The first Kornegays in America waded ashore in March of 1710, naked and shivering. Less than two years later, all of them were slaughtered by Indians with the exception of one small boy. They were not debtors, indentured servants, or peasants, they were cultured, deeply religious people, driven from their homes by religious persecution. The Kornegays (originally spelled Knege, also Kornegee, Kenergy, Kornage, Keregy, and Korneghka) were from the upper Palatine area of southwest Germany which includes the wine regions of the Rhine and Moselle valleys and the Black Forest. By 1709, this region had been wrecked by wars fueled by religious differences. The armies of Louis XIV were the latest to plunder the Palatines and his victories meant trouble for Protestants like the Kornegays. Queen Anne of England invited some of the Protestants to England to be settled there. The Kornegays were among the 20,000 homeless refugees. At this time, Baron Christopher de Graffenried of Switzerland had acquired a large grant of land, 25000 acres between the Neuse and Trent rivers in the Carolinas, for the purpose of starting a settlement. He chose about 100 families from the Palatines on condition that he provide them with land for homesteads (250 acres per family) on his Carolina tract within three months after arrival. The Baron was to follow with a ship load of Swiss mechanics and artisans which would populate a town named after Bern, Switzerland surrounded by farmlands tilled by the Palatines. In January, 1710, about 600 Palatines set sail in mild weather from England for Carolina. The John George Kornegay, his wife and children were among the chosen. The Palatines had a bad crossing. They were soon overtaken by such terrible storms that the voyage lasted thirteen weeks. More than half of them died during the winter voyage across the Atlantic and many more after landing from poor nutrition. Their ships carried them off course to the mouth of the James River in Virginia. Here one of the two vessels was robbed by a boarding party from one of Louis XIV's warships. Everything was taken including the ship's rowboats and the clothes from the passengers. The people of Jamestown were startled to see naked people wading ashore but they were kind to the "poor Palatines" and provided them with food, clothing and shelter. After a few weeks, they set out over land to find the Neuse River, stopping first at a site that would later be called New Bern. They took with them their Bibles, hymn books, catechisms, and long guns. It was from the long guns, originated and made exclusively in the Rhineland region and brought over by the Swiss and Palatine settlers, that the famous Kentucky long rifles were evolved. When they arrived, they found that their land had not been cleared of its Indian title as de Graffenried had supposedly arranged, and the Tuscarora were in no hurry to vacate. In September, de Graffenried arrived finding the Palatines living in the greatest poverty, selling their limited assets to neighboring people in order to live. A late crop was planted. Yellow fever from the swamps ravaged the colonists and took its toll in lives. Surveyor General Lawson laid out plans for the town to be named New Bern in the form of a cross with the center reserved for the building of a church. After the foreclosure of Colonel Thomas Pollock's mortgage on the settler's land, the town did not get built according to the original plan. At dawn on September 22, 1711, without warning, when their first full crop was ready for harvesting, the Tuscarora swooped down on the Palatines killing dozens of families. Sixty English and more than sixty Germans and Swiss were killed. The Kornegay family, with the exception of nine year old George, was wiped out. The Tuscaroras, related to the Iroquois, lived in north Carolina, where they maintained friendly relations with the colonists. According to the natives, trouble began when the white settlers began to take advantage of the Tuscaroras, encroaching on their farmland, cheating them in trades, and in some cases kidnapping and selling their children into slavery. In retaliation, Tuscarora warriors, under Chief Hancock, raided white villages in 1711. The Tuscarora War quickly escalated. In a final standoff, Colonel James Moore led his men, aided by Yamasee Indians, into the Tuscarora village of Neoheroka in 1713, killing and capturing one thousand inhabitants. Many were then sold into slavery to finance the war effort. The surviving Tuscaroras migrated to New York, where in 1722 they became the sixth nation in the Iroquois League. A drawing by Christopher von Graffenreid, founder of the Kornegay's Swiss-German colony in North Carolina, shows he and his slave being held captive by the Tuscaroras during the conflict. Women and children were captured as prisoners with booty. So terrible was the decimation and suffering of the people that the date of the massacre was set apart by the General Assembly as a day of humiliation and prayer and was observed in North Carolina for more than 25 years. De Graffenreid returned to Europe in 1713. He was beset by many difficulties and became bitter. He abused the colonists as having caused their own disasters, being "thieves, lewd fellows, profane, slanderers" and suggested that the Almighty punished them by means of the heathen, for they were worse than these. He was upon leaving "more sorry to leave such a beautiful and good country than such wicked people." The Palatines retorted that he "carried off from our Settlements all that he could come at." De Graffenried failed to supply the colonists with the livestock, tools, implements and other things required of him in the contract. But their great and bitter grievance against him was that he never gave them the titles to their lands, which he had mortgaged to Colonel Pollock. _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]