First City. Gary B. Nash
English. But Gloria Dei, the “Old Swedes Church” in Philadelphia, became a revered sanctuary for people of many national origins. Its minister, Andreas Hesselius, was the brother of the colony’s premier colonial painter.
Far more numerous than the Swedes—in fact, the most numerous of all immigrant groups to early Pennsylvania—were the Germans. Some 80,000 poured into Pennsylvania during the colonial era, most of them fleeing “God’s three arrows”—famine, war, and pestilence—in their homelands along the Rhine. Although most of them moved through Philadelphia to take up farming, hundreds stayed in Pennsylvania’s commercial center, taking up positions as artisans, innkeepers, printers, merchants, and clergymen.24
To Pennsylvania came Germans of many types, and they were among the earliest immigrants recruited by Penn, who had traveled through the Netherlands and the Rhineland and published his promotional tracts in German as well as English. Some of the earliest German settlers, like Johannes Kelpius, were pietists, seeking in Pennsylvania a refuge where they could put themselves beyond the scorn and abuse of their neighbors. In 1694, Kelpius led a settlement of some forty German pietists who purchased land in Germantown and became industrious members of that community. Christopher Witt’s ink drawing of the mystic Kelpius, done about 1705 and purchased by the Historical Society 177 years later, may be the first portrait rendered in Pennsylvania.
Following the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, ending a series of Anglo-French wars that hampered immigration, German sojourners to Pennsylvania poured ashore. More numerous than the pietists were the Moravians, whose main settlement was in Bethlehem. Like the Quakers, the Moravians dressed conservatively, garbing themselves in grays and browns and avoiding ruffles or other evidences of vanity. Unlike the Quakers, who wished for peace with native peoples but had no desire to convert them to Quakerism, the Moravians were among the most fervent missionaries to the Indians.
Though Pennsylvania became dotted with pietistic German communities, the most numerous of the German immigrants were the industrious farmers and artisans of the more worldly Lutheran and German Reformed churches. Settling in the western parts of Bucks and Chester Counties and more thickly in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties, they left behind a tradition of folk craftsmanship and art that is immensely popular today. The painted furniture German artisans produced shows how the culture of the homeland could persist when transplanted to an environment that did not despise or attack cultural diversity. The painted chest (Figure 12) was often the most important storage item found in rural southeastern Pennsylvania households well into the nineteenth century. Holding clothing, linens, bedding, and even tools and food, it was frequently used as well for seating or as a table surface. The chests, to be found in every German household, were highly individualized with carving, inlay, and painting. They played a key role in each family’s migration. Many were inscribed with the name of the owner, thus marking a chest as the personal property of the immigrant and signifying how humble peasants began to see themselves as individuals. Many owners pasted their taufschein (baptismal certificate) inside the lid of the chest.25
The Historical Society, Philosophical Society, and Library Company had few members of German descent in the early years, partly because most German Americans lived in the counties west of Philadelphia and also because Philadelphia’s Germans had a thriving historical and literary society of their own, founded in 1763. Therefore, the collecting of material relating to Pennsylvania Germans did not figure prominently in the minds of the city’s collecting institutions at first. The Historical Society in 1882 received a rich collection of manuscripts, illustrated hymn books, German language pamphlets, and records of the Ephrata Cloister collected by Abraham H. Cassel, a descendant of Pennsylvania’s most famous German printer of the colonial era—Christopher Sauer. In 1904, the Library Company acquired a collection of about one thousand German imprints, including some 150 from the press of Sauer, including the first Bible printed in German in North America. Already, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, founded in 1877, had been gathering a few examples of German American pottery and then, by the early twentieth century, systematically began acquiring pieces from regional dealers who purchased them from rural homesteads. The public’s interest in German American folkways had been whetted in the 1864 Great Central Fair where a recreated Pennsylvania-German kitchen, with a huge banner reading “Grant’s Up To Schnitz,” captivated visitors. Philadelphia’s German-Americans built on this interest two decades later with a massive bicentennial celebration of the first arrival of German immigrants in 1683. But not until 1926, when DuPont beneficence allowed the Museum of Art to install a kitchen and bedroom from a German American miller’s house, did the public have regular access to the aesthetic taste and craftsmanship of the state’s largest ethnic group.
FIGURE 12. Pennsylvania German painted chest over drawers, 1775, Mercer Museum. This chest was inscribed with its owner’s name, Christina Hegern, and the date of its making, 1775. Public memory of the past is shaped—and skewed—by the kinds of objects that have survived. Common utilitarian household objects were seldom prized (often they simply wore out), and their owners or descendants usually discarded them. Now that interest in common folk has greatly increased, chests of this kind are precious, and entire museum exhibitions have been dedicated to this material culture, such as a 1999 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that brought together an array of decorative as well as fine arts that gave the public the fullest picture yet of early Pennsylvania craftsmanship and aesthetic taste.
Although cultural persistence was a hallmark of Pennsylvania’s German communities—and has led to the production of hugely marketable ironware, pottery, and fabrics along the tourist routes in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties today—it was from the beginning mixed with cultural adaptation. This was evident in some German newspapers that circulated in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties; the two-column, two-language format accommodated settlers of differing degrees of acculturation and provided an early form of bilingual education. No complete runs of these newspapers exist, which speaks to the limited eighteenth-and nineteenth-century vision of collecting institutions. As late as 1869, when James Rush left today’s equivalent of $20 million to the Library Company of Philadelphia, he wagged his finger, so to speak, in his bequest, directing that the library not collect to amuse the public and therefore shun “mind-tainting reviews, controversial politics, scribblings of poetry and prose, biographies of unknown names, nor for those teachers of disjointed thinking, the daily newspapers, except, perhaps for reference to support … the authentic date of an event.”26 Widely shared among cultural leaders, Rush’s vision of what was valuable and therefore collectible facilitated the obliteration of parts of the past that historians now strain to recapture.
Like the Germans, the Scots-Irish found in Pennsylvania a place of refuge, especially from economic privation. Also, like the Germans, most were unable to pay the fare across the Atlantic, and so they came as indentured servants. The term of service was four to seven years, during which time the servant surrendered his or her labor and the fruits of it entirely to the master. The indentured servant’s rights, more liberal in Pennsylvania than in many colonies, were spelled out in written contracts that have filtered into the collections of many institutions. Often the servant was to receive a few pounds and, if lucky, two suits of clothes, one of them new, and perhaps a few tools. Such a grubstake was for many the beginning of the slow climb toward economic security.
The Scots-Irish left behind no body of vernacular furniture, such as in the case of the Germans, and until recently the leaders of collecting institutions were little concerned with collecting evidence of ordinary immigrants’ lives. Not until the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies was founded in 1971 did Philadelphia have an institution focused on immigration history and ethnic heritage, and the materials it has gathered largely pertain to the immigrant experience since the mid-nineteenth century. Hence, the early history of the Scots-Irish, one of Philadelphia’s largest immigrant groups, is poorly documented. Only from the fragmentary records and artifacts of immigrant societies can partial stories be recovered. The medal of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, a mutual aid organization founded in 1771 for men of direct Irish descent, is one such rare item.
Besides the Germans