Excerpts from: THE VIRGINIA GERMANS pg. 28 The logical chain of planning, however, was broken by unforeseen events As inaccessible as the Valley looked from the east, it was an inviting path for those moving from north to south. The wilderness offered few other highways so well laid out by nature. Where Indians had traced out the natural course, with easily fordable streams to cross and few hills to surmount, traders and travelers hardy enough to brave the solitude found ready passage. From the Potomac an southward, the Valley continues as a natural road into the Carolinas, and on through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky Early contacts with Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier explain the knowledge inhabitants of Penn's colony had gained about this north-south route. Hunters and traders on this trail could not help being impressed by the lands they saw. The immediate interest of numerous Germans in the reports from the Virginia hinterland was not quite adventitious In a sense, the tide of German migration was just then heading in the direction from where the tidings of fertile land came From 1683 onward, Germans had been emigrating to Pennsylvania At first they occupied land around Philadelphia, but within a few years after the turn of the century their numbers increased so much by new immigration and by the exodus of many others from the New York frontier that they soon swarmed all over the fertile limestone soil of eastern Pennsylvania. As thousands more were arriving every year from Germany and Switzerland, settlement proceeded in a southwesterly direction until by 1720 it reached the Susquehanna, where it came to a temporary halt. Only a few years later, Germans began to cross the broad river, and as land prices in Pennsylvania showed a rapid upward trend, they followed the Monocacy trail through Maryland to the Potomac. THE VIRGINIA GERMANS pg. 38 Nor did the German migration stop at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. The Scotch-Irish were nor alone in pushing on southward and westward. Their predominance in the southern valleys did not deter many Germans from venturing into the "Irish Tract" and beyond. Early pioneers on the Virginia frontier showed much more readiness to intermingle than the solidification of ethnic areas in later years leads one to believe. During the first decades, settlement was in no way final for many people: names which appear in the thirties in the Shenandoah Valley are encountered in southwestern Virginia in subsequent years. There was a considerable strain between the attachment to the land they tilled and the lure of better land still farther away. Many Germans succumbed to the temptation to continue their wanderings. Willing to forgo the convenience of having neighbors of their own language and faith, individuals wandered forth into the far-off river valleys in search of unknown and isolated places which could be appropriated. Family groups scouted for rich bottom land that could provide ideal fields and pastures. In the Southwest land was still available for the asking while contentions over titles, such as existed over the Hite grant, made some of the Shenandoah lands unattractive to newcomers. Among the Scotch-Irish on the James and Roanoke rivers and their tributaries, German names began to appear. In 1740 John Peter Saling settled in the first fork of James River below Natural Bridge. Christopher Zimmerman obtained a 400-acre grant in the James River country in June 1743. John Miller (Johannes Müller) built the first mill at present-day Fincastle. It was operating when Colonel John Buchanan visited Miller in October 1745. Peter Kinder (Günther) came to the Roanoke soon after 1740 and made his home on what became known as Peter's Creek. Tobias and Erich Bright (Brecht) settled between Pearls and Brush Mountains on the North Fork of the Roanoke About 1746 Stephen Holston (Holstein) built his cabin at the head springs of the river which bears his name to this day. Between the years 1743 and 1745 several German family groups moved southward through the Shenandoah Valley and the James River country. They bypassed the settled areas, crossed the dividing ridge to the valleys of the western waters, and settled on apparently unclaimed land. *pg. 39 When James Patton and others, to whom 100,000 acres had been granted on the three branches of the Mississippi River, sent a surveyor into the New River country, he found several groups of people already seated there, among them two distinct German neighborhoods. Adam Harman (Henrich Adam Hermann), a Shenandoah settler of 1736, had led the first group, many of them his relatives, to the New River about 1743. They occupied the horseshoe bottoms along the western bank. More Germans from the Shenandoah and from Pennsylvania joined the Harman group until the most fertile sections along the dyer were taken up and the settlement spread north over the plateau beyond Price's Fork and west into present Giles County. In the autumn of 1745 Israel and Samuel Eckerlin and Alexander Mack, Jr, disgruntled leaders of the Sabbatarian cloisters at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, arrived on New River and established Mahanaim, a religious colony which attracted many other Ephrata Brethren and kindred spirits. First conceived as a secluded refuge for celibate Sabbatarians, the assembly of log cabins on Dunkard's Bottom, a few miles south of present-day Radford, was soon surrounded by the farms of Dunker families, the "householders" of the Sabbatarian order. Some of these Dunkers also lived an Sinking Creek. Their presence naturally aroused much curiosity on the frontier. By October 1745 the Woods River Company sent John Buchanan out to arrange far the terms of their land. At William Mack's cabin he encountered the first long beard... Thomas Walker visited Mahanaim in April 1750 and left a vivid description of this "odd set of people who mate it a matter of Religion not to Shave their Beards, b an Bees, or eat Flesh, though at present, in the Last, they transgress, being constrained to it as they say, by the want of sufficiency of Gram and Roots, they having not long been seated here I doubt the plenty and deliciousness of the Venison and Turkeys has contributed not a little to this. The unmarried have no private property, but live on a common Stock. They don't baptize either Young or Old, they Keep their Sabbath on Saturdays, and hold that all their men shall be happy hereafter but first must pass through punishment according to their Sins. They are very hospitable." The Swedish clergyman Israel Acrelius noted in one of his reports that the New River Sabbatarians did not build community houses as in Ephrata but "dwell in separate houses, but in one neighborhood, and so by themselves that they neither help nor desire help from other people. pg. 41 While he carried on an extensive trade with the Cherokees, he also contracted the hatred of other Indians in the area. Samuel Stalnaker left the New River community and moved his family westward in order to be closer to his trading partners. In April 1748 Dr. Thomas Walker, then on one of his surveying tours, met Stalnaker between Reedy Creek and Holston River. The German was on his way to the Cherokees. During this encounter, Stalnaker is credited with having indicated to Walker where the Cumberland Gap is located, a road which was then still unknown to Virginians. The two met again in 1750 when Samuel and Adam Stalnaker had moved to the north side of the Holston. Walker came upon their camp in March and he and his party helped Stalnaker raise his house. On Fly and Jefferson's map of 1751, the German's place is shown as the extreme western habitation in Virginia. Stalnaker's renown as a frontiersman spread throughout the colony. Governor Dinwiddie soon would have reasons to avail himself of the services of this man "well acquainted with the woods, and a good Pilot or Guide upon occasion. For a number of years, the Harman clan on New River carried on daring hunting expeditions into the mountains to supply their extensive trade in furs and skins. At least seven brothers of this family came to Virginia in the 1730'9 and early 1740's Their favorite hunting region lay along Bluestone River deep in the mountains where they obtained a grant for 15,000 acres of land in 1750. pg. 69 Wherever Germans formed the majority of inhabitants, the landscape soon bore the stamp of their agricultural skill. A pamphlet on Virginia, published in Germany in 1772, said of the Valley: "There are now seated a great number of Germans who grow considerable quantities of good wheat, rye, barley, oats, hemp and flax, and they keep much livestock so that this Province is now acquiring a very beautiful aspect." pg. 102 THE VIRGINIA GERMANS was unrest among the Germans, Hodson sensed: "They are evidently beginning to feel the inconveniences which drove their fathers further west, and will, probably, gradually imitate their example, in spite of their old steady German habits." Some years later, in 1837. the young Lutheran minister Henry Wetzel wrote from Rural Retreat: "Our friends are nearly all selling off, and some have sold, among them same old people, and intend to remove to the west." Notwithstanding a considerable exodus, which was quickened by serious internal dissensions in the German churches, a substantial number of the descendants remained in Wythe or spread into adjacent counties In 1852, a newly arrived German immigrant, Louis Heuser, marveled at the farms near Wytheville "inhabited by German- speaking Pennsylvanians. They were all born in America and speak but a poor German."' The original Wythe settlement overflowed early beyond the present county lines to the south, west, and north. On Elk Creek in Grayson County, German farmers organized a union church which, however, faded out of existence in the first half of the nineteenth century." Many of the first settlers of Bland County were Germans coming either across Walker's Mountain from Wythe or up Walker's Creek from the New River neighborhoods. Sharon Lutheran Church near Ceres was the center of a farm community that developed along the headwaters of the North Fork of the Holston. Other Germans located on Walker and Kimberling creeks. In Tazewell County, migration followed the head branches of the Clinch River. In 1771 three brothers of the Harman family from New River, Mathias, Henry, and Jacob, already made their homes near the sire of Jeffersonville. The first court in Tazewell was held in June 1800 in the large log house of Henry Harman, Jr. The ovally shaped basin of Burke's Garden was largely settled by German farmers Walled in by ridges rising to a thousand feet above the level bottom land, the Garden lent itself ideally to intensive farming and stock raising. There was a Lutheran church in Burke's Garden, and German itinerants served preaching points at Poor Valley southwest of the Garden and at Concord near Tazewell. The three forks of the Holston, the Clinch, and the Powell all received a fair number of Germans. On the South Fork of the Holston, their names appeared in the land records from 1781 on. Adam Lerberber, Balzer Rouse, and Jacob Hartenstine were among the first to settle. Typical German neighborhoods evolved only along the Middle Fork in Smyth County. The Largest one, extending from Atkins to the county line on both sides of the river, supported two churches, Schneble's near Groseclose and St. Mark's near Atkins, both maintained jointly by Lutherans and Reformed. The old Chilhowie country, where Samuel pg 103 Stalnaker lived in colonial days. attracted a German colony centering around Ebenezer Church. The first landholders on the Middle Fork, during 1774-86, were Hunchrist and Conrad Carlock, Peter Harman, George Spangler, and Henry Kounts. Along the Holston's North Fork and in Rich Valley, Germans were well represented. The earliest land surveys date from 1774 for Frederick Gobble, Michael Hoffaker, and Gasper Mansaker. Other pioneers in Smyth and Washington counties were Caspar Fleenor, Peter and Jacob Spangler, Adam Deck, John Schafer, Peter Münch, Frederick Koppenhafer, Peter Fuchs, John Hagey, Peter Groseclose, Jacob Bluebaugh, Christian Lutspike, and Anthony Horn. During the summer of 1805 Pastor Butler visited "divers streams of the Holstein River whereon many Germans are found living in various directions." In Smyth County, he preached to Germans gathered in the home of Philip Greever, and at Seven Mile Fort to "a cold and ignorant neighborhood" made up of sixteen German families. At Abington, Butler noted "only few Germans who have partly turned Presbyterians for want of a German preacher." Many of the Wythe and Holston families spread into Scott, Lee, Wise, Dickinson, Buchanan, and Russell counties. Susong, Blabough, Engle, Fleenor, Hinkle, Kaiser, Kinder, Snider, Spangler, Hunsaker, Kinser, Rosenbaum, Brunk, Grabill, Hartsock, Rivercomb, Henderlite, Wassum, Copenhaver, Greever, and Carlock are names which all have a familiar ring in these westernmost counties of Virginia. When individuals and families moved on into the narrow valleys, they became dispersed and neither German churches nor schools emerged. Assimilation was an absolute necessity for them long before the communities in Wythe and Smyth gave up their cherished language and traditions The maps still witness the widespread infiltration of Germans. Olinger and Stickleyville, both in Lee County, Wampler, Honaker, and Repass in Russell County, Fleenor, Hanckel, Litz, and Neff in Washington, and Shraders, Snapp, Harman, and Groseclose in Tazewell are hamlets and neighborhoods whose names are traces of the extreme outposts of German settlement, Hess Hollow (Russell), Heniger Gap (Tazewell), Foglesong Valley (Bland), Shafer Creek (Lee), Bumgardner Branch (Washington), and Steffler Run (Smyth) are but a few examples of geographic reminders of the German share in the amalgam of the population of Appalachia. Virginia ports played only a very minor role in the mass immigration of the eighteenth century which provided the many German and Scotch-Irish settlers who peopled western lands. Most of the immigrants reached America through the port of Philadelphia.