As promised, after last week's unusual post, it's back to business as usual. I had hoped to finish my Carbon County book last October, but life has a tendency to get in the way. Between work, health, weather, and the holidays, I haven't gotten it done. But it's almost done. I have two chapters and an afterword left to finish, plus some tweaks I want to make to the finished chapters, and I'm hoping to get it wrapped up in the next few weeks.
So when I was trying to decide what to write about this week, I took a poll on the blog's Facebook account asking if people would rather have a new quest or another sneak peek at the book. It was a close call (things were in a dead heat even when I woke up this morning), but the tie finally broke with one last vote to do a sneak peek.
The original post about Gnadenhütten remains one of the most popular I've ever done, and I'm extremely proud of how I've fleshed it out in the book. I won't share the entire chapter, but here's a look at some of the detailing, including an image I've never before shared on this blog.
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| The sign is not located at the cemetery itself, but rather on nearby East Penn Street, at the Lehighton Public Works Department; additional signs direct visitors to the site |
The word Gnadenhütten (or Gnadenhuetten if you write it without the umlaut) is German, and it literally translates as “huts of grace.” I have also seen it written as two words, “Gnaden Huetten,” although I'm not sure whether or not that's considered equally correct. In any case, many of the settlements established by the Moravians were given this name. There were two in North America which both came to unfortunate ends. “The Gnadenhütten Massacre,” when mentioned in historical records, often refers to the destruction of the one in Ohio, in 1782. But a few decades earlier, here in Pennsylvania, there was a similar incident on a smaller scale.
When the Moravians came to North America, they had a fair bit of success in evangelizing to both enslaved people (though some of them did keep slaves themselves, which I still find a little shocking) and also Natives. Because of this, they had to establish more and more settlements where the faithful could live and worship together, and one of these was Gnadenhütten. More accurately, there were three Gnadenhüttens in the same general vicinity. Two of them, both known as “New Gnadenhütten,” eventually merged and grew into the community of Weissport, on the east side of the Lehigh River. The other one, which came first, stood where the marker can now be found in the modern borough of Lehighton, on the west side. This drawing was made in 1751 by Nicholas Garrison, and it gives us an idea of how the little village most probably looked; the original is in the Unity Archives of the Moravian Church in Herrnhut, Germany.
At the time that Gnadenhütten was standing, the French and Indian War was raging between Great Britain and France. On the British side were Anglo-American colonists and their allies in the Iroquois Confederacy. Also known as the Haudenosaunee, the Confederacy was a strong alliance between six Native American nations who had pledged peace with one another. These were the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Cayuga, and the Tuscarora. Today they're more commonly known as the Six Nations. France, meanwhile, and French colonists were allied with Natives not in the Confederacy, including the Shawnee and the Lenape. The French had many more allies among these Natives than the British did, because the Natives frequently interacted with French traders and even sometimes formed alliances by allowing them to marry Native women. To strengthen their claim in the upper Ohio River Valley, the French constructed a series of forts. Attempts to drive them out of this area in 1754 were defeated due to British forces being outnumbered. The British Prime Minister at the time, Thomas Pelham-Holles, wanted to retaliate with an undeclared strike, but he had enemies who managed to communicate his plans to the French government, and what had merely been a series of skirmishes exploded into all-out war.
As the war raged on, in July of 1755, the British general Edward Braddock planned a four-way attack against the French, which was a complete disaster and led to Braddock himself being fatally wounded at the Battle of the Monongahela. (Among those fighting on the British side was a young up-and-comer named George Washington. You may have heard of him.) Following the Braddock Expedition, Pennsylvania was left basically without any sort of organized protection, and Natives who were allied to France began attacking British frontier settlements in greater numbers. There are several PHMC markers throughout the state dedicated to these incidents. The Natives weren’t just motivated by their alliance with France, however; they were also motivated by hunger. Game was becoming scarce due to overhunting, and a frost in May had decimated some of the vegetation throughout the area, including crops. Many of the Natives who hadn’t converted to Christianity wanted to pull their converted brethren out of Moravian settlements for their own safety, and while some stayed, others were persuaded to leave. Some of those who left told others about the food supplies which could be found in the various settlements, adding extra incentive for raiding.
The thing that didn’t help the Moravians is that they were completely neutral. Their religion meant that they were strict pacifists, and their ancestry was neither British nor French. So they wanted to stay out of the conflict altogether, apart from defending themselves against attack, and the result was that pretty much nobody trusted them. This would change later, during the American Revolution, when the Continental Army would rely on them for help with their sick and wounded soldiers; but that change came too late for the victims of this story.
(Unlike in my book, where I force myself to give the unsettling details of the attack and ensuing murders, I won't get too specific about it in this blog post. It was a grisly affair. I warn my book's readers about that up front, and advise those who aren't comfortable reading about it to skip ahead to the section on the survivors, but I also have a lot more space for writing in the book than I do here.)
Although some sources quibble about numbers, it has been confirmed that on the night of November 24, 1755, there were sixteen Moravians in the village - fifteen adults and one infant. One of the men, Peter Worbass, was sick and confined to the bed in his hut. The rest of the settlement sat down to dinner in the Gemeinhaus, or community house. There were no converted Natives in Gnadenhütten at the time. A noisy commotion outside caught everyone’s attention. Upon opening the door, they found that the Gemeinhaus was surrounded by a group of roughly twelve Natives of the Munsee Delaware tribe, each of whom held a rifle. Some of them fired into the building, injuring a few people and killing one man, Martin Nitschmann, immediately. The others ran up the stairs and barricaded the door to the upper level, so their attackers set fire to the building instead.
Some Natives were standing guard at the door to the house where Peter Worbass was recovering. Fortunately, despite his illness, he recognized the danger and escaped through a back window. Meanwhile, in the upstairs of the burning Gemeinhaus, a few people took a chance on leaping from the roof, but one was caught in the process and met a horrible fate. While the common house burned, the attackers set fire to other buildings in the settlement. They helped themselves to food, and then left. In all, there were eleven victims of the attack, and only five survivors. One woman, Susanna Nitschmann, was captured while trying to flee; she died later, still in captivity, though sources don't seem to indicate her cause of death.
As I mentioned, Peter Worbass had been sick in bed when the Gemeinhaus was set on fire, and had escaped through a back window to avoid the guards at the door. He was a carpenter from Denmark, 33 years old. Because of his absence from the dinner table at the time of the attack, there have been a number of accounts of the event which don't include him. Despite his illness, he managed to make it to Bethlehem, where he broke down sobbing as he recounted what he had witnessed.
Records indicate that one of the men escaped because he had left the evening meal before the attack came, in order to check that the chapel had been locked for the night. This would have either been George Partsch, a linen weaver from Silesia, or Joachim Senseman, a tailor from Hesse, Germany. At 36 and 48 years old, respectively, they were the two eldest survivors. The pair fled together and managed to reach the Lehigh River, where they met with one of the converted Natives who had been at New Gnadenhütten, John “Shebosh” Bull. Senseman and Shebosh were old friends, as they had previously been together in a New York settlement. Many of the Natives at New Gnadenhütten wanted to go after the attackers, but were advised against it, so Shebosh had instead gone to see if he could be of any assistance.
Upon finding Senseman and Partsch at the river, Shebosh took them in his canoe and helped them get to Bethlehem, where they were able to get a few hours of sleep before returning to Gnadenhütten with Zeisberger’s search party. Both were hoping to find their wives. Senseman was grieved to discover that his had died in the fire, but Partsch soon found that his wife Susanna (née Eller) was alive. Susanna was 33 years old and born in Budingen, Germany. She and her husband had come to Gnadenhütten on November 18th, mere days before the tragedy. She had managed to get away from the besieged settlement and into the woods, where she discovered a hollowed-out tree trunk on the ground. She wedged herself inside of it and spent a terrified night praying that the attackers wouldn’t find her, then reunited with her husband the following day.
The youngest of the survivors was Joseph Sturgis, who was just 17 years old. He was a laborer and had been born in Philadelphia, where he was baptized into the Moravian faith as a child. When he was ten years old, his father died, so his mother sent him to Oley to attend the Moravian boys’ school. After completing his studies, he moved to Macungie, and then to Gnadenhütten. He had been the first to jump from the upper level of the burning Gemeinhaus, inspiring some of the others to do likewise.
On December 10, 1788, thirty-three years after the tragedy, the victims of the Gnadenhütten massacre received a new stone to mark their burial site. Moravian tradition dictates that tombstones lie flat on top of the graves, to indicate that all are equal in death, and this one is no exception. It is, however, much larger than most such stones. Some names have different spellings than are seen elsewhere. The epitaph also contains a very strange mistake. The Bible passage quoted at the end includes the phrase “in the sight of the Lord,” but for some reason, on the stone it says “in the fight of the Lord”. In the typography of the day, the letter S sometimes looked like the letter F, so my personal best guess is that whoever carved the stone probably misread the word.
I know the photo makes it hard to read the full inscription, so this is what it says:
Gottlieb & Christina Andres
with their child Johanna,
Martin & Susanna Nitshmann,
Ann Catharina Sensemann,
Leonhard Gattermeyer,
Christian Fabricius clerk,
George Schweicert,
John Fredrick Lesly and
Martin Presser
who lived here at Gnadenhutten
unto the Lord
and lost their lives in a surprise
from Indian warriors
November the 24th
1755
Precious in the fight of the Lord
is the death of his saints
Psalm CXVI 15
Moravian tradition dictated that once children were weaned, they were taken from their parents and raised in a nursery in a different settlement. As a result, some of the victims had children who were not present for the attack. Most of the survivors also went on to have families, and so there are descendants of Gnadenhütten to this day.
In 1905, to mark the 150th anniversary of the massacre, the community held a large graveside ceremony. A local florist, Paul Nichoff, created enormous sprays of blossoms and ferns, and many descendants of the Gnadenhütten Moravians were present for the occasion. It was a huge event attended by upwards of 3,000 people from all over the country. The demand to participate was so great that the Lehigh Valley Railroad had to arrange for a special stop in order to bring people to the ceremony from Bethlehem.
The Rev. William Henry Rice, a direct descendant of Martin and Susanna Nitschmann, gave the memorial address. A transcript of his speech is in the archives of the Moravian Historical Society, along with his notes about the residents of Gnadenhütten. He troubled himself to carefully research every single one of them and provide as much information as he possibly could, to make them feel real to the people listening to him speak. His work is one of the biggest reasons why we know as much as we do.
Today, absolutely nothing remains of Gnadenhütten except this grave. The Moravian cemetery was absorbed into what became the Lehighton Cemetery. But the tomb of the martyrs is still a point of interest for those who know the story (or want to know it) and make the trip to see it for themselves; the cemetery includes a number of signs directing visitors how to find it. The grave is encircled by a low metal and concrete barrier, discouraging people from walking on it.
As for the historical marker, it’s found a little way southwest of the cemetery, in the parking lot of the Lehighton Public Works Department on East Penn Street. People driving on the nearby highway can easily miss it, and might have no idea about that terrible night so long ago.
Sources and Further Reading:
Lehighton Cemetery at FindAGrave.com
Ebbert, Lamont, and Gordon B. Ripkey. Images of America: Lehighton. Arcadia Publishing, 2013.
Gnadenhuetten at the Historical Marker Database
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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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