history
Johannes Valentin (John Valentine) Pressler prepared his family for what was undoubtedly going to be a long and difficult journey. The dream was America, and though what lay ahead was uncertain, the possible promise of a brighter future for his family seemed to him to be worth the risk and probable hardship that was involved. Whatever lay ahead could not be worse than what he and his family had endured in the last few years, and what he foresaw coming in his village in the months ahead.
It was late March or early April in the year 1709, and Valentine was forty years old. He had been married to his wife, the former Anna Christina Frantz who was five years his junior, for fourteen years. He and Christina had been blessed with five children. There were the two oldest daughters: Anna Elizabeth, who was thirteen, and Anna Gertrude, who was eleven, both old enough to help with the younger children. Then had come three sons: Andreas, who was eight, Anthonius, who was four, and the youngest son, who was just two years old. Valentine had spent his life, as had his father and grandfather, working in the vineyards of the Rhine valley. Now, all that was about to change forever.
The Kaiserdom in Speyer (Herman Kohl, Die deutsche Pfalz am deutschen Rhein (Pirmasens: Adolf Deil, 1929)
One can imagine that as Valentine stood on the banks of the Rhine, his wife and children getting ready to start the journey down the river the next morning, he might have watched a sunset behind the towers of the ancient medieval cathedral. As he did so, it might have seemed to him that the sun was setting not just on a busy day, but on the previous forty years of his life. It might have seemed in a sense that the sun was setting on all the preceding centuries in which his family, his father and his grandfather, had lived in the little village where he had grown up, where he had brought his wife, and begun raising his family. Indeed, it might have seemed to Valentine, and to many other of his fellow travelers at that time, that the sun was setting on the history of a people and a way of life, for it seemed there could be no future for anyone in that war-ravaged land.
He could not remember, and neither could his father or grandfather, when their countryside had not known the footsteps of marching armies and the destruction which they left behind them. As soon as people had begun to recover their lives, another army would appear on the horizon, demanding tribute, burning their houses and churches, and leaving poverty, disease, and suffering in their wake. Then had come the bitter winter from which the warm Spring sun was just beginning to thaw the frozen earth. It was undoubtedly with sadness that Valentine lay down beside his wife and children for the last night he would spend in his homeland.
The Pressler family was only one of thousands who had come to the same conclusion to emigrate from Germany in that Spring of 1709. Many sold their lands or received help from relatives which enabled them at least to start the journey down the Rhine and across the Channel to England. They had to pay their passage and to take food for the journey, along with the means to prepare it. Perhaps they would be able to buy food if they had money, but who knew if food would even be available in the war-torn land. As it turned out, many of their fellow citizens, sympathetic to their plans, did provide help and food along the way.
Before Valentine fell asleep from exhaustion he must have kept asking himself if anything had been forgotten. Were the necessary papers in order? Had they forgotten anything they would need? Someone would need to look after the two-year old toddler. He couldn't be left alone on a boat, and thank goodness the older girls could help. Restless sleep! Next morning they boarded their small, flat-bottomed riverboats with the goods they could carry and their faith in God as their only possessions.
Germany was not a nation in those days in the sense that we would understand the term. It was a loose collection of 300 small states and free cities, each with its own autonomous ruler. The old Holy Roman Empire, to which all these princes pledged some allegiance, was more an illusion than a reality as a political power. Most of the people who were emigrating were from that area of the empire known as the Palatinate, and called themselves Palatines, but many were from the districts of Würtemberg, Darmstadt, Hanau, Franconia, Alsace, Baden, and other areas on both sides of the Rhine from its junction with the Moselle south to Basel in Switzerland and from Zweibrücken next to Lorraine west to Baireuth bordering the Upper Palatinate.
The Palatinate, or Pfalz as it was called in German, consisted of lands ruled by the Counts Palatine, a title held by a leading prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The boundaries of the Palatinate varied according to the political and dynastic fortunes of the Counts Palatine, who eventually became the Electors Palatine and with other Elector princes determined the identity of the Holy Roman Emperor. The upper Palatinate was a part of his territory that was located in northern Bavaria, while the lower Palatinate was located on both sides of the Rhine from the Main River south to Alsace.
In times of peace it had been a rich land with a mild climate, an area of ancient cities and old vineyards. The vineyard-covered countryside extended from west of the Rhine back to the densely wooded Haardt Mountains, known as the Pfälzer Wald, or Palatinate Forest, the largest area of continuous woodland in Germany. The cultivation of the grape was an ancient occupation going back to the time of Charlemagne and even to the days of the Roman Empire.
While the law required that any person wishing to emigrate from the Palatinate must obtain permission from the Elector Palatine, many of Valentine's companions were traveling without such permission. They were afraid, and quite rightly, that the princely rulers of the various domains would never give permission for such a large number of people to leave (who would pay the exorbitant taxes?), but people also knew that their rulers would be unable to stop such a large exodus of citizens all at one time. By early May the Elector Palatine had forbidden anyone to leave, and at least two boats had been seized and the fleeing passengers imprisoned.
We have no record of a passport for the Pressler family, but we do know that they traveled as Catholics, possibly due to the fact that at that time it was not generally thought that Catholics would be emigrating to America. It could have been that Valentine thought it would be easier to travel as a Catholic, and possibly he had given that information to the officials who issued passports. Of course, as it later became clear, the boats traveling down the Rhine that Spring were filled with many thousands of genuine Catholics along with their Protestant neighbors.
Religion was not the primary reason for most of these people leaving their homes, although there undoubtedly were some amongst the emigrants who may have lacked such freedom in their home districts. Every army seemed to bring a change in religious affiliation, the rulers each wanting the populace to conform to their particular beliefs. Some people had adopted a "universal Christianity" which placed not too much strain on their consciences when the form of worship changed. Life seemed to go on whether there was a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister in the pulpit on Sunday mornings.
Hochstadt is located eleven miles southwest of Speyer (From The Rhineland by Walter Marsden (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1973))
As the Pressler family traveled down the Rhine from the southern Palatinate, they passed many of the sites where German history had taken place. At Speyer they would have seen a city that had been occupied since Celtic times with its ancient Romanesque cathedral, the Kaiserdom, begun under the Emperor Konrad II in 1030 A.D. With its twin towers at both the east and west ends of the building and its twin domes, it was the burial place of eight emperors. No fewer than fifty Diets (meetings of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire) had met in Speyer, that of 1539 having confirmed the Edict of Worms which ruled against the teachings of Martin Luther. The reaction of the Lutherans to the Edict gave rise to the term Protestant. The cathedral had been badly damaged in the Thirty Years War.
Beyond Ludwigshafen and the junction of the Rhine with the Neckar River where they may have been joined by emigrants from Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatinate, they would have arrived at Worms, which had been a garrison town under the Romans and over the centuries a center of the German wine trade, where they would have seen another great Romanesque cathedral begun in 1171. At Worms more than one hundred Diet meetings had been held over the centuries. That of 1521 had summoned Martin Luther to defend or recant his criticisms of the Church. His ultimate refusal to recant led to his being expelled from the Empire by the emperor Charles V and his works being burned.
Although we know nothing for certain about Valentine's father and grandfather due to the destruction and loss of so many records during endless years of war, it would not be far-fetched to imagine Valentine recalling, as he passed this ancient city, what he had been taught about this history of the Reformation, stories perhaps passed down from his father and grandfather. We can reasonably suppose that his father might have been born near the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) and his grandfather near its beginning (1618).
During the Reformation the Palatinate accepted Protestantism, and Protestants flowed into the Palatinate from other parts of Germany, Holland, and Switzerland where they suffered persecution. In 1618 the Protestant nobles of Bohemia rebelled against their Catholic Habsburg king and heir apparent to the imperial throne. When the aged emperor died the following year, the Protestant princes of the empire could have joined in the rebellion, denied the right of King Ferdinand of Bohemia to serve as an Elector, and blocked his election as Holy Roman Emperor. The Protestant Elector Palatine, Frederick V (1596-1632), was the only one willing to do this. The Bohemian rebels deposed their king and elected Frederick as King of Bohemia in 1619. The emperor prepared to crush his rebel Bohemian subjects and punish the Elector Palatine. Thus began the Thirty Years War and the eventual defeat of the Elector Palatine.
By 1622 Frederick had lost not only his Bohemian crown but also his Palatine lands as well. A solution to these original issues did not end the war, however. The fighting continued as private armies led by soldiers of fortune and the armies of the kings of Denmark and Sweden and France each took their turns on the battlefield. The European powers fought one another, not in their home countries but on German soil, and not entirely for religious reasons either, but to acquire territories, power, loot, and dynastic aggrandizement. The emperor dreamed of driving out all the Protestant princes and unifying the empire under a Catholic Habsburg banner. The struggle went back and forth with the last thirteen years of the war being the most destructive.
The situation of the people of central Germany by 1635 was such that they were dying of plague, hunger, and exposure. In cities their bodies lay in the streets and were stepped over by those citizens who still struggled to survive. The groans of the sick and starving filled the night air. Children hid in cellars and killed and ate rats. Armies confiscated what little grain was in the granaries. The wine harvests were trampled down by fugitives and by invaders. Famine ravaged the countryside. There were reports of people eating the raw flesh of dead horses, of the bodies of criminals being torn down from the gallows and eaten. Graveyards in the Rhineland were guarded to prevent newly-buried bodies from being dug up and eaten. Near Worms it was reported that hands and feet were found cooking in a gypsy's pot.
The atrocities never ceased. The torturing, raping, and pillaging continued year after year. There were no hospitals for the sick and dying. Few churches were left standing to serve as sanctuaries for the oppressed. No matter how little the peasants had, the soldiers, and the camp followers, who trailed after them, took what little was left. Horses, herds of cattle, fodder, food stores were all taken, and famine, pestilence, pain and death were left behind in their place.
The Peace of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 made few changes to the political map of Germany, but it represented a final recognition by the Catholic princes inspired by the Counter-Reformation that they could not reverse all the gains that Protestantism had made in the preceding century. Germany remained extremely fragmented, the emperor with little real authority.
Cathedral at Worms (The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
It may have been at Worms that Valentine Pressler met a fellow passenger who came on board named Johann Philipp Greisler (sometimes spelled Kreußler or Chrysler). A man just three years Valentine's junior from Herrnsheim, he came aboard with his wife, Anna Catharina, and their three children: seven-year old Johann Georg, six-year old Johannes, and three-year old Beata Maria. It is likely that these two families became friends and traveled and stayed together all the way to New York.
Sixteen miles north of Worms the emigrant family's boat passed the village of Oppenheim on the left bank of the Rhine with its Gothic church sitting high up the steep hill. Large areas of Oppenheim had been burned and destroyed in 1689, the evidence of which the Presslers probably still saw twenty years later. This had been the center of Charlemagne's wine estates with the hills of Oppenheim and Nackenheim curving around Nierstein in between them, their slopes covered with vineyards. It was said that Charlemagne once stood on the balcony of his castle at Ingelheim, looked at these hills, and sent men to Orléans for grape vines. Legend is that when the grape blossom fills the air with its fragrance in the spring, the shadowy figure of Charlemagne wanders about the vineyards blessing the vines. It must have been with much sadness that Valentine thought that he might never stroll through these German vineyards again. Would there be vines in the New World to tend?
The end of the Thirty Years War was followed by horrible epidemics. The Black Death, or the bubonic plague, depopulated the countryside. Thousands of unemployed, mercenary soldiers, homeless peasants, and camp followers were left on their own to roam the countryside as robbers, thieves, and disabled beggars. Valentine may have heard his father tell about the scenes of death and poverty during his younger years. It was a healing time, but still a time of great hardship. Not until after Valentine's birth were economic conditions recovered to a comparable level as they were before the war and had the population of the countryside recovered.
In fact, war in Europe never seemed to cease during the seventeenth century. Louis XIV came to the Bourbon throne of France in 1643 at a time when the government became centralized and his power absolute. France was the most powerful country in Europe, but Louis had an almost neurotic fear of being encircled by Habsburg power. He initiated a series of wars in 1667 by attacking the Spanish Netherlands. Allied with England and Sweden, he attacked Holland in 1672. Austria, Spain, and Brandenburg joined in the fray, and in the end France gained nothing, but Louis continued to nibble away at German territory in the west in Alsace and Burgundy. Strassburg was annexed in 1681.
All of this meant that armies and soldiers were constantly crossing the Palatinate countryside. Even if fighting was not occurring in a particular place, armies in those days lived off the land over which they traveled, and they demanded of the people of the countryside that they provide food and shelter. Soldiers marched with only a couple days rations in their packs. Marching on foot (the only way an army had to move), it took weeks to move an entire army across a region, during which time they had to be fed by the people. No law, no court, and no authority protected the people from these armies, be they of German or of foreign origin.
Then in 1688, when Valentine had become a young man, the Palatinate was ravaged by war again in a struggle variously known as the Palatinate War of Succession, the War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Grand Alliance, or the Nine Years War. In 1685 the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig died without leaving a direct descendant. His sister, Liselotte (or Elisabeth Charlotte) was married to Philippe I d'Orléans, the brother of the French King, Louis XIV. The king demanded that parts of the Palatinate be given to her as an inheritance, although at the time of the marriage any claim to Palatine territory had been renounced. He sent in his army to occupy the Palatinate, but opposed by a coalition of European powers, he was forced to withdraw from much of the area, but not before ordering his commanders to burn the countryside. Heidelberg and Speyer were left in ashes, as were other towns and villages.
While Louis wanted to destroy the Palatinate as a base of operations for any invasion of France by the German princes, he succeeded instead in arousing German patriotic sentiment and made the princes even more firmly opposed to him. The French turned the town of Landau in the Palatinate into a fortress with the largest fortifications in Europe at the time. The war dragged on until in 1697 the Peace of Ryswick was signed, which brought a measure of reduced fighting for only a few years.
As if it weren't enough that the people of Germany had to endure the ravages of war and the depredations of the armies who crossed their land, they had to tolerate the heavy taxation of their own rulers, who demanded money not only to fight the wars, but to support their lavish and extravagant lifestyles. The petty princes looked at the splendor of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles and tried to emulate it, based on the resources of their own exhausted subjects.
A whole new phase of war began again in 1700 when King Charles II of Spain died without direct heirs. The result was the War of Spanish Succession which lasted until 1713. The struggle was between France and Austria, with Louis promoting his own candidate for the vacated Habsburg Spanish throne. England and Holland, fearing the increase in power of France in acquiring the Spanish overseas empire and the control of overseas trade, joined in the controversy. The result was war once more fought primarily on German territory.
The imperial army crossed the Rhine at Speyer to attack the French fortress at Landau in 1702, but as soon as they had driven out the French and the German forces had been moved to another theater of battle, the French returned. Over the next few years there were roving armies, French and German, back and forth across the Palatinate, with the resultant looting, confiscation, requisitioning, burning, pillage, beating and killing of the civilian population.
All of these movements of armies and political maneuvers would have been of little interest to the Presslers and their fellow villagers had it not directly affected their lives---but they were profoundly affected. Hunger, starvation, disease, burned homes and churches, lack of security, and death was all around them in those years, a never ending torment so it seemed. Yes, life went on. It had to. But what kind of a life? What kind of future could Valentine and Christina see for themselves, and more importantly for their children. All of these recollections and uncertainties must have plagued Valentine's thoughts during those days as they slowly made their way down the river, always being joined by more and more people just like them, hoping for a better life somewhere down the river and across the sea.
Mainz, the ancient city and capital of the Roman province of Germania Superior, must have caught the attention of the Presslers in their little river boat. There was another of those great, medieval Romanesque cathedrals along the Palatinate Rhine, this one begun in 1239. It was here that the Rhine was joined by the River Main, and it was here in 1450 that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. It was the result of just that invention that had brought enticements to so many German citizens to abandon their wretched conditions and strike out for a new life in America.
English proprietors in America, such as William Penn, seeking colonists to occupy their land, and thus put money in the proprietors' pockets, advertised and extolled the climate and life in the New World. Pamphlets were distributed throughout the Rhine Valley, and agents of proprietors in Carolina and Pennsylvania entered into negotiations and correspondence with prospective colonists.
One German by the name of the Reverend Joshua Kocherthal, an evangelical minister, published a book in 1706, Aussführlich und umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, extolling the virtues of the New World, and Carolina in particular. In it, he suggested, or at least hinted, that the English Queen might help them in crossing the English Channel and in going to the colonies. The book, which the Germans sometimes called the Golden Book, because of its title printed in gold letters, and its golden promises, contained a picture of the Queen and was so much in demand that three more editions were printed in 1709 alone. Emigrants expected to find free land, no taxes, and free farming tools awaiting them in America.
Richard Blome's English America, which described the English possessions in America, had been translated into German and published in Leipzig in 1697. Pennsylvania was the best advertised province, and various books had been published in Germany about the colony over the preceding twenty years. Valentine must have remembered seeing, or hearing about, some of these printed encouragements to emigration.
The Mäuseturm, near Bingen (The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
Five miles beyond Mainz the Rhine begins its course through the Taunus Mountains. North of Rüdesheim, a riverside village of half-timbered medieval houses, the Presslers undoubtedly noticed the ruins of Ehrenfels Castle which stood for four centuries until the French had destroyed it in 1689. At Bingen they would have seen the Mäusturm, or Mouse Tower, where legend held that the wicked Bishop Hatto of Mainz was eaten by mice. Actually, the tower, which clings to a rock in the river was a customs tower from which Hatto collected tolls from the river traffic.
While the Rhine Gorge is most beautiful, it is doubtful that the Presslers and their fellow passengers found much comfort or pleasure in its castles and other sights. The 38-mile stretch of river was marked by rapids, which had wrecked many a boat, and the passage was repeatedly interrupted by the need to pay tolls. The castled Rhine was built by tolls. During the Middle Ages there was no law of primogeniture as in England where an inherited estate passed intact to the eldest son. In the Holy Roman Empire the law required that the lands of the nobility be divided among all heirs, with the result that a growing number of small estates lined the river with each feudal lord extorting money from the river traffic along the Rhine, the main artery of European commerce.
In time, there were 62 toll stations between Basel on the border of Switzerland and Rotterdam on the seacoast. In the 96 miles between Bingen and Cologne (Köln) there were more than 30 castles each situated so as best to extort tolls from anyone who passed.
The trip down the Rhine for the Presslers and their companions took from four to six weeks. At each of the toll stations customs officials examined the boats and the goods and belongings of the people. Travelers had to present their passports, and endure the leisurely searches. Officials were under no incentive to be efficient, courteous, or even honest. Bribery was considered to be part of their pay. If they did not finish today, tomorrow would be soon enough for these insignificant peasants. Meanwhile, the people were delayed and had to seek shelter, thus increasing the cost of their journey.
They passed the village of Aßmanshausen on the right bank with its half-timbered houses and with three castles on the mountainside and cliff face on the opposite side of the river. Three miles downstream was the village of Niederheimbach also dominated by a castle. The village of Lorch was next with the ruined towers of Furstenberg on the opposite side of the river.
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Left: Bacharach (the ruin is the Wernerskirche, destroyed in the Thirty Years War)
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Right: Schloss Pfalz (built for protection of collection of tariffs on the Rhine)
(The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
Bacharach was a wine shipping town, its name derived from the Latin Bacchi ara, meaning Altar of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Just beyond Bacharach was a narrow island on which the Pfalz castle appeared to rise from the riverbed, another of those toll stations. Then came Kaub with its 13th century castle, and Oberwesel with its 13th and 14th century watchtowers and its Schönburg Castle high above the town. If the Presslers did not know the legend about this last castle, perhaps someone aboard the boat told it to them. Certainly, the children would have enjoyed hearing it.
The story is that there were seven maidens who taunted their suitors and then did not keep their promises. They were punished and turned into stones and placed in the riverbed just downstream from Oberwesel. Rivermen can judge the level of the river by the Seven Maidens Rocks which appear above the surface, one by one, as the water level drops.
The Lorelei Rock (The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
Or perhaps the children would have loved the stories of the Lorelei, a 417-foot cliff which rises from the water's edge, on which it is said that the marks of the devil's claws can be seen, left when he tried to prevent God from creating this beautiful gorge. The children would have looked for the marks. Another story that might have been told was that about rivermen always being warned to beware the golden-haired siren, who is clothed in white with a wreath of stars on her head and who tries to distract them from their work so that they will crash their boats against the dangerous cliffs. The whirlpools in the river here would have made the story all the more dramatic to the young ears.
Burg Katz (Castle of the Cat) near St. Goarshausen (The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
Next came the twin villages of St. Goar and St. Goarshausen, the villages of Boppard, Braubach, and Lahnstein, each with its castle. At the junction of the Lahn River were Lahneck Castle and Stolzenfels Castle. The emigrants did little traveling on the Sabbath or on religious holidays. They stopped and sought shelter and attended church. It would have done no good to try to do otherwise, since the toll officials were also attending church.
Further delays were occasioned by adverse weather, forcing them to remain on shore. In cities such as Mainz and Cologne municipal boatmen's guilds had a monopoly on river transport and baggage had to be unloaded and loaded from boat to boat. No doubt the family lost many things through theft, accident, and corruption and carelessness on the part of boatmen and officials.
They probably saw the spires of the cathedral of Koblenz where the Moselle River joins the Rhine long before they arrived there. Beyond Koblenz were the Eifel Mountains, once the hunting lands of Charlemagne. These mountains, which rose to 2000 feet, were covered with beech and spruce forests, trout streams, lakes and castles. They passed the village of Neuwied where the river Wied joins the Rhine. In Valentine's grandfather's time, this had been the town of Langendorf, but it had been completely destroyed in the Thirty Years War. The local count had built his castle and a new town there in 1648, but the French had destroyed that, and new construction had just begun in 1706.
They passed Andernach, burned by the French in 1688, Bad Honnigen, Linz, Remagen, Bad Honnef, Königswinter, where the great quarries had provided stone for so many of the Rhineland's church buildings. At Bad Godesberg with its ruined castle which sits on a place where worshippers sacrificed to the ancient forest god, Odin, perhaps Valentine noticed for a last time the vines, the northernmost place in Germany where the vine is cultivated.
The Cathedral of Cologne, begun in 1248 A.D. (The Rhine (Berlin: Reichszentrale für Deutsche Verkehrswerbung, 1927))
Five miles beyond, they passed the fishing village of Bonn, and then Cologne. Here the Rhine had become slow-moving, and the flat, vast lowland stretched northward all the way to the sea at Rotterdam. Perhaps the Presslers paid special attention to this city which at one time was the largest city north of the Alps and a major political and commercial center. Perhaps they noticed its great unfinished cathedral which had been begun in 1248 to house the relics of the Three Magi. Perhaps they were more concerned with the safe off-loading and on-loading of their children and precious possessions from one boat to another
Even though they had been traveling northward, the weeks had rolled by and the Spring weather had warmed. As Valentine and his family sat on deck enjoying the warm rays of the sun, they undoubtedly remembered the horrible past winter they had so recently endured. From the beginning of October the cold had become intense, and by November the firewood would not burn out-of-doors. In January wine had frozen into solid blocks, and birds fell dead while flying across the sky. Western Europe was experiencing the most severe winter in over a century.
All the rivers were ice-bound, including the Rhine. It was even reported that the sea along the coast had frozen so that carts could be driven over the ice. People who could not store a winter's supply of flour and meal had no bread when the water-driven mills were brought to a standstill. Fruit trees died, their trunks and limbs splitting open; winter wheat and rye perished; chickens, ducks and geese froze to death in their coops. The snow and bitterly cold weather lasted into April.
In the Palatinate, the destruction of the precious vines meant that the husbandmen and vine-dressers, such as Valentine, were facing the loss of their livelihood. Everyone could see that more famine and starvation lay ahead in the coming months. For some men and their families, this was the final straw. Emigration seemed not just a means of survival, but the only means of providing a future for their children. The men who worked in the vineyards constituted more than half of the emigrants that Spring and Summer of 1709. They abandoned the same old struggles they had fought for generations and struck out for promise of a better future.
Twenty-five miles north of Cologne the emigrants passed Düsseldorf, then Duisburg, Wesel, Emmerich, and then the border with the Netherlands. Its flat land, crisscrossed by canals and dikes, and dotted by windmills and green fields must have been a strange and welcome sight to the Presslers as they neared the end of the first leg of their journey, but they must at the same time have felt some trepidation. Very soon they saw the rooftops and church steeples of Rotterdam with its busy harbor filled with the masts of ocean-sailing ships.
Valentine and Christina had arrived in Holland. While the burdens of history lay upon them, they hoped to be able to lift those burdens from their children. They hoped for the dawning of a new day. Germany lay behind them. "Auf Wiedersehen, mein armes Deutschland-Goodbye, my poor Germany." Only God knew what lay ahead!
The first Palatine refugees reached the vicinity of Rotterdam on April 19, 1709. There is no record of the Pressler family at Rotterdam, but we do know they were among the first to arrive in London, so they certainly must have been among the vanguard of the flood of people who began to arrive at the Dutch seaport that Spring.
List of Palatines Arriving at London, 1709 (note Valentine Presler & Family)
James Dayrolle, the British Resident at The Hague, had heard rumors all winter that many German emigrants were headed down the Rhine. Beginning on March 29th as the first families began to arrive, he began granting passes to sixty to one hundred families at a time. Dayrolle felt that these industrious people would be an asset to England and to her colonies in America. He suggested to the British government that the ships which were bringing troops from England to Holland to fight Louis XIV's French troops could carry these Palatines back to England on their return trip. With the Queen's approval, orders were issued to that effect.
On April 19th Dayrolle reported that nine hundred Palatines were at Rotterdam, and late in April four ships with 852 of the German emigrants aboard arrived in England. Their subsistence on the voyage, which probably took about a week, had been provided by private contributions that had been obtained in Holland from such organizations as the United Baptists at Amsterdam, and the burgomasters of Rotterdam had distributed money amongst the poorer emigrants.
Valentine and his family were among this first party of Palatines to arrive at London on May 3, 1709. Did they have money to pay for their own passage? We don't know, but because they were among the earliest families to make the trip down the Rhine and had to wait but a short time at Rotterdam, their resources may not have been totally depleted and they were able to find passage fairly easily. The rough waters of the English Channel, confinement in the hold of a ship, and probable seasickness were all foretastes of what they would experience in the coming months on a much longer voyage.
By May 10th another 1,000 emigrants were awaiting transportation across the Channel. Dayrolle appointed two Dutch merchants to supervise the loading of the emigrants on the ships that began arriving after that date. On May 12th, 1,283 persons were shipped at British government expense. By the 24th of the month, another two thousand people were awaiting transport. They continued to arrive in Rotterdam in increasing numbers, and by early in June they were coming at the rate of one thousand a week, which rate was maintained until late in July.
The emigrants were encamped outside Rotterdam in shacks covered with reeds and in miserable conditions. This was not much different from the way many of them must have been living at home, for in a letter to officials of the British government published in 1709 and signed simply "The Palatines," they were said "to make the cold Earth our Lodgings, and the Clouds our Coverings." The embarkation was pushed with as much speed as possible, with provisions being given the people for six or eight days for the crossing. The packet boats carrying dispatches, and even men-of-war, were employed in the transport of emigrants. By June 8th, six thousand Palatines had been shipped at the expense of the British government, which considered that they would be a great asset in the American plantations.
However, in June the cost of moving and supporting all these new arrivals became of concern to the British government, and on June 24th orders were issued to refuse passage to Roman Catholics. It was difficult to discriminate and identify Protestants from Catholics, and so the problem was left to the London authorities. They were coming so fast, that it was becoming increasingly a problem to care for the people in Rotterdam, and also in London.
On June 29th Dayrolle sent some of the Palatines back to give warning to the several thousand people reported to be on the way down the Rhine, that no more would be accepted. He also put an advertisement in the Cologne Gazette to that affect. On July 5th he reported that 2,776 Palatines had sailed the day before for England and 500 more were in Rotterdam. The following week, 1,200 were at the city. On July 18th, 1,433 sailed for London.
London in the early 1700s (picture source unknown)
Warnings were sent from Britain to the Dutch authorities to stop the flood of emigrants. The Dutch just wanted to rid themselves of these poor people who had exhausted their charitable resources, but they did send notices and deputies up the Rhine to try to stop them, and they sought help from the National Assembly of Holland. The latter ordered their ministers at Cologne and Frankfort to warn the people not to come. All was to no avail.
Dayrolle informed the Palatines at Rotterdam that they would be sent back from England, but late in September there were 1,500 more emigrants trying to reach England. The British government refused to accept any more, yet on October 11th another 1,100 sailed from Rotterdam. The Queen felt sorry for the "poor Palatines", Dayrolle was sympathetic to their plight, and the Dutch officials were determined to rid their city of these people who would not return home. All totaled, there were 13,500 Palatines who reached England that year.
Valentine, Christina and the children had none of the delays on the continental side of the Channel that were experienced by those who came after them, but once in England the story was different. The German emigrants had expected that on their arrival in England they would be shipped immediately across the sea to Pennsylvania, but the promises made in the Golden Books had not been made by the British government. No one was prepared to implement such a plan.
The people of London, at first, welcomed their visitors, and such terms as "innocent, laborious, peaceable, healthy, ingenuous, rather…a blessing than a burden" were used to describe them. However, the government was hard pressed to provide for such a large number of people. London was hardly so large a city that these thousands of new arrivals could be easily accommodated. The squares, taverns, and inns were filled with Palatines, and the Board of Ordnance issued 1,600 tents for encampments at Blackheath, Greenwich, Camberwell, near the Tower of London, Tower Ditch, Wapping, Nightingale Lane, and East Smithfield. Barns, sheds, and cheap houses were rented for them at Kensington, Walworth, Stockwell, and Bristol Cansey. Fourteen hundred people were housed in a large warehouse. Even as early as May, it was reported that "very often 10 to 30 men and women together with their children" were packed into one room.
Conditions were unhealthy and the Palatines were dependent on the British government to provide for them. Charitable collections were taken up for them, but nevertheless, this was insufficient to provide for their needs. They were unemployed, and while some (especially the married women) were reduced to begging on the street, others made small toys and sold them to the crowds of Londoners who came to the encampments on Sundays to see them. People gave them clothing and shoes.
Soon, however, the novelty wore off, and the poorer English people began to resent the fact that wages were dropping, presumably due to the fact that Palatines were taking jobs at starvation wages. They noted that charity was being given to these foreigners rather than to them. There was fear, even by the upper classes, of contagious diseases being spread by these people. The encampments were sometimes attacked by London mobs. Queen Anne, who felt kindly towards these "poor Protestants," was much chagrined, and the Palatines, in self defense, soon met violence with violence.
Various plans were considered as to what to do with these people. Her Majesty, at first, wanted to settle them in England, but as the numbers grew, other plans had to be devised. Most of the Palatines, over half of the first four groups, were farmers and vine-dressers, with carpenters, textile workers, and other trades also represented. Some of the vine-dressers brought vine plants for a new start in the plantations, and one wonders if Valentine had managed to slip a few cuttings into his baggage when he left home.
There was concern that these people were bringing in religious unorthodoxy. After all, many were admitted papists, and rumor was that they were changing their religion in name only. The truth was that the sudden conversions to Protestantism of many of the Catholics (perhaps even the Presslers), was just another accommodation to changing government as they had been accustomed to seeing in their homeland. The sudden changes of state religion from Protestant to Catholic, or vice versa, had been a fact of life for them for generations.
As stated previously, the Queen was willing to save only "poor German Protestants," but the Catholics were required to become Protestants or to be returned to Germany. The Queen agreed to pay their expenses for the return trip. While Valentine had indicated that his family was Catholic on arrival in London, he may have been Protestant all along and change in his status at this point was merely a formality, or as previously indicated, perhaps his religious affiliation was merely an accommodation to political realities. The Presslers were not required to return. Amongst the Palatine emigrants 2,257 were sent back because they were Roman Catholic, another 900 voluntarily returned home, and an additional 618 Roman Catholics were sent back in March of 1711. This meant that the British government had left 10,000 people with which to deal.
They waited, while the bureaucrats fumbled. Living in unhealthy conditions in the London encampments, it was inevitable that diseases and epidemics should break out. Fevers and plagues resulted in perhaps a thousand of their number dying during these months while the inefficient British bureaucracy decided their fate.
The attempt to settle some of the emigrants in England was often a failure. The new people were not exactly welcomed in all communities, were given no land, and were expected to work as day laborers, which some refused to do. They had dreamed of working their own land, and as far as they were concerned, they had been promised their own land in America. Money was offered by the government to the various parishes to help with their support. Some of the very poor may have had to stay where they were sent, but many returned to London. In desperation, 322 of the men enlisted in the British military, 56 people became domestic servants, and 141 children were "purchased by the English," or apprenticed. Probably, several thousand of the Palatines eventually settled in England.
Other proposed plans were to settle several thousand of them on the Rio de la Plata in South America, or in the Canary Islands. The expense involved was deemed to have been prohibitive. Proposals were received to employ some of them in the silver and copper mines of Wales, to ship them to Barbadoes or other islands in the West Indies, to employ them in the fishing industry in Newfoundland, to settle them on the Scilly Islands off the coast of England. None of these proposals was accepted as practical.
Three promising ventures were finally decided upon by the government, which involved sending Palatines to Ireland, to Carolina, and to New York. Late in August, 794 families were taken to Chester in wagons and embarked for Ireland where they arrived during the first week of September. Others followed in October. They were temporarily lodged in Dublin where they were supported by the government and charitable contributions until they were distributed in lots among 43 Irish landlords who agreed to settle them on their lands. The Palatines were dissatisfied with this arrangement, the golden promises of America still paramount in their minds. Most of them left the areas to which they had been sent, and even with monetary offers made by the government for them to stay, by September of 1712 only 254 of the families remained.
Another large party of Palatines was sent to Carolina. An aristocratic Swiss man by the name of von Graffenried had been enlisted to lead a party of Palatines, for which he was granted 10,000 acres by the Lords Proprietors of Carolina on which to settle them. About 90 families were chosen, and they sailed for America in January 1710. Death overcame half of them before they were settled on land which was called New Bern, to which additional settlers were sent over from Bern in Switzerland. Indian attacks, lack of supplies, political disputes, dissatisfaction among the Palatines regarding their lands, etc. all resulted in a colony which did not prosper.
Finally, there was the proposal to send some of the Palatines to New York. The Swedish government had a monopoly on providing naval stores, and Britain was seeking another source for tar and pitch, as well as timber, so necessary for the wooden sailing ships of the day. The government had been investigating for years the possibility of obtaining these supplies from the pine forests of America. It was with that in mind that the Reverend Joshua Kocherthal had been sent with a small party of 55 immigrants to New York in 1708, although no provisions were made at the time of their settlement in the Hudson valley to start such an industry.
It was from this idea, however, that a plan was formed to settle a group of the Palatines in New York, and by means of their labor, they would repay the government for their passage and initial support, and at the same time they would provide the British navy with the much needed supplies of tar, pitch, rosin, and timber. An additional benefit would be to strengthen the New York frontier against the pressure being exerted by the French. As it later became clear, however, the weakness of the plan was that it placed the Palatines in perpetual indentured servitude, a weakness which ultimately doomed the project to failure.
For the Presslers, who chose to join this group of settlers, it must have represented the promise of a new life in the New World, of which they had so desperately dreamed back in the vineyards of the Palatinate. We begin already to see certain characteristics of this family which will lead them all the way to Graceland-determination to follow their dreams, a willingness not to cling to the past, but to move on to the next frontier, or the next valley, where opportunity seemed to beckon, and an acceptance of the risks and possible hardships they might encounter along the way. Strong, hardy, and daring people!
We don't know if the Presslers, or any of the Palatines, actually signed the agreement, or covenant, with the British Crown on December 21, 1709 (no signatures have been found), or whether it was just read to them. The agreement, which became a source of so much controversy in 1711, specified that the Palatines would, in effect, become indentured servants of the British government for an unspecified period of time, employed in the manufacture of naval stores until the profits had repaid the costs of their transportation, settlement and support. When the governor, who was to decide on what land they would be settled, had judged their obligations met, each Palatine was to receive a grant of forty acres of land.
The newly appointed governor of New York, Robert Hunter, was to accompany the emigrants on the voyage to his new post. Tents, guns, ammunition, and other supplies were obtained for their settlement on the frontier. Ministers to provide for their religious needs and someone to instruct them in the making of naval stores were obtained. Transportation was arranged to New York at the low rate of five pounds, ten shillings per head.
Ten ships were in the Thames at the specified time, and between December 25 and December 29, 1709, the Palatines were taken on board. Valentine and Christina Pressler and their children were among this group, but we don't know on which of the ships they sailed. Because of the low transportation rate, the people were packed tightly into the small vessels.
When the ships reached the Nore, a buoy at the mouth of the Thames, the Royal Navy refused to accept responsibility for escorting these slow ships. It was true that the War of Spanish Succession was still raging in Europe, but this ineptness of the British bureaucracy was unconscionable. Two departments were working against each other to the detriment of the Palatines, and they were imprisoned in their ships for what eventually became a six month voyage.
All during the winter they remained in the rat-infested ships as they slowly made their way along the southern coast of England, stopping at times in the harbors of Portsmouth and Plymouth. The last letters written by emigrants at Portsmouth during April reported eighty deaths on one ship and one hundred people sick on another. Foul odors, vermin, inadequate food, no light or fresh air, filthy and damp conditions, and little or no provision for sanitation, had already taken their toll. Not until April 10, 1710, did they finally sail from Plymouth.
There were no passenger ships in the eighteenth century. The Palatines sailed on cargo ships, or merchantmen, just as the Mayflower passengers of ninety years earlier had done. In fact, there had been little progress in ship design during the preceding century, and to the inexpert eye, perhaps the most obvious differences included a lower forecastle and a somewhat longer and sleeker looking hull. Unlike the rigging of the fast men-of-war, the rigging and sails of cargo ships remained much simpler. This was necessary because of the fewer crew members manning the cargo ships, and of course, the result was that they sailed at a slower speed, much to the discomfort and distress of any passengers.
Deplorable Shipboard Conditionsin the 1800s--probably much better than those endured by the 1709 Palatines (picture source unknown)
Passengers were crowded into the 'tween deck within the hull of the ship and below the main deck. The hold which carried cargo and provisions was below them. The 'tween deck had an overhead only four or five feet high, so that passengers could barely stand up, if at all, with no provisions for light or fresh air. Obviously, there was limited access to the main deck, and for long periods when weather conditions were inclement, they were battened down in their dark space below. There was no access to the galley, so food, such as was provided, was eaten cold. Drinking water was dirty, and worms invaded both the food and the water.
The Presslers and their fellow Palatines were mostly farmers. Indeed, it is unlikely that many of them had ever seen the sea before they had arrived at Rotterdam. In the worst of times in their beloved homeland, even in starvation times, there was light and fresh air. Now, confined in their dark quarters, with sick and dying companions, in the midst of a stormy sea, they must have been terrified. There must have been times when Valentine, Christina, and the children clung to each other, huddled in a corner, and prayed for deliverance, thinking that they might die at any moment, dashed into the abyss of a dark, stormy, and bottomless ocean.
It was not long before "ship-fever" began to decimate the passengers. From their misery, the doctors of that day began to call it "Palatine Fever," but we now know it was typhus, the deadly disease transmitted by infected fleas and body lice, which the Palatines reported at the time were biting them. On one ship 330 persons were sick at one time, and there were only three doctors on board the eleven ships. Of the 2,814 Palatines who set sail from England, 446 died before the end of July, and thirty babies were born but no record indicates how many of those died.
Daily quarrels among the passengers and within families were inevitable, considering the crowded and miserable conditions. Why had they undertaken this voyage? Who had made the decision? Would not they have been better off at home in the Palatinate? Even if they had starved to death, it would have been better to die among family and friends than to be buried here at sea with only strangers to mourn! Who would take care of their orphaned children, if they died?
And so a voyage of suffering brought them to the land of promise. "So we have come upon this expedition and are never more to see our Deutschland," wrote one Palatine several years later when he made the voyage to Pennsylvania. Eleven ships which set sail from London in December of 1709 arrived in New York harbor in the summer of 1710. The first of the ships, the Lyon of Leith, arrived on June 13th, and the next day, the Lowestoffe, on which Governor Hunter sailed without any Palatines, arrived, along with several of the other immigrant ships. Prior to July 10th, the Fame, the Tower, the Mary, the Hartwell, the Baltimore, the James & Elizabeth, and the Sarah had all arrived. The Herbert was wrecked on the east end of Long Island on July 7th, while the Midford arrived after July 12th. The last to arrive was the Berkley Castle on August 2nd, which had had to return to England, and then set sail again.
The arrival of all these ships in New York harbor was of major concern to the Dutch city officials. There were only about 4,500 people in the city at that time with perhaps 950 slaves. The Council was informed that the first of the immigrant-laden ships had arrived, and the Mayor and the Corporation of the city "prayed that they might not come within the Citty as there was just cause to believe that there were many contagious distempers among them which might endanger the Health of the Inhabitants of the Citty."
It was decided that Nutten Island (now Governor's Island) was "the properest place to put them" for a period of quarantine, and it was ordered that huts be constructed for them on the island. Because there had been a scarcity of foodstuffs in New York that Spring, stockpiles had been created, and there was issued a proclamation preventing a rise in prices of bread and other provisions.
Since Nutten Island was not within the legal boundaries of any county in the colony, Governor Hunter established special courts of Judicature for the immigrants. The listmasters, who had been appointed by the British in England to be responsible for the families on each ship, served in the quarantine camp on Nutten Island as Justices of the Peace and helped in handing out supplies to the various families.
The immigrants were slow to recover their health and an additional 250 deaths were reported after their arrival in New York. Perhaps as many as 74 orphaned children were apprenticed, as a means of providing for them.
The Governor kept a record of his payments for the subsistence of each of the 847 families from the time of their arrival in New York until September 1712. These accounts were for the purpose of the Palatines repaying the government by their labors in the production of tar and pitch. From these first records dated July 1, 1710, it appears that Valentine and his family had come through the terrible journey intact. The family of Johann Philipp Greisler, listed on the same day, had not been so fortunate. Their two sons were still with them, but their young daughter, Beata Maria, had died somewhere along the way, probably in the London camps or on the long and difficult sea voyage to America.
On September 13th, while they were possibly still quarantined on Nutten Island, Johann Philipp and Anna Catharina Greisler were blessed with another baby, christened by the Reverend Joshua Kocherthal, as Johann Henrich Valentine Greisler. Valentin Presler and Henrich Mehs were the sponsors, or godparents, and the event was eventually recorded in the West Camp Lutheran Churchbook.
The Presslers were not immune from tragedy, either. Soon after they landed in New York, their youngest son died, but late in 1710 or early 1711 Christina gave birth to a baby girl, whom they named Maria Agnes. One wonders if she was perhaps named after the little Greisler girl who had died enroute.
While the Palatines were recovering their strength and health, the Governor was involved in finding suitable lands and making arrangements for their movement to settlements in areas where they could begin to repay the government by producing naval stores. He decided upon a tract of 6,300 acres on the west side of the Hudson River ninety-two miles above New York City which belonged to the crown, and a second tract of 6,000 acres purchased of Robert Livingston on the east side of the Hudson, along with an adjoining 800 acres purchased of Thomas Fullerton.
Map of New York City in 1703, showing Dutch (green) neighborhoods and English (red) neighborhoods, along with the occupations of the residents. The wealthier English and major Dutch merchants lived along Dock Street facing the waterside and port. (Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1994)
New York City in 1710 was a town which had been under English rule for forty-six years, but it still retained a significant Dutch flavor. Sixty percent of the population remained Dutch and worked primarily as blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, etc, while the later-arriving English and French Huguenots were forming a wealthy mercantile elite.
The fort which lay at the tip of Manhattan Island contained the Governor's residence within it, a two-storied twelve room house. Adjoining the fort was Bowling Green, or the parade ground, where the Palatines built a tent city after they were released from quarantine. In front of the fort was an area where market fairs were held on three days a week. The wall which had marked the northern limits of the Dutch town had fallen into disrepair, and the Dutch had taken the stones to construct a new city hall at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets where the Reverend Häger held church services for the Palatines.
Most of the houses of the city were of the Dutch style with gabled ends facing the street, but English-style homes were replacing many of the Dutch ones. Shops of the merchants sometimes occupied the ground floor of their houses. Beyond Wall Street wealthy citizens were building fine homes and beyond them the farmers of Manhattan Island raised food for the citizens of the city. Most of the citizens of New York still cultivated gardens within the yards of their houses. The Presslers must have been delighted at their first taste of Indian corn and cornbread, and astounded at the availability of venison (forbidden to common people in Europe), wild turkey (a New World bird), Dutch cheese, and Dutch pastries.
The busy harbor was filled with ships from England and the West Indies. New York was still a frontier town, and brawls and fights were common. Taverns, or ordinaries, catered to the seaman who were in town. Dogs were allowed to run loose in the city. Indians sometimes could be seen on the streets in what the Presslers would have considered outlandish costumes. They must have been surprised and amazed at the sight of the black slaves, New York being one of the largest slave-owning colonies at the time. They probably had acquired no knowledge regarding slavery in the New World prior to their arrival.
All of these things Valentine, Philipp and their other Palatine companions must have discussed amongst themselves, as well as their hopes and plans for the future. Where would they find lands? What would they do in the coming months? Was the covenant to which they had all agreed in England the same one by which the English now told them they had to abide? Did they have to go up the Hudson with their other fellow Palatines?
Early in October the Palatines boarded the boats, probably not too unlike those in which they had traveled down the Rhine a year and a half earlier, which would take them up the Hudson River. Taking all their belongings and supplies, and sailing up the river to the lands to which they had been assigned, this was a sadder people than those who had sailed down the Rhine. They were survivors, and they were now more than ever determined to seek and find the life of which they had so long dreamed. The future months would prove just how much they had changed from a people who had passively submitted to the tyranny of German rulers and French armies to a people who would defy the British government and its representative, the Royal Governor.
By June 1711 seven villages had been established on the two sides of the Hudson River: Hunterstown, Queensbury, Annsbury, and Haysbury were on the east side and were known as East Camp; Elizabeth Town, George Town, and New Town were on the west side of the river and were known as West Camp. There were a total of 1,874 Palatines on the Hudson with about 350 people remaining in New York City, most of whom were reported to be widows with families, or those who had obtained employment in the city.
Both the Pressler and the Greisler families appear to have remained in New York City. The records do not indicate why this was so, but perhaps they were among those Palatines who had found work in the Governor's gardens or the gardens of some of the other wealthy citizens, or perhaps they had found work cutting wood for some of the grand estates around the town. For the Presslers, it may have been just another of what became a long series of independent moves away from the path they might have been expected to take.
Meanwhile, the organization which was to manage the business of the Palatines in the manufacture of naval stores had a somewhat military character. Dissatisfaction was not long in making itself felt among the Palatines in the Hudson River settlements. They claimed the contract being forced upon them was not the one to which they had agreed in England. They felt they should be given their land immediately. Their supplies were provided to them in irregular fashion, and food was said to be inadequate and inferior in quality. As vine-dressers, they disliked working in gangs under rigid supervision. In May of 1711 a rebellion of three or four hundred of the Palatines had to be put down militarily.
In addition to an unwilling labor supply which worked only reluctantly and a lack of continued financial and political support by the English government, there was inadequate instruction of the Palatines in the methods of producing naval stores. It might have been that the pine trees of New York were not as productive of tar and pitch as the Carolina pines, or the methods taught them for producing the tar were not correct, but, in any case, production was not what had been expected. In the Carolinas the industry was quite successful. By September 1712 Governor Hunter told the Palatines that they would henceforth receive no further subsistence from the government, and they would have to provide for themselves.
Shocked, but probably somewhat relieved, they began to drift away from the settlements in search of better circumstances and in the next five years many had moved away, some to Albany and Schenectady and the Mohawk Valley, some to the Schoharie Valley, and some to Pennsylvania and to New Jersey.
It's not clear just how long Philipp Greisler and Valentine Pressler remained friends, or how long the Greislers remained in New York City, but in time they drifted apart. The Greislers moved up the Hudson to West Camp at least by 1715, and in his later years Philipp lived with his son in Schoharie. In New York City, Valentine and Christina began to build for themselves and their children a new life.
Valentine was probably very much aware during these years in New York of the difficulties which his Palatine friends and companions in the Hudson River settlements were experiencing. He had heard of the conditions under which they were living, the presence of army units sent to maintain order, and the inadequate and irregular supplies provided for them.
It is probable that he and his family were fairing somewhat better than the people in the settlements during this time. When he had a job, and when he had some money in his pocket, there was food to buy in the shops of the town. That was not to say that his family was living in luxury. They had probably found simple accommodations in a poorer area of town, along with other immigrants and poor folks who were trying to survive in the city.
Valentine and Christina must have experienced the fear of their fellow citizens when they heard of a slave uprising in the city on April 7, 1712. A fire was started by slaves in the home of a Dutchman named Peter Van Tilburgh, and a band of armed slaves killed nine white men who rushed to put out the fire. Armed soldiers were sent to restore order, and thirteen slaves were hung, six others were tortured and killed, and still others killed themselves to avoid capture. Immigration to America had not removed the Presslers from the ever-present dangers of possible violence in their community.
In New York, Valentine and Christina had been blessed with a baby girl soon after their arrival. Less than three years later on December 4, 1713, another son, named Hans Georg (or Hans Jurie), was christened in the New York City Reformed Church. Sponsors, or godparents, for the child were Hans Juria Pechor and Elizabeth Roseboom.
On June 1, 1714, Johan Valentyn Bressler and wife Anna Christiana of the Hoogduidsche Kerk joined the New York City Reformed Church. Hoogduidsche Kerk was Dutch for "High German Church," the term High German having nothing to do with social class, but referring to a geographical location and a linguistic dialect in southern Germany, as opposed to Low German which was spoken in the flat lowlands of northern Germany. Valentine and Christina were trying to put down roots in their new land.
About 1715, Valentine perhaps found work with the Dutch farmers on Staten Island (which the English called Richmond). In that year he was listed as being in the North Company of Colonel Aug. Graham in the Richmond County militia. Although a fourth son was christened in the New York City Reformed Church on July 25, 1716, named Martinus and in the presence of godparents Johannes Keÿser and Elizabeth Kerlag, a fifth son and last child of Valentine and Christina was christened on September 8, 1717, in the Reformed Church at Port Richmond on Staten Island. The child was called Pieter, and his sponsors were Pieter Van Pelt and his wife Sara.
It was probably due to the fact that the Pressler family was living on Staten Island that they were not included in a list of Palatines then living in New York City and the Hudson River settlements which was published in 1717 in Germany by immigrant Ulrich Simmendinger, who returned to Germany and wrote an account of his experiences while in New York.
South Prospect of New York City in 1717 (Gloria Gilda Deák. Picturing America, 1497-1899. Prints, Maps & Drawings Bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is now the U.S. (Princeton: Princeton University, 1988))
The older of Valentine's children were growing into young adulthood. On November 7, 1718, Anna Elizabeth Bresseler married in the New York City Reformed Church to John Kimbark of Jamaica, Long Island. In 1721 Valentine apprenticed his second son, Anthonius (Anthony), to one Theunis Montaine to become a weaver, and on April 21, 1723, his oldest son, Andries (Andreas) Preslaar married in the New York City Reformed Church to Antje (Annie) Wells, a native of Staten Island. Andreas, or Andrew as he later was known, and Annie moved from New York soon after their marriage.
After Anthony had finished his apprenticeship, he married Neeltje (Nellie or Cornelia), whose last name is unknown to us, probably about 1724-1727, and settled on the west side of the Hudson River in Ulster County. The baptisms of six of their children were recorded in the New York City Lutheran churchbook in the following years. Johan Matthias was baptized in 1728 at Qvassayk-kill in B. Mynder's barn with Johan Matthys Kienberg (Kimbark?) and his wife as sponsors). Andriantje was also baptized at Qvassayk-kill in 1730, while Mattheus was baptized in 1735, Thomas in 1737, Anna Margaretha in 1741, and Joseph in 1742.
It is probable that Anthony and Nellie had two other older daughters whose names were not recorded in the churchbooks: Rebekka (Rebecca), who was born at Old Man's Kill in Ulster County and married Michael Wighandt (Wygant or Weygant), a native of Newburgh, on November 2, 1747, and Catrina who married Juryyen (Urean or Jurie) Mekki (Mackey), a native of Old Man's Kill on September 22, 1749. Both of these marriages occurred at the First Reformed Church at Poughkeepsie in Dutchess County, across the river from Ulster County.
Old Man's Kill, or Creek, has been located as being at Marlboro Landing, just north of Newburgh. As previously stated, the Reverend Joshua Kocherthal brought a small group of Palatines to New York back in 1708, two years before the larger party of Palatines arrived. At least some of these immigrants settled at Quassaick Creek on the Hudson just north of the town of Newburgh, where nine of their number were given a patent of land in 1719 for 2,200 acres.
Michael Weigand was one of the patentees, and with his wife Anne Catherine, and children, Anne Maria, George, Michael, and Tobias, settled on 250 acres of this patent. Burger Mynder was another of the original patentees. He was listed in the 1726-1729 tax lists, and it was in his barn that Anthony's oldest son was baptized in 1728. On the tax rolls of 1724-25 was George Waggont (Wygant), and next to Tobias Wygant was Valentyne Breasure (believed to be Pressler); in 1726-29, when the clerk listed many men by their given names only, there was next to Geo. Wagagont (Wygant) a John Vantine (believed to be John Valentine).
This evidence shows that Anthony Pressler settled his family on the grant at Quassaick Creek, and suggests that Valentine was also living there and paying tax on a parcel of this land between 1724 and 1729. The original settlement by Kocherthal in Ulster County did not prosper in the long term, and by 1751 the original settlers had all sold their rights to the land and moved. Anthony, who had apparently purchased a tract of this land from one of the earlier settlers, must have found a degree of success and happiness there. Perhaps his wife's family lived nearby, which would have been another inducement to stay there.
Anthony remained in New York State, and within a generation or two, members of the family had moved to other areas of the state, and in some cases, the family name had evolved to Presley. In 1738, Anthony Pressler was in the foot company of Ulster County militia under the command of Captain Thos. Ellison, and twenty years later in 1758 at the age of 54 he enlisted, along with his twenty-one year old son, Thomas, in Captain Harsbrook's militia company for participation in the French and Indian War. The record of these latter enlistments are significant in that they give us the earliest physical description of a Pressler. Anthony and Thomas were both five feet six and one-half inches in height with brown hair.
Valentine had left the Palatinate in search of better opportunities. Once in New York, he had declined to follow his fellow immigrants to the Hudson River camps, preferring to find work in the city. Possibly finding that after a time he had not discovered his fortune there, or perhaps thinking that he had saved enough money to follow his son up the river to Ulster County and buy some land, he tried that route for several years.
Then, he tried another move. What prompted this next big move, we don't know, but possibly it had something to do with his wife. After the christening of her youngest child, there is no further mention of Christina in the extant records. She had endured a hard life and had born many children, which may have led her to an early death. If she died in New York City or in the Hudson River settlement, the loss of his soul-mate would have left Valentine with his teenage sons to finish raising. Perhaps this explains how he came to feel free to move south, perhaps to be near his oldest son, Andrew, or to continue the old search for a better life for his other sons.
Many, if not most, of the Palatines who had come to New York, had wanted to go to Pennsylvania in the first place. The publicity about Pennsylvania in the various German lands had been most effective. It was the province about which they had heard the most information. New York had been little known to them, and the British government had diverted them there for its own purposes. After their difficulties in the Hudson River settlements with the authorities and in obtaining titles to their own tracts of land, many of them wrote to their relations and friends in Germany and advised them that if they ever intended to come to America, not to go to New York, but to go to Pennsylvania.
William Penn had obtained in 1681 a patent for the province which would bear his name. He was a good salesman and promoter, and by 1685 the colony had more than 7,000 inhabitants. Only half of them were British, with the remainder being a variety of national and ethnic groups. In 1683 one Francis Daniel Pastorius, a lawyer of Frankfurt, obtained a grant of 6,000 acres of land east of the Schuylkill River and brought over a group of German Mennonites to found the settlement of Germantown. In the next few years more and more Germans arrived in the colony and established scattered settlements over much of southeastern Pennsylvania all the way to the Blue Mountains and west of Philadelphia and the areas of English and Welsh settlement.
By 1736 there were about 40,000 Germans settled in Pennsylvania, and the Assembly feared that their numbers would deprive the English of the political control they enjoyed. Many of these Germans became squatters because they were too poor to buy the land. Palatines from New York had begun moving to Pennsylvania by 1720 or earlier. In 1723 fifteen of these Palatine families, many from Schoharie, moved to the Tulpehocken (Womelsdorf) district just east of the Swatara Creek in Berks County. Other families from New York followed the settlers to Tulpehocken in that year and in subsequent years.
No record of the Presslers in Pennsylvania has been found to date. However, it is almost inconceivable that they did not travel through the colony, and more than likely live for a time there. It is likely that Andrew and his new bride heard about the opportunities that were being offered in Pennsylvania, and opportunities to them seeming to be sparse in New York, they journeyed south after their marriage. Perhaps they crossed New Jersey to the Delaware River and visited Philadelphia with its broad streets, large lots, and busy docks, stores, tannery yards, brick kilns, and blacksmith shops. Perhaps they chose one of the several roads which led inland to farms and land where they hoped they might find a place to settle. It is likely that they did not find opportunities that were within their means.
They soon settled across the Pennsylvania line in Cecil County, Maryland, in St. Stephen's Parish, which was in the southern part of the county below the mouth of the Susquehanna River and near the head of Chesapeake Bay. They remained in this area for at least seven to eight years, but there is no evidence that they ever acquired the land for which we believe they were searching. Perhaps Andrew worked for the English farmers in the area, or perhaps he worked as a blacksmith as we know he did in later years.
The children of Andrew and Anne Prisley were christened in the Anglican church of St. Stephen beginning with their daughter Christain on June 6, 1725. A son John Volintine was christened on January 9, 1726, a daughter Sarah in 1728, and a son Thomas on August 27, 1730. The records of these christenings were the first instances in which we find an anglicized version of the surname, the minister who recorded the events most likely being a native English speaker who "wrote it as he heard it." However, by the time of the christening of the next and last son, Andrew, on February 4, 1732/33, the surname was recorded as Presler. We can conjecture that this was probably the result of the presence of the child's grandfather, whose name was recorded in the churchbook as John Vollintine Presler.
Thus, within a short time of Valentine's presence on the Hudson north of Newburgh, he had arrived in Maryland to visit with, or to live near, Andrew and his young family. Presumably, Valentine had come with his younger sons, Hans Jurie, who was then about 19 years old, and Peter, who was then about 15 years old. It is likely that Martinus had died in childhood. Valentine was then about 63 years old, and the record gives us no indication of his whereabouts for the next ten years.
Perhaps during those years he was living with his sons in Maryland and working for others, or perhaps he spent some of these years living and working among his fellow Palatines in Berks County or some other area of Pennsylvania. It is likely that during those years his sons, John and Peter, had married and begun their own families, but no records so indicating have been located.
Perhaps like many of the German settlers in Pennsylvania, Valentine wrote to family members or friends back in Germany telling them about the agreeable and hospitable conditions he encountered in Pennsylvania. Again, we have no way of knowing.
Valentine's name (along with those of his two youngest sons) surfaces once more for a last time in the records of Maryland in 1742. In that year a petition was circulated for the creation of a new parish, to be called All Saints, through the division of Prince George's Parish. Among the signers of this petition were 23 German settlers, including John Valentine Presler, John Presler, and Peter Presler. On the same date a petition was circulated which sought creation of Frederick County from Prince George County.
Between 1721 and 1731 the English had moved into the area of what would eventually become All Saints parish and Frederick County, Maryland, settling on land beside the rivers and streams. After 1731 the Germans began to move into the area from Pennsylvania and to take up tracts of land in or near the hills which paralleled the Monocacy River and which reminded them of the rolling country of their native Palatinate.
The signatures of Valentine and his two youngest sons on this petition certainly suggest that they were living in the area of the Monocacy in 1742, but no other record in the area has been found with their names. The petition for a new parish was granted in November 1742, and the new county was created in 1748.
It is also unclear when Andrew decided to move his family from Maryland to Virginia, but sometime after the birth of his youngest child he moved to Amelia County, Virginia, southwest of Richmond. In 1745 Andrew Presley finally purchased 100 acres in western Brunswick County on the north side of the Roanoke River. In 1746 the western part of the county was formed into a new county called Lunenburg, and in February 1746, just six months after he had purchased the land and before sufficient time had passed to raise a crop, Andrew Breslar and Anne, his wife, sold the 100 acre tract, which was then in Lunenburg County, and moved again.
Back in Europe the situation of almost continuous warfare had continued. The War of the Spanish Succession had ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 and the Peace of Rastatt in 1714. As a result of those treaties, the city of Landau in the Palatinate became a French city for the next one hundred years. There followed another period of several years of uneasy recovery for the Palatinate, but in 1734 the War of Polish Succession broke out. The Polish king, who was traditionally elected, died, and the result was that Austria, Sweden, Russia and France each attempted to have a candidate favorable to their interests elected. French troops again marched through the Palatinate and "allowed" its citizens to support them by payments of money, food, etc. As had so often happened in the past, the French ended up fighting, not the Poles, but rather the Austrians and the Russians on German territory.
Within a very few years another war, the War of Austrian Succession, began. Charles VI of Austria died in 1740, and Bavaria, Spain, Prussia, Saxony, and France agreed to partition the Austrian empire. French armies were once again on the march back and forth through the Palatinate. An exhausting war, with neither side able to claim victory, was waged until the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed in 1748. The promise once again of peace did not change the fact that the population of the Palatinate was exhausted and discouraged, and when word began to spread once more about a better life in America, and especially in Pennsylvania, the message fell on receptive ears.
The peak of German immigration to Pennsylvania was to occur between 1749 and 1754. During the first of those years, twenty-two ships with 6,000 Palatines landed at Philadelphia. It is perhaps significant to our story that on October 19, 1749 the ship Lydia docked at Philadelphia carrying several Pressler immigrants to Pennsylvania. They were three brothers, named Johann Georg Simon Pressler, Johann Nickel Pressler, and Johann George Pressler, along with their two sisters, named Maria Elisabetha Pressler and Anna Maria Pressler. They were children of Hans Georg and Eva Magdalena Pressler of the village of Niederhochstadt in the Palatinate, who had been born there between 1722 and 1735. They also had a younger brother named Johann Valentin, born in 1737, who had likely died.
Host Church, Berks County, Pennsylvania, from painting by Ralph Dunkelberger, 1894-1964 (Annette K. Burgert, The Hochstradt Origins of Some of the Early Settlers at Host Church, Berks County, PA (Myerstown, PA:AKB Publications, 1983))
The Presslers/Bresslers moved to Tulpehocken Township in northern Berks County in the area of the St. John's Reformed Church. This church, commonly known as the Host Church, had been founded by Palatine immigrants, and many of its early members with surnames such as Becker, Bender, Bogenreiff, Bortner, Ehly, Gamber, Gensemer, Jordan, Knoll, Kornman, Laux, Meyer, Motz, Müller, Reintzel, Rost, Schirman, Unruh, Wagner, Wilhelm, and Wolff had all come from the villages of Oberhochstadt and Niederhochstadt in the Palatinate. They had begun arriving in Pennsylvania in the early 1730s and had settled near each other in this community as each family arrived.
At a somewhat later date, in 1764, Simon Bressler of Tulpehocken paid for the passage of Nicholas Bressler, son of Joh. David and Margaretha Bressler of Niederhochstadt, and his wife, and for Philip Jacob Bressler who all arrived on the King of Prussia at Philadelphia. They were presumably relatives.
Another family of Presslers also arrived in Philadelphia in 1749. Johannes Bressler, son of Hans Valentin and Anna Catharina Presler of Niederhochstadt, along with his wife Eva Maria (Öhli) and his children settled in Strasburg Township of Lancaster County. Johannes was probably accompanied by his brother, Jacobus. Among the precious possessions of the Bresslers when they arrived in Pennsylvania was a family Bible that had been published in Nurnberg in 1716.
If these Bresslers/Presslers were the younger kinfolk of Valentine Pressler and his family, they did not meet each other in Pennsylvania. By 1749, the three sons of Valentine, Andrew, John and Peter, had arrived in North Carolina. There is no further record of Valentine. An old man by the standards of the times in the 1740s, he had lived a difficult life in a challenging time. It is not known if Valentine died in Maryland or Pennsylvania, or if he made the trip with his sons to North Carolina. There was a Preslar family burying ground in North Carolina not long after his sons arrived there, but the names of those interred therein is lost to history.
Perhaps he had not found all that he had hoped to find in America when he left Germany, but he had known the satisfaction of seeing his sons and daughters grow to adulthood. He had enjoyed at least some of his grandchildren. He, and they, were free-free to move about without having to deal with the petty authorities and rulers of Europe. If his goal in America was land ownership, then he was perhaps less than successful, but if freedom and opportunity for his children was his goal, then he was, indeed, a great success. He had established the Pressler family blood line in the New World. How extensive that line would grow, and what his descendants would accomplish in this newly developing society in America, he could not know.
It is tempting to imagine, that just as we first discovered this immigrant ancestor traveling somewhere along the Rhine looking toward the promise of a better life in America, so the closing chapter in his life might have been somewhere along the trail with his sons, still in search of a better future.
Three sons of Valentine Pressler arrived in south central North Carolina about 1746-1748. In fact, they settled in the area of the Piedmont west of the Great Pee Dee River which was still in Bladen County. Settlers coming into this area from 1740 to 1750 found a wilderness of vast forests, wild game, flowering shrubs, and rivers and streams filled with fish. A decade earlier this was the hunting ground of the Siouan Indian tribes, the Waxhaw, the Catawbas, the Cheraws. where food and clothing were the gifts of nature, but alcohol and smallpox, the white man's diseases, had taken their toll.
By 1750 the steady stream of settlers, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and French were rapidly taking up land along the rivers and creeks. They came from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolina seaports of Wilmington and Charleston. They sought new homes where land was cheap. Indian attacks were not a threat, such as they had become in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and government was far away. It took three days to ride the 100 miles from the Great Pee Dee River to the county seat in Elizabethtown over swollen streams and roads that were not much more than Indian paths.
The settlers who arrived in the wilderness that was Anson County in the 1740s brought tools, stock, and personal belongings to aid them in their settlement. The earliest residents simply settled without bothering to obtain a legal grant to the land which they claimed. The English and Scotch-Irish cleared the land by girdling the trees so that the sap could not flow and the trees died, while the Germans used more sound farming practices and cut them down and removed the stumps. They built log houses from the vast forests of long-leafed pine; they built furniture and tools from the oak, cedar, and cypress that was so abundant. However, they considered the log structures only temporary until such time as they could construct more substantial frame houses.
Most frontier settlers arrived with little more than a few horses or a yoke of oxen, a few cows or hogs and some chickens. They hunted and fished the forests and streams, but they looked forward to soon advancing beyond mere subsistence farming to the day when their crops would produce a cash profit.
The backwoods pioneers in the southern colonies shared certain cultural characteristics, some of which we can only assume applied to the Presslers, some of which the historical records most definitely indicate as applicable. They highly prized personal freedom and individualism, and often times had little respect for social institutions such as law, religion, and legal ownership of land. They possessed an almost compulsive desire to move every few years,
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