From "America at 1750" by Richard Hofstadter "Land was an enticing outlet for investment, a magnificent means of converting politician influence into profit. Yet raw, idle land could be made profitable only when settlers were brought in to work, rent, or buy it. 'Lands, though excellent, w/o hands proportionable,' wrote Sir Josiah Child in 1690, 'will not enrich any kingdom.' " This supports your ideas that there were many people in PA and probably in Frankfurt and Strassburg advertizing the free or cheap land in America. This was the best way for the English with political influence to get rich quick. I don't know the circumstances of there not being enough Enlish and Scot-Irish to go around and thus the Germans were actively recruited. "In the Southern colonies the standard way of bringing labor to the land in the seventeenth century was the headright system, under which a newcomer was granted 50 acres free of charge in return for transporting himself, unencumbered, to the colony. This practice was soon transmuted into free grants for bringing others - indentured servants, for example. At first intended to bring about compact, small settlements, the headright system in fact made large holdings as possible as small; like almost everything else bearing upon colonial lands, headright requirements were open to fraud and evasion. . . . . Headright claims became negotiable instruments: sea captains could acquire a right for each servant or slave they imported, and sell the rights to a planter; indentured servants, achieving freedom, sometimes sold their rights for cash instead of taking the land to which they were entitled. . . . . and in VA the practice ceased to be of central importance early in the 18th century. But the pattern of a rather steeply differentiated system of land tenure had already been built up. " "The two major streams were the Scotch-Irish and the Germans. Together the immigrants from Ulster and from Germany brought something decisively different into the political and religious culture of the colonies, especially on the frontier. The new immigrants were Protestants but not Anglicans. They were recruited from the middle and lower classes. The Scot-Irish brought not only an outlook quite different from that of English settlers but a distinctive tone of hardihood and combativeness that expanded in frontier conditions. The Germans were important not as a force in war and plitics but as the carriers of a tradition of skilled and loving husbandry that far surpassed the farming practices of most Anglo-American settlers." Although the English and Scots setup some very large plantations I think it is fair to say the Germans were the successful farmers. Even today those farms of Lancaster, PA and the Shenandoah Valley are beautiful. I bet the land of the Rhine was much better than anything in England. That must have been some transition to have gone from a peasant in an oppressive system to almost total freedom on the frontier. "Wm Penn, the first promoter to see the possibilities of large- scale German settlement, was chiefly interested in recruiting minority sectarians who were suffering the sort of persecution his Quakers brethren had long endured. Through his pietistic acquaintances he was able to mobilize a number of interesting sectarians, who formed the Frankfort Company [I have not heard of this. I guess that is Frankfort, Germany. That is getting close ] to aid and finance settlement. Led by a young lawyer, Francis Daniel Pastorius, who was charmed at the prospect of taking a community to lead "a quiet godly, and honest life in a howling wilderness," in 1683 a pioneer group settled in what was to be called Germantown, not far from Philadelphia, which became a center where German immigrants collected before moving out into the neighboring counties of PA. . . . . In the wars before the Peace of Utrecht French armies repeatedly devastated German Palatine towns along the Rhine, laid waste the fields, and left great numbers in destitutions. With English encouragement, great numbers of Palatine Germans settled in England in 1708 and 1709, and the Lords of Trade were hard put to know what to do with these refugees. Under the leadership of a Lutheran minister, Joshua von Kocherthal, one group went not to England but to NY and established Neuberg on the Hudson. . . . . . . . The first Dunkers (or Tunkers -- the name derived from their method of baptism by dippings, eintunken in German) came in 1719 and then encouraged others. The SCHWENKFELDERS, a group of Silesian sectarians who had been much persecuted, emigrated in 1733-4. In the 1740's as the number of Germans grew, the religious complexity of German Protestantism came to be more completely represented. Lutherans and German Reformed churchmen began to outnumber the denominations, although the Moravians, the largest German church, were a substantial group. . . . . . . . Before the era of the Revolution there were German colonists in the valley of VA, parts of western MD, especially Frederick Co. and the region around Hagerstown, and as far south as western NH. " I have never fully undertstood what made Frederick Co., MD the jumping off point for the German southern migration. Loudon Co., VA was another important point of German settlement. "The solution, [of a labor shortage] found long before the massive influx of black slaves, was a combined force of merchants, ship captains, immigratrant brokers, and a variety of hard-boiled recruiting agents who joined in bringing substantial cargoes of whites who voluntarily or involuntarily paid for their passage by undergoing a terminable period of bondage. This quest for labor, touched off early in the seventeenth century by the circulars of the London Company of VA, continued by Wm Penn in the 1680's and after, and climaxed by the blandishments of various English and continental recruiting agents of the 18th century, marked one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world. " "With the beginnings of substantial emigration from the Continent in the 18th century the same sort of concerted business of recruitment arose in Holland, the Rhenish provinces of of Germany, and Switzerland. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam the lucrative business of gathering and transshipping emigrants was soon concentrated in the hands of a dozen prominent English and Dutch firms. As competition mounted, the shippers began to employ agents to greet the prospective emigrants at the harbor and vie in talking up the comforts of their ships. Hence the recruiting agents known as Neülander -- newlanders -- emerged. These newlanders, who were paid by the head for the passengers they recruited, soon branched out of the Dutch ports and the surrounding countryside and moved up the Rhine and the Neckar, traveling from one province to another, from town to town and tavern to tavern, all the way to the Swiss cantons, often passing themselves off as rich men returned from the easy and prosperous life of America in order to persuade others to try to repeat their good furtune. " HUMAN NATURE DOES NOT CHANGE . Edgar A. Howard