German Beginnings in America The English government was aware of the plight of the Palafines. It took measures to settle some of them in the colony of New York, beginning in 1709-10. William Penn hoped to obtain German settlers for the vast American lands that King Charles II had given him in 1680. Penn sent recruiting agents, who could speak German, to the Rhineland. These agents printed broad-sides to distribute in villages, such as Hordt, to attract potential settlers to the rich land in Pennsylvania. Religious freedom was among the advantages Penn offered. Pennsylvania became the focal point for German settlement in America, although there were areas of German settlement in New York, Maryland, and Georgia as well. Most of the German-speaking people who settled in the Valley of Virginia came there after living for several years in Pennsylvania. Early groups of German settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. The mass movement of Lutheran, Reformed Germans, and the smaller pietist sects like the Mennonites and Brethren began in 1709. These peoples quickly acquired prime farmlands in the areas surrounding Philadelphia. They began to spread westward into Lancaster County and towards the Susquehanna River. A few began to enter the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1730. By the 1740s, the best farm lands in Pennsylvania had been claimed. The children and grandchildren of the early German settlers began to look southward to the great Valley of Virginia, and into North Carolina, for new lands to farm. In the Valley of Virginia, their areas of greatest concentration were in present-day Shenandoah County, where they were the overwhelming majority of the population, and in Frederick, Rockingham, Page and northern Augusta counties. After the American Revolution, and in the early -19th century, these Virginia Germans, many of them grandchildren of the immigrants from the Palatinate, began to move from the northern Valley into south-western Virginia. They leapfrogged over some counties and settled in Botetourt, Montgomery and Wythe Counties in large numbers. Mary Jane Bright Star