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The Germans and Swiss settlements of colonial Pennsylvania
The Germans and Swiss settlements of colonial Pennsylvania Author:Oscar Kuhns Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA- GERMAN FARMER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Although Christopher Sauer says that many of the early German... more »s of Pennsylvania had been wealthy at home; although Mittelberger distinctly tells us that " persons of rank, such as nobles, learned or skilled people," were often sold as redemptioners, yet the large majority of the eighteenth century settlers were poor. This of course was through no fault of their own; the devastations of the Thirty Years' War, and especially the wanton destruction ordered by Louis XIV. in the last decade of the seventeenth century, had reduced to poverty thousands who had been prosperous farmers and tradesmen; and not for two hundred years was this prosperity fully restored to those who remained in the Fatherland.1 Whatever property they had been able to gather together was used up in the ex- 1 See p. 6. penses of descending the Rhine and crossing the ocean, or was stolen by the unprincipled shipowners and their parasites, the Newlanders. It was not long, however, before this poverty was transformed into prosperity and plenty. This was especially true of the Mennonites, who came when the land was cheap, and who bought large quantities thereof. Later, property in the immediate neighborhood of Philadelphia and the adjacent counties became dearer and dearer, and finally not to be obtained at all. Those who came towards the middle of the century had to move further and further into the wilderness beyond the Blue Mountains or across the Susquehanna.2 After the Revolution, however, prosperity reigned throughout the whole of the farming regions of the State. This prosperity was not entirely due to the peculiar conditions of Pennsylvania at that time; others, both of those who came before and of those...« less