Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Picturesque Quality of the Pennsylvania German: An Address, With Illustrations, Presented at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania-German Society
I think my awakening to the fact that one need not go abroad to be abroad was brought about once while a friend and myself were touring southeastern Pennsylvania as tramps, sleeping in barns and fattening on the prover bial hospitality of our pennsylvania-german friends: we stopped a small boy to inquire about the road and instead of an answer he gave us a most elaborate grin. He could not speak English. An older sister who had had the ad vantages of a common-school education presently appeared and relieved the awkwardness of the situation for all of us. A little further on in the same journey we made the ac quaintance of another fellow-citizen who, we learned, was sixty-five years old at the time, a scion of a family which had its origin in America not many years later than 1700. He was born in the house in which he still lived. Some folks might have thought him conservative to a fault, for he could not speak English either, nor had he ever ridden on a railway train although the puff of a passing loco motive in the valley below was plainly audible at his house. This gentleman was then the owner of a magnificent col lection of antiques, the legacies of two lines of his fore bears, and the great pride of his life was his trust that there would be a big vaudoo after his death.
Roughly speaking, the segment of a circle described from west to north of Philadelphia, taking that city as the center, and with radii seventy-five miles long, will com prehend that magnificent agricultural country which was peopled by the Palatine immigrants who commenced to occupy it in 1683, and which is mainly populated by their descendants to-day. In that year a small party of Men nonites came over in the Concord and settled at German town, now a most picturesque suburb of Penn's green city on the banks of the Delaware.
That was the first lapping of the tide which soon swept over the new land. According to our friend Governor Pennypacker, in his story of Germantown, it was the beginning of the infusion of that potent race which in the sixteenth century, under the lead of Luther, con fronted the Pope; and which has done so much to enrich, strengthen and liberalize the State of Pennsylvania and to establish those commonwealths in the West, where in the future will rest the control of the nation. Persecution at home and the prospect of an undisturbed right to worship God as they saw fit, turned the faces of thousands and tens of thousands of these Germans to America and nerved them for the awful horrors of the long voyage in loathsome and disease-infested ships.
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