside Rotterdam, where starvation and exposure killed many. Others made it to England, where a refugee camp was set up to provide for them. -->William Penn, a member of the British Royal family, and a Quaker, had -----------^^^^ established the colony of Pennsylvania as a haven for Quakers and other religious refugees. The Quakers helped within the refugee camps, and established trust among the refugees, and soon tens of thousands of them were on the way to Pennsylvania. Not all the German emigrants were religious ones. A good many Lutherans left their homes to escape social and economic conditions, and became intermixed with the religious refugees. The general turmoil of the marching and countermarching armies made life miserable for everyone. And Germany was poor and overpopulated. The industrial revolution had not come to the continent. The German peasant was little more than a serf, and belonged to his duke, who viewed him as a valuable asset, little more than a slave. The petty German dukes drafted their young men and impressed them into the army, and rented them out to the warring factions in Europe. The peasant could not legally move off of his land without paying a sort of ransom to the duke, called a manumission tax. Many Lutheran peasants sneaked off in the middle of the night without paying the tax, and became outlaws for having done so. They flocked to the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, in hopes of gaining passage to Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most common means of gaining passage was to sell oneself and ones family into an indenture contract to a sea captain. No money changed hands, but the captain, who was usually also the owner of his ship, would provide passage to America for free. Many immigrants died in passage, and upon arrival in Philidelphia the captain would sell the contracts of the survivors to some prosperous farmer who lived around Philidelphia. The immigrants were then obligated to work for the owner of their contract for a period of about fifteen years under conditions often little better than slavery. Many ran away. Life in Pensylvania All in all, there are records of the arrival of some 100,000 Germans into Pennsylvania in the twenty years before the Revolutionary War. As the indenture contracts began to expire, the immigrants had to move away from Eastern Pennsylvania in order to find land for themselves. They headed west into the Susquehanna Valley, but could not go further directly west because of the unbroken wall of the Alleghenies, and had to follow the Great Valley between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies into Virginia. Strange things began to happen in America. The authorities in Maryland, which had been established as a haven for English Catholics, invited these Protestant German immigrants into Maryland. No matter that they had been fighting each other for 250 years in Europe. Many came, but the lure of limitless cheap land to the west lured many to move on to the the Frontiers of North Carolina and of Virginia. Some of the denominations of refugees were more cohesive than others. The Mennonites and Amish, in particular, were tight self help societies, and provided mutual economic assistance in purchasing land. The Amish were able to form a colony in Pennsylvania. The Mennonites moved into the Shenandoah Valley. The Dunkards settled at Dunkard’s Bottom at present Radford, Virginia. The Cherokee annihilated the Catawbas [Indians] who had lived in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, which is where Winston-Salem in located today. This created a vacuum in the area of some of the best farm land in North Carolina, and even as the Cherokee began to move in, the Moravians sent a missionary colony into the Yadkin, soon to be followed by a larger group of Moravians from Pennsylvania. Then came the various groups of the Brethren, less organized than the Moravians, but also the followers of John Huss. Then came large numbers of Scots- Irish, who as Presbyterians, were theologically related to the German denominations already settled in the Yadkin. These diverse peoples intermarried. German Immigration into Our Area At this point one needs to divide the incoming German settlers into four groups, as each was a little different from the other three. The first group would be those Germans who came directly into the upper Clinch Valley and the upper Valley of the North Fork of the Holston from Pennsylvania and Maryland. They were of relatively pure stock, and came over the route that lead from the New River by the Narrows to Bluefield or Tazewell, and who settled from there to more of less present US 19 between Abingdon and St. Paul. They tended to have been more of the pioneering culture as they arrived about the time of the French and Indian War. In 1771 the settlers of the Yadkin Valley engaged in an armed insurrection against the Colonial authorities, against whom they fought a pitched battle near Alamance Court House. The settlers ran out of ammunition, and lost the battle. The Red Coated soldiers of the Governor ran amok through the Yadkin, burning and hanging, and the settlers began the largest mass migration in colonial American history, as they ran for their lived through the passes of the Blue Ridge in to the Valleys of the Holston, Watauga, and Clinch. They became known as the “Over Mountain Men of the Watauga Settlements”, and settled without benefit of legal title. They, also, were frontiersmen. Around 1775-1777 real estate agents seem to have been active in the Pennsylvanian and Maryland German communities, as this is the period when the Rich and Poor Valleys of the Holston were settled by Germans of pure stock in the area running from the Tennessee - Virginia state line northeast to US 19. They purchased the land from these real estate speculator companies that had promoted the land to them, or from earlier settlers. These folks tended to be more of the settled German peasant stock, and not so nearly the frontiersmen that their other German neighbors were. They have tended to stay put more than the groups to the north and to the south of them have. The fourth and last group of German settlers in our area are typified by the ancestor of the Rasnicks. As a young man Jacob Rasnick was working in his parent’s hay loft in the German State of Hesse when an impressment gang of soldiers came down the road and took him. All his mother could do was to give him a German Bible and say goodbye, as he was taken off to become a soldier. They never saw each other again. The Duke of Hesse rented Rasnick and his army out to the British for hard cash, and they wound up fighting in the American Revolution. Washington captured them at the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey and they were kept it the prisoner of war barracks at Charlottesville, Va. Barracks Road in that city is named for this circumstance. Many, like Rasnick, after the war was over decided that if they returned to Hesse their Duke would merely rent them out again to fight in some far off battlefield not of their choosing. Many stayed in Virginia. Col. Scheiflick stayed and became the ancestor of all the Shiffletts of Greene County. Rasnick came to what now is Dickenson County, Virginia. There are no records of how many Hessians stayed in Virginia after the end of the War, but if family traditions are any indicator, their descendants are heavily sprinkled among us. Cultural Remnants What happened to all these Germans, and to their culture? Well, the Germans are still here. The spellings of the names frequently became anglized and may be difficult to recognize. But we are here. For example - Flinner to Fleenor; Scheritz to Sharrett. Evidences of the culture are more difficult to identify. There are several reasons. The more collectivistic of the German denominations established themselves to the northeast, where they are quite evident today as the well known Amish and Mennonite Communities. They had only indirect influence here. The European Lutheran Church did not support the Lutheran Church in America. Unlike the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, the Quaker, or the Catholic Churches, it sent neither trained clergy nor financial aide. There were Lutheran Churches in our region, but they soon withered. An example would be the Lutheran Church that existed on the Hortinstine farm in the community between Fleenor’s Spring and Fleenor’s Chapel in Rich Valley. Even though Winston-Salem continues to be the center of the American Moravian Church, it did not survive the Regulator refugee emigration out of the Yadkin Valley into our area. The less formally organized Church of the Brethren survived the immigration better, and there was a Church of the Brethren at Zenobia, which is east of Mendota, that conducted services in German till World War I. The Germans immigrants to our area desperately wanted to “be English”. They were the subjects of some discrimination, frequently being called “thick headed Dutchmen”. The second generation, those born in America, frequently joined British denominations that were historically and theologically related to the churches of their parents. Members of the German Reformed Church usually joined the co-Calvinist Presbyterian Church, and the Moravians and Brethren joined the Methodist Church in such numbers that they made it their own. The last union of Brethren and Methodists did not occur until about twenty five years ago, an event that turned the Methodist Church into the United Methodist Church. As for the more private German culture as practiced within the family, it held together within my family until the Civil War. Others still spoke German well enough to listen to sermons in it and to sing in it till World War I. After this, all mention of things German vanished from memory, only to remain in subtile ways, like cattle calls, sour Krout, and potato salad. In my area, salad is still frequently pronounced in the German fashion, “sala’t “, as in “sala’t greens”. I hope you are now persuaded on the significance of the German immigration into our area. I would like to acknowledge the contributions to the research underling this talk of Mr. Edgar A. Howard. I will now entertain questions and comments. Thank you. jbass@digital.net 216 Beach Park Lane Cape Canaveral, FL 32920-5003 LINDSAY, HARRISON & CSA-HISTORY Roots Mail List Home of The *HARRISON* Repository & *MY FAMILY* http://moon.ouhsc.edu/rbonner/harintro.htm Data Managed by Becky Bass Bonner and Josephine Lindsay Bass