(Originally posted on this List, 9 Dec 2002, by Thom Faircloth.) This is day two of the Holtzclaw article on The Little Fork Colony The Little Fork Germans are referred to indirectly in 1743 in the diary of Leonard Schnell and Robert Hussey, Moravian missionaries, on their journey to Georgia. They stayed with Jacob Holtzclaw in Germantown from Nov. 23 to Nov. 25, 1743, and were told that Matthew Hoffman, a Moravian of Bethlehem, PA., had written several letters to his brother, who lived 10 miles away; that the brother had brought the letters to Holtzclaw to read, because he was afraid that Matthew Hoffman had fallen away from the true religion; but that Holtzclaw read the letters and liked them very well (Va. Mag., Vol. 11, pp. 376-8). The center of the Little Fork settlement was on land that belonged to Jacob Holtzclaw of Germantown. He was granted 680 acres on the branches of Indian Run in the Little Fork of the Rappahannock in 1728, and the tract was enlarged to 1300 acres by a later grant in 1748. On Aug. 22, 1748, Jacob Holtzclaw and Catherine his wife of Prince William Co. deeded parts of the tract to four families, as follows: Harman Back 100 acres (Orange Co. D. B. 11, p 85); John and Frederick Fishback, sons of Jacob Fishback and Catherine his wife, 150 acres, with life tenure to the parents (p.88); Henry Huffman 225 acres (p. 83); and John Young, Fr., and Katherine Young, infants, son and daughter of John Young and Mary his wife, 200 acres, with life tenure to the parents (p. 86). The Orange Co. list of tithables for 1739 shows that Jacob Holtzclaw was charged with 4 tithables on his Little Fork land, who were apparently the above 4 men, as the 1748 deeds state that the grantees were already living on the land. We can thus be pretty certain that the Little Fork group from Nassau-Siegen, or at least part of it, was established in 1749. Henry Huffman of the 1748 deed was quite clearly the John Henry Huffman of Brother Gottschalk's report, while John Young was John Jung, the Reader of the group. A fifth man, George Wayman, was also a member of the settlement as early as 1739, for on Feb. 26 of that year William Beverly gave him a life lease on 100 acres of land just southeast of Jacob Holtzclaw's tract (Orange D. B. 3, p. 389), and on May 24, 1754, Jacob Holtzclaw deeded him 98 acres of the old Holtzclaw grant between Henry Huffman and John Young (Culpeper D. B. "B", p. 115). Professor Hackley and I think that this tract of 98 acres, roughly a triangle, was probably the land on which the church was located; that it had been originally intended as the minister's glebe; and that it was not deeded to George Wayman until after the colony had given up hopes of securing a minister. Rev. James Kemper, who was born at Germantown in 1753, thought that Wayman (as well as Hanback and Utterback below) was a member of the original 1714 group from Nassau-Siegen, but except possibly in the case of Utterback, he seems to have confused members of the second Nassau-Siegen group with the first. Two other men who were in the Little Fork group in 1747 were sons of the original 1714 immigrants from Germantown. The first was James Spilman, son of John Spilman of Germantown. The William Beverly Papers in the Virginia Historical Society Library at Richmond show that in 1747 Spilman had assumed an arrears of debt of George Wayman (probably on the 1739 land deeded to Wayman by Beverly), but that Spilman had paid up the arrears by 1752. It is not improbable in view of the above that Spilman had married Wayman's daughter, as he was a young man, born ca. 1720-25. Spilman himself got a grant of 400 acres in the North Little Fork in 1751. {to be continued} Thom Faircloth