Why the Palatines Still Matter
by Richard Berleth

They were the first mass migration to the American colonies. They endured privations as terrible as any, yet when a new country called, their steadfastness made all the difference.

In order to celebrate the anniversary of the Palatine refugees’ arrival in America 300 years ago, we need to cast our minds back an impressive distance to the formative time of the American colonies. In 1710 the colonial world had only begun to sort itself out. The markers we now use to navigate the past—the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the birth of the United States—had not yet been put down. Into this place not even half mapped by its inhabitants and known in its entirety to no one sailed the largest refugee contingent ever to arrive in North America during the 18th century.

The German Palatines were survivors of religious war and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the armies of King Louis XIV in the upper Rhineland. The uprooting of Protestant farmers and craftsmen from their villages along the Rhine had been terrible to behold, and many in England and Holland sympathized with the destitute victims of French oppression. Here then was the beginning of the refugee road that the Palatines would travel. Ultimately that road would lead to Rotterdam, London, New York, and up the Hudson River to East Camp and West Camp, to land that is part of today’s Germantown and Saugerties.

They left behind centuries of personal history. And what a dreadful price they paid during their journey from the heart of Europe to the edge of the New York frontier! Approximately 3,000 Palatines sailed from England in leaky tubs at the beginning of 1710. By the time they arrived in New York in June, 470 men, women, and children had been lost to disease or shipwreck, according to the testimony of Colonel Hunter, their leader. More Palatines died of ship fever (probably typhus) while quarantined on Governor’s Island (Nutten Island) in New York Harbor. When the survivors were barged to East Camp and West Camp the following September, only about 1,800 remained of the original 3,000. Three hundred young people, many orphaned by the voyage or deaths on Governor’s Island, ended up adopted by city families or contracted as indentured servants.

The refugees’ new life in America never afforded them time or ease to look back, as we can now. That first generation buried the past as best it could and did what successful immigrants have always done: it lived in the moment, dreaming of rich lands just over the mountains where free farmers could build new homes and worship as they pleased. These were a people fixed on the future. Their leaders were prophetic dreamers, who, from the first moment the Palatines landed in the Hudson camps, charged with making tar out of pitch pine, schemed to cross the western mountains and descend into the land of “Scorrie,” the lovely, fertile Schoharie Valley.

The Palatines had heard of Schoharie in London and became convinced that the valley along the meandering creek far away in the wilds of New York was their Canaan, their destined promised land. From the start, they were determined to reach it no matter what stood in their way. Colonel Hunter, by then governor of the Crown Colony of New York, warned the restless camp dwellers that once in Schoharie they would be beyond the defensible frontier and exposed to every French raid aimed at the British colony. The bulk of the Palatines skipped over the mountains anyway, and spreading into the Mohawk Valley, opened a new chapter in their American story—one full of conflict with Dutch landowners and Crown officials.

Certainly the Palatines were a tough, resourceful people, inured to suffering, and, prepared to bear any risk or labor to attain their goals. Yet the same words might be spoken of any number of immigrant groups, then or now, arriving in America without a road back. African-Americans, Irish, Catholics, and Jews of all national origins experienced the same or worse. What is it that makes the Palatines different, exceptional, or more notable than other immigrants who endured the pains of parting, the dangers of the passage, the persecution and discrimination of being other in the New World?

In 1897, Sanford H. Cobb published a history of the Palatine immigration that begins by asking this very question. His book is dedicated to the “children of the Palatines,” who were his parishioners at Schoharie and Saugerties. From old-timers Cobb had learned tales of the migration and been shown the web of families tracing their origins back to Hunter’s ships. As a trained historian, on the other hand, Cobb had the critical tools to weigh the Palatine contribution to the building of the nation. Ahead of his time, he objected to nativists labeling the 1710 influx of poor, sick refugees, foreign-speaking and alien, a “threat to American nationhood.” His writing seeks to reveal and commemorate the intense identification of the Palatines with core values that would someday shape the ideas and institutions of the new United States:

“The Pilgrim Fathers were not the only company who sought in this western world ‘Freedom to worship God.’ The fact is that, if ever a body of emigrants came to America from under the hand of the oppressor, such were these Palatines; and if ever the thought of religious liberty constrained men to leave their native land for hoped-for freedom in America, such hope was powerful with these children of the Palatinate.... Their experience was utterly unlike that of all other bodies of colonists.... The Palatine immigrants of 1710 found, to their bitter sorrow, that they had only made an exchange of masters. For 15 years they suffered with a continuance of affliction; they were cheated and oppressed, and became the helpless victims of vindictive and rapacious men.”

A 300th anniversary celebration is not an occasion for reviewing the manifold wrongs suffered by the immigrants at the hands of grasping landowners and corrupt government officials. Suffice it to say that the Palatines found a way, generation by generation, to secure long sought-for homes and communities.

Yet however far they wandered from the old tar works of their beginning, East Camp and West Camp, they never forgot what that experience had meant to them. East Camp and West Camp became badges of honor proudly worn by those who endured the first winter and the toil that followed. Some that stayed to found Germantown, and helped to develop Saugerties and nearby Rhinebeck, kept faith with the first immigrants and their experience. Now, as winter approaches in 2010, their descendants commemorate that first bitter winter in a new land when their forbearers huddled in huts and prayed for an end to the ice and snow. What did their suffering give to the maturing colony of New York? Cobb remarks, “It goes without saying that it were impossible for such sturdiness of stock, such patient and firm persistence in the right, such capacity for endurance, and such buoyancy of hope, conjoined with such addiction to religion, to be absorbed into American life without a deep impress on the character of later generations.”

We must look now to what those descendants of the 1710 immigration confronted as the several crises of the 18th century swept over New York State.

From the Hudson to Schoharie to the farthest westward reaches of the Mohawk, the diaspora of Palatine children spread along the key waterways of central New York. One branch, led by Conrad Weiser, made the perilous journey down the Susquehanna to Pennsylvania, and there became the root of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Indeed, throughout the 18th century, immigration from Germany flooded into eastern Pennsylvania in the wake of this ground breaking. But the Plymouth Rock of German settlement in the New World remained on the Hudson, at Germantown and Saugerties, where the first Palatine refugees had landed decades before.

Offshoots of the Hudson colony built settlements on the Mohawk and Schoharie even as the Seven Years War unleashed French and Indian raids into the valleys. Palatines were farmers, not frontiersmen. Yes, they had learned to hold their own in the woods, but the community had never been martial in outlook. In their first winters, before they could eke out homesteads, the Palatines found the Mohawk and Oneida nations helpful and sympathetic. In fact, without the help of the Iroquois, so widely feared along the frontier, it is doubtful that the Palatine settlements would ever have lasted. Conrad Weiser, a survivor of Governor’s Island, was taken into a Mohawk family, learned Iroquoian dialects, and became a blood brother of the Six Nations. Sarah Kast, born in East Camp, was adopted by a Mohawk family, learned the language, and became a translator much in demand. There were others who bridged the cultural divides through arts of peace and craft.

Palatines had to fight for their homes in the mid-century but they fought the French and their Indian allies, not Native American neighbors and friends. In their rapport and cooperation with native people, the Palatine settlers expressed a deeply felt pacifism, an attitude not unlike that of contemporary Quakers. In the War for Independence, New England militia expressed contempt for Palatine soldiers. They (the theory went) had not had to wrest their lands from savages or kill to survive. When this idea was put to the test in 1777, the Palatine descendants proved their doubters wrong. Those who followed Nicholas Herkimer (himself a son of the 1710 migration) into the bloody fight at Oriskany, fought as long and as desperately as anyone else in the American Revolution. What was more, they would be fighting along the Mohawk for four more years before the Tory raiders and British incursions finally ceased.

When war came to the valleys, ethnic groups were pressed to join one side or the other. Nicholas Herkimer’s brother went with the Tories; Nicholas with the patriots. Sarah Kast and her clan wholeheartedly served the King, while numerous Palatine families, divided between the patriot promise for tomorrow and the British offer of peace and stability, wavered or compromised. The numbers cannot be known but the overall record suggests that two thirds of the Palatine community eventually decided for national independence.

This new nation, for which so many sacrificed and bled, would not always look kindly on the strange ways and odd appearances of a German-speaking enclave. Their piety and frugality often set them apart. But inevitably, as happens to all tight-knit communities, time loosens the ties that bind them together. The Palatines long ago put aside their cultural beginnings to find a place in the American mainstream. Their values, however, live on in the national heritage, as Sanford Cobb realized a century ago.

Germantown Turns 300

For months Germantown has been buzzing with preparations for their 300th Anniversary Celebration. The occasion is marked by special cultural/historical activities on the first weekend of October (historical talks to students, a history/genealogy seminar, an ecumenical service in Viewmont’s Lutheran Church, and a music extravaganza at the Germantown Reformed Church). On the second weekend there will be a full-blown revival of the Germantown Oktoberfest, the first in a dozen years, complete with parade, oompah bands, farm market & craft fair, demonstrations, dance and fireworks. Ongoing are special exhibits at the library, oral histories, and the sale of commemorative caps, t-and sweatshirts, and other items (available at Otto’s Market). Find much of this and more at: www.germantownnyhistory.org.

Big Dig at the Parsonage

Christopher Lindner, Archaeologist in Residence at Bard College, confers with Bard student Reuben Mills at the site of the parsonage built in the mid-18th century to house the minister of the Reformed Church of Germantown. The Bard Archaeology Field School and local volunteers conducted a series of investigations beginning in fall 2009 in order to understand the design and function of the original structure and changes to it over time. Near the house, six student archaeologists are investigating test trenches adjoining the foundation of the Parsonage in an effort to find evidence of the original cellar door. The trenches were dug by trowel, sifted through quarter-inch screen, and are approximately two feet deep. Farther from the building, volunteers are testing in what probably would have been the front yard. Artifacts and food refuse found there were likely to have been thrown from the doorstep, the table scraps to be eaten by farm animals, as was typical in the 18th century. Among those working in the yard is Alvin Sheffer (kneeling with bucket in front of him), who is an eighth-generation Palatine descendent and the local driving force behind the dig. Next to him is a Germantown Elementary School teacher. Photo courtesy Jane Dodds and 4274 Design Workshop

The Palatine Analemma

To help celebrate Germantown’s 300th birthday, artists and cousins Dea Archbold and Kurt Holsapple, both tenth-generation descendants of Palatine settlers who came to Germantown in 1710, are in the process of creating the Palatine Analemma—a sculpture based on the ancient design that marks the positions of the sun through the year. Archbold and Holsapple have been keeping track of the shadow cast by their gnomon—a 12-foot-tall spruce pole with three red elm knobs that was installed on the winter solstice in 2009—and will continue to do so until the year is complete. The stone wall sculpture, being built along the resulting pattern on the far side of the lake in Palatine Park, “will be in the shape of an elongated figure 8” says Holsapple. “The long loop marks the path of the sun from autumn through spring; the short one marks the summer, when the sun is high.... We want to mark, in stone, the actual time of the Palatines’ arrival and other significant events in Germantown history.” The height of the sculpture will vary, reflecting changing angles. Photo courtesy The Palatine Packet, published by the Germantown and Saugerties Historical societies.