Germantown, Pennsylvania
Founded in 1683, it became a borough within the county of Philadelphia in 1707 and in 1854 an administrative district within the city of Philadelphia. Although this progression marks the decline of its importance as a center of German life and culture, Germantown has continued to be regarded as the symbolic birthplace of German settlement in America.
The three hundredth anniversary of its founding was celebrated with a designation by the U.S. Senate as the “Tricentennial Anniversary Year of German Settlement in America” and by a visit from Karl Carstens, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, in October 1983. Germantown’s reputation as one of the most historic communities in colonial Pennsylvania rests principally on three events. One was the Protest against Slavery issued by the Germantown Quaker Meeting in 1688 and thought to be the first such formal document arising from a white institution. The second was the Battle of Germantown on October 4, 1777, one of the benchmark battles of the Revolutionary War and a defeat that caused George Washington to retreat with his troops to Valley Forge for the winter. The third was the temporary appointment of Germantown as the capital of both federal and state governments during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.There were, of course, many German speakers in the colonies before 1683, including families and individual settlers from Silesia, Brandenburg, Nuremberg, and Switzerland. Governor Johan Bjorns- son Printz of the Swedish settlement on the Delaware, established in 1643, was a Hol- steiner. Germantown, however, was the first self-conscious attempt to create an ethnic enclave. As a direct result of William Penn’s promotional visits to Europe and his promises of both land and religious toleration, two groups from continental Europe had purchased land in Pennsylvania: one was the Frankford Land Company, which sent no settlers but deputized Francis Daniel Pastorius to represent the company; the other was a group of thirteen Dutch Quaker families from Crefeld who arrived in Philadelphia and agreed to have Pasto- rius act for them as well.
On October 24, 1683, Penn’s surveyorgeneral laid out the primary plot plan for the township. He situated it on 5,700 acres (8.81 square miles) of high, hilly, rocky ground just over 5 miles from Philadelphia, a strategic location in the growth and development of Germantown throughout the century. The grant was bisected by an Indian trail that became the Germantown Road, connecting the town to both Philadelphia and the rich, fertile farmland beyond. The three creeks that flowed through the township (the Wissahickon, Cresheim, and Winghocking) were not navigable, but they were well adapted to industrial uses such as mills and tanneries.
Pastorius and the Crefeld settlers envisioned their community as a “Germanopolis” or “little German city,” and the lots, mostly too small to be viable for farming, were laid out along the Germantown Road to encourage craft production and commerce.
Within two years of its settlement, families of German immigrants began to flood into Germantown. By 1709, a clear German majority was established with a hegemony that lasted up to the nineteenth century, but although predominantly German, the township was never a homogeneous community. Added to the Dutch first-comers and the Germans were many families of British origin, as well as a sprinkling of French, Swiss, Swedes, Irish, Africans, and African Americans. The Germans themselves encompassed a wide variety of backgrounds, beliefs, and dialects, coming as they did from the dozens of semi-autonomous little German-speaking states of seventeenth-century Europe. True to Penn’s promise, no church was established, and five main religious groups— Quakers, Lutherans, Reformed, Mennon- ites, and so-called Dunkards (German Baptists)—were joined by a smattering of Roman Catholics, separatists, Schwenk- felders, and Hermits of the Wissahickon and a substantial minority of freethinkers or nonbelievers. A large increase in residents of British background by the end of the century led to the establishment of a Methodist Church in 1796, followed soon after by congregations of Presbyterians and Episcopalians.
The population of Germantown did not grow smoothly throughout the eighteenth century, but rather in a series of incremental leaps followed by periods of relative stagnation. Increase was largely the product of immigration; natural increase was uncharacteristically low for colonial America, and out-migration was high. From an initial population of 42 people in 13 families at the time of settlement in 1683, the town grew to well over 2,000 by the time of the Revolution, making it the fourth-largest population center in Pennsylvania. The U.S. Census of 1800 listed 3,200 people in about 550 families. The largest surge came between 1745 and 1767, during which time housing stock increased from about 100 to 350 dwellings and Germantown was discovered by wealthy Philadelphians as a place to build their estates or rent apartments for the summer. As a result of the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, many city dwellers, middle as well as upper class, relocated permanently to the healthier “suburbs,” followed by branches of the shops and businesses that serviced them.
Each of the population spurts brought an influx of newcomers to the town who were ethnically and culturally different from each other and from the longtime inhabitants. Although outsiders saw the town as being German in character, it was actually an amalgam of old and new, as well as a mix of the many ethnic groups represented in the populace. The earliest houses were small and continental in design— half-timbered, with high-pitched or gambrel roofs and casement windows. By the mid-1700s, the typical house had incorporated English Georgian style while retaining certain elements from the older tradition, such as the arched cellar windows, pent roofs between the first and second floors, “Dutch” doors, and front stoops. What set them apart as uniquely Germantown was the stone of which they were built; a “glimmer-stone” sparkling with mica, found only in a very limited area around Germantown and known by the scientific name of Wissahickon schist.
This kind of mixed acculturation could be found in daily life in even more significant ways than in the choice of consumer goods. Within a generation or two, it was mainly newcomers who still spoke and wrote in German, at least in public. English gradually became the common language of longtime residents of the township, although it was often written in German script, interlaced with German words, and pronounced with a German accent. From the mid-1700s, schools offered both English and German instruction, and it was not uncommon for German families to translate or anglicize their surnames as well as their given names. The original Dutch Quaker families assimilated so thoroughly that within a few decades they were often seen as part of the escalating English population. Growing numbers of non-Germans after midcentury increased the impact of the outside world and its ways on the development of the township’s institutions and lifestyle. Churches, schools, and a market were built; a library and a fire company, in imitation of the ones in Philadelphia, were organized; numerous taverns opened; regular stagecoaches ran along the Germantown Road, stopping over at the local inn; and a potter’s field was established, joining the two town cemeteries and several church burying grounds already present.
One of the most noteworthy features of eighteenth-century Germantown lay in its economic development. The history of America has always emphasized the nation’s growth from a commercial base to an industrialized, manufacturing nation in the nineteenth century: the story of the colonial period has generally been told in terms of agricultural communities involved in the commerce of raw or minimally processed goods. As the founders had envisioned, however, Germantown operated as an industrial center almost from the very beginning. It was craft and processing, elevated to a complex and sophisticated level, rather than commerce and trade that formed the backbone of the economic system.
Unlike the single-industry system of European towns of the period, Germantown was involved in the production of a broad mix of market goods. Over sixty-four separate occupations were listed in the township during the century. Although many of the crafts lay in the area of primary processing of agricultural products, such as butchering and milling, many more were involved in creating finished manufactured items employing the use of several skilled craftspeople in different aspects of manufacturing. The workshops, except for the mills, relied on human power, giving them the atmosphere of the preindustrial world, but an assembly-line style of production and specialization of tasks marked them as being on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.Two of the principal economic networks in eighteenth-century Germantown were built around cattle and flax. Butchers formed the first step in the cattle network; tanners and skin dressers were the next craftspeople who participated; from there the product was distributed to breeches makers, bookbinders, harness makers, saddlers, cordwainers (shoemakers), and carriage- and chairmakers (small personal transportation vehicles), all of whom employed leatherworkers in some capacity. The chair “factories,” in turn, also required blacksmiths and wheelwrights from the metalworking trades. The flax network was based on a locally grown product and was primarily focused on the
production of linen goods. This included separate craftsmen (and occasionally women) who spun thread, wove fabric, and bleached, dyed, and starched it. Although a great deal of yarn for the retail market, as well as yard goods, was produced, the principal products were stockings, woven or knitted.
The most famous offshoot of the flax network was the paper industry, a major contributor to Germantown’s reputation as one of the most historic communities in Pennsylvania. William Rittenhouse had set up the first paper mill in the British colonies in 1690 on the Wissahickon.
Christoph Sauer’s printing press, begun in 1738, was one of the largest in the colonies, and his German Bible was the first to be printed in a European language in America. One of Sauer’s employees, Jocob Bey, was the first to manufacture printing type. Full production required ink manufacturing and bookbinding, which were in full operation in the town by midcentury. The binding of books in leather brought the economic system full circle, back to the leather/cattle complex, and the links between the paper and book industries of Germantown and Benjamin Franklin reinforced the ties of the growing town with its overpowering neighbor, Philadelphia.Stephanie Grauman Wolf
See also Pastorius, Francis Daniel; Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania German (Dutch) Language; Sauer, Christoph; Schwenkfelders
References and Further Reading
Hotchkin, S. F. Ancient and Modern Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill. Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1889.
Keyser, Namaan H., et al. History of Old Germantown. Germantown: Horace F. McCann, 1907.
Tinkcom, Harry M., Margaret B. Tinkcom, and Grant Miles Simon. Historic Germantown from the Founding to the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century: A Survey of the German Township. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955.
Wolf, Stephanie Grauman. Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683-1800. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
------. “Hyphenated America: The Creation of an Eighteenth-Century German American Culture.” America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three- Hundred-Year History. Eds. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, 1:66-84.