Things have been a little quiet here lately, except for some unsettled weather patterns doing what they do to me. Nothing new there. I'm getting ready for my upcoming week's vacation, half of which will be spent running around in search of new history tidbits; the other half will be spent doing, well, as little as possible to be honest.
I see by my list of planned blog posts that it's time for a visit to Berks County (hello to my pals in the Berks History Buffs) so off we go. We're heading back to the lovely community of Bernville, but this time we're just a mile from the neighboring community of Shartlesville; it's so close that I scratched my head a little bit about where exactly the marker is located. If you are, or I should say were, at all familiar with the now-closed and much-lamented attraction Roadside America, the marker is located very close to the exit from their parking lot. In fact, the property which held Roadside America was once part of the farm which was the site of this post's major event.
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| The marker is on old route 22 on the eastbound side, near the exit of the former Roadside America parking lot |
The Amish are a religious sect which values simple living, manual labor, humility, and plain dress. They got their start in Switzerland back in 1693, when a man named Jakob Ammann broke away from his order of Mennonite Anabaptists; those who followed him became known as Amish. Many of them came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s because of William Penn's promise of religious freedom, and here they remain, helping to keep alive that dialect of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch. They largely settled in Lancaster County, including the parts of it which later became other counties. Toward the end of the 19th century, they broke into two groups, the Old Order Amish (which is what people usually mean when they say Amish) and the Mennonites. Mennonites are still very similar to the Amish, but they are known to wear patterned garments instead of only solid colors; they also are willing to make use of certain modern conveniences, like cars and Burger King, which the Old Order Amish will not.
The Northkill Amish are remembered as being the first identifiable Amish settlement in the New World. It was so called because of its proximity to the Northkill Creek; that region was opened up for settlement in 1736, and in that same year two Amish men, Hans Seiber and Melchior Detweiler, settled there with their families. The settlement was firmly established by 1740, and in 1742 it was deemed large enough for the residents to petition the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly for naturalization rights. This allowed them to purchase additional land, making room for more Amish arrivals. When Bishop Jacob Hertzler joined them in 1749, the settlement grew to its largest size with close to 200 families.
All was well, or at least unremarkable, until 1754, when - as stated in almost every post I've written concerning a fort - the French and Indian War began. The local Native American tribes had previously coexisted peacefully with the new arrivals, having agreed on Pennsylvania's Blue Mountain range as a sort of boundary beyond which the Europeans would not settle. But the French, as I've noted elsewhere, started nudging the Natives to attack the settlements as part of their strikes against the British, regardless of whether the people in those settlements actually were British. My longtime readers will remember the tragedy of Gnadenhuetten in Carbon County as an example.
Sources seem to disagree on the exact date of the incident - some say the 19th, the marker says the 29th - but it's agreed that it happened very early in the morning of a day in September 1757. Native Americans, spurred by French scouts, attacked the home of Jacob Hochstetler, a Northkill Amish settler. The attackers set fire to the house, and watched to kill anyone who tried to escape. The Hochstetlers fled to the basement, and most of those who did escape were able to do so by climbing out of a cellar window and running for it. Jacob's wife, the former Anna Lorentz, was killed, as were one of their sons, Jacob Jr., and a daughter whose name has been lost to time. Jacob Sr. was captured, as were two of his teenage sons, Joseph and Christian. The three prisoners were marched across the state to Presque Island, in Erie, where they were turned over to French forces; Jacob escaped roughly eight months later, but the sons remained captives for several years until the British Army was able to secure their release as part of a peace treaty.
The descendants of Jacob Hochstetler are numerous, and the Jacob Hochstetler Family Association maintains the family legacy. His descendants have written extensively about the family and the attack, and hold a reunion every five years to help the various branches connect with one another. Although the family farm is long gone, their website includes an artist's rendering of how it might have appeared at the time of the incident. (It's about halfway down the page; click on the image for more details about the artist.)
As for the rest of the Northkill Amish, some remained in the area; this included Jacob's oldest son John, who was married with children of his own and living on a different part of the family farm. His family was able to safely hide during the attack, and remained on the land, caring for the farm until Jacob was able to escape and return to them. Other families fled in the wake of the tragedy. The settlement persisted into the 1780s, but by then, most of the families had relocated to different parts of Lancaster, Berks, Chester, and Somerset Counties. Lancaster became, and remains, the biggest hub of Amish life in the United States.
The Northkill Amish settlement was abandoned completely before 1790, and little remains today to indicate that it ever was there at all. There's a cemetery, which is very difficult to find if you don't know where to look - and this marker.
Sources and Further Reading:
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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