Historic Rittenhousetown

ittenhouseTown: A Journal of History

2006 • Vol. 3 Table of Contents

Introduction: By Monica Letzring...... 1

The Square Piano: A RittenhouseTown Treasure By Mary Rittenhouse Shwartzentruber ...... 3

Invisible RittenhouseTown: Stories from Archaeology By Rebecca Yamin...... 7

William Rittenhouse as Minister: A Steady Presence in an Unsteady Context By John L. Ruth ...... 20

© 2006 Historic RittenhouseTown 206 Lincoln Drive Philadelphia, PA 19144 Introduction In the introduction to its first issue, we noted that RittenhouseTown: A Journal of History would attempt to show how various kinds of investigation help us to preserve and interpret Historic RittenhouseTown. We presented the examples of the Historic Structure Reports on two of the homes, making it possible for us to date them; of our Oral History Project, from which we learned about the community of Blue Bell Hill, established on Rittenhouse property in its later years; and of the research on the work of two early 19th century writers who left us with important information about the Rittenhouse mills. This issue continues the task, first considering how specific artifacts located on the site can help us to know more about the families that lived here. Mary Rittenhouse Schwartzentruber looks at the Square Piano that once was among the furnishings of one of the homes, and now, once again rests there. She points out what the piano can tell us about the rise of the family to prosperity, adding to what we had already learned from an earlier HSR investigation of the structure and architectural details of the house. Mary, a musician herself, is a longtime member of the Franconia Lancaster Choral Singers, participant in the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, and teacher of piano and organ. Rebecca Yamin goes back to an earlier time, to the history that still lies buried in RittenhouseTown. She urges us to look underground for those artifacts that will tell us what the early families ate, what tools and kitchenware they used—and more. Dr.Yamin, principal archaeologist/senior partner with John Milner Associates (JMA), directed the multi-year Five Points project in New York City, and has headed several excavations on Independence Mall in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Her book, Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: An Archaeological Memoir of Philadelphia, is forthcoming from Yale U. Press.

1 Histories of RittenhouseTown and its family regularly note that William Rittenhouse was selected to be the first Mennonite minister in America. “Why him?” one might ask. For John L. Ruth, an explanation lay in the history of early Germantown settlement. His research not only gives us a better understanding of the status of the Rittenhouse family, but at the same time expands our understanding of the complex immigration patterns of the early settlement and of the conflicts, even, at times, religious rancor, among the various German and Dutch groups. Professor Ruth is well known for his writings, films and lectures on Mennonite, Amish and Hutterite history. His major writings include Maintaining the Right Fellowship, a history of Franconia and Eastern District conference, and The Earth is the Lord’s, a history of the Lancaster Mennonite conference. Monica Letzring, Editor

We dedicate this Journal to the memory of Hugh B. Hanson, founder of the Friends of Historic RittenhouseTown and passionate and indefatigable supporter of it.

This issue of RittenhouseTown: A Journal of History is made possible through the generous support of James M. Duffin, Frank L. Hohman III, David R. Knapton, Ann Matonis, Barry R. McKeon, Daniel Rottenberg, and Anna Coxe Toogood.

Special thanks to The Lindenmeyr Munroe Paper Merchants, A Division of Central National Gottessman, Inc., for its donation of paper and envelopes; to Aztec Copies –The Loft, for its graphic design, layout, and printing; and to members of the History Committee.

2 The Square Piano: A RittenhouseTown Treasure By Mary Rittenhouse Schwartzentruber

Stepping into the parlor of the Enoch Rittenhouse homestead, you will immediately be taken by the beauty of a treasured musical instrument, an American Square Piano.This square piano had quite a journey prior to its return “home”to the village where it is now displayed. Donated by a tenth generation Rittenhouse, Mrs.Theodore H. Steuber of Dallas,Texas, the piano had been in the Rittenhouse family since its original acquisition in the 1790s. Mrs. Steuber provided documentation of the piano’s journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore in 1832 by Charles Rittenhouse, son of Nicholas. For two hundred years, the piano was carefully granted to succeeding generations, who obviously valued its presence in their homes.1

1 Mignonette Rittenhouse Steuber, personal communication, September 24, 1992.

3 The piano was made by John Haberacker of Reading, PA, circa 1794. (Some documents list the name as Jaberacker, perhaps a misinterpretation of the German script used at the time.) Upon inspection of the piano, a piano technician deemed the instrument “of very high quality construction for the time.”2 The piano has undergone a very careful restoration by Christopher M. Swan, of Colonial Williamsburg,Virginia. An example of the care given to the restoration is the description of the string tension loosened gradually over a period of six months by Mr. Swan. Each pin in a single row of tuning pins was loosened one-quarter turn every two weeks, repeatedly rotating through all four rows of pins. The piano was rendered unplayable at the time of restoration to preserve the fragile condition of the action.3 The RittenhouseTown square piano has sixty-one keys compared to the standard eighty-eight keys of current pianos. The white keys have an ivory overlay while the black keys are dark stained wood. The case, which is rectangular, is of rosewood inlaid with holly and harewood.4 When the lid is down, covering the keys, the case rather resembles a coffin, not an uncommon shape for pianos of that era. The panel above the keyboard has a typical German-style presentation of exquisitely decorative hand drawn, colored scrolls, leaves and wreath centering the John Haberacker’s name. The legs are attached by means of hand-wrought wooden screws with heads the size of a black walnut. Lion-faced brass medallions guard these screws and swing easily to reveal the practical mechanisms. The history of stringed instruments can be traced to biblical times when a kind of primitive harp, the psaltery, had its strings

2 Eben Goresko, personal communication, September 22, 1994. 3 Christopher M. Swan, Treatment Report (September, 2000). On file, Historic RittenhouseTown. 4 Historic RittenhouseTown Catalog Sheet, Accession Number RT1993.1.

4 attached to a sounding board. Both the virginals of Shakespeare’s time and the later sophisticated harpsichord of Bach’s and Mozart’s time are derived from the psaltery, in that the playing mechanism plucked the strings. Newer keyboard instruments were developed which used soft hammers to produce tones, allowing more sensitivity to the player’s touch while giving variety to the tones with exquisite crescendo and decrescendo qualities. Between the harpsichord and the piano e forte was the clavichord, played by both Mozart and Bach. Bach is said to have loved the clavichord as a domestic instrument since the music could be played softly for his wife while his many children were sleeping.5 Mozart is reported to have carried a clavichord with him for daily practice in his travels throughout Europe.6 The American Square Piano had the strings grouped in sets of two. Modern pianos have the strings grouped in triplicate except for the lower register where two thicker strings are enough to produce the tones. Square pianos were the most common of the domestic keyboards, widely used in England and Colonial America during the time Haberacker was making pianos in Reading, PA. The construction of square pianos continued as late as 1868 when eighty percent of Steinway’s production was still the square piano.7 By this time upright pianos were becoming a preferred alternative as they were easier to build and to maintain. The RittenhouseTown square piano tells us something about domestic life and architecture in America and at our site. First, the size of the instrument is appropriate to a small room in a country house. The square form of the instrument is adaptable to a living

5 Anthony Burgess, “The Well-Tempered Revolution: A Consideration of the Piano’s Social and Intellectual History,” The Lives of the Piano, ed. James R. Gaines (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), 9-10. 6 Alfred Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers, rev. ed. (1911; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 32. 7 Ronald Lee Berry, “The Square Piano,” from David Crombie, Piano (1995). http://www.ptg.org/resources-historyOfPianos-square.php. (March 5, 2006).

5 or a dining room, where its dimensions would fit in with other, non-musical, furniture. There was a market for such instruments among families who had the time and money for music, but whose rooms might not accommodate a grand piano. A look at the elegant wooden inlay work and painting on the cover of the piano reminds us of two facts: the buyer could afford such craftsmanship, and the instrument was meant to be seen at close range, as well as heard. Most likely the square piano was meant to be played alone or to accompany one other instrument or a few voices. We can see this in the paintings of the Dutch painter, Jan Vermeer, the most famous of a group of 17th century artists who painted people making music.Vermeer returns several times to the subject, with similar elements in each case: one person at the keyboard, a second person perhaps singing, and an optional third person listening. One can only imagine the type of music played on the square piano now resting in Historic RittenhouseTown. When it was purchased in the 1790s, music by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart would have been available for a pianist. Hymns were likely played during the proper observations of “The Day of Rest.” The age of romantic music for the piano was yet to arrive with music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. Historic RittenhouseTown is most grateful to the generations of pianists and caretakers of this genteel, delightful piano which can now be enjoyed as a visual treat.

6 Invisible RittenhouseTown— Stories from Archaeology by Rebecca Yamin Bathed in the afternoon sun, RittenhouseTown appears as a vision of the past, a tiny community stretched out along the banks of a sparkling stream. It suggests olden times, simpler times, purer times. As with any landscape, our minds and our memories have everything to do with what we see. We link the houses into an idyllic community, one that goes with its history as the site of the very first paper mill in America and the birthplace of David Rittenhouse, one of the young country’s most important scientists. What we see aboveground at RittenhouseTown is actually a collection of houses built at different times left standing by the Fairmount Park Commission for no more lofty purpose than to house park personnel.1 The idyllic woodland setting has little to do with the original setting. The “real” RittenhouseTown sat at the base of a cleared slope. Its core was a complex of mill buildings, not including the first mill that washed away in an early eighteenth-century freshet, but definitely including the second mill and at least one additional mill building.2 The mills, after all, were RittenhouseTown’s reason to be and the houses, built over a period of 130 years, were the homes of the millers. The mills, and even their foundations, are unfortunately invisible. Taken down by the Fairmount Park Commission when it acquired the lands along the Wissahickon in the late nineteenth century, all that is left is a maze of buried walls, uncovered by an archaeological team in 1990/1991, but covered up again for the

1 Rittenhouse family members also apparently campaigned to preserve the standing structures. Anna Coxe Toogood and Robert Holstein, “Stereoscopic Views: The Wissahickon Valley in Transition,” RittenhouseTown:A Journal of History 2. 1 (2000): 41. 2 According to Ben Haavik, the Mill II site included several mills that were joined to form one large mill in the early nineteenth century: Haavik, Cultural Landscape Inventory (April 2000), 9. On file, Historic RitttenhouseTown.

7 sake of preservation.3 Besides the mill foundations, many more structural remains lie buried beneath the ground of RittenhouseTown. Old photographs, prints, and maps show barns, sheds, a springhouse, another dwelling house, a carriage house, and lots of fences, all of which have more than likely left their imprints in the ground, in some cases, merely as post holes, in others as hefty stone foundation walls. There was once a blacksmith shop near the center of the village and workers’ row houses and a church stood along the connecting road to Rittenhouse Street on the southern edge of the community. The rowhouses and church were demol- ished when Lincoln Drive was built in ca. 1900. Remains of a quarry, also south of Lincoln Drive, are still visible in the woods and tantalizing patterns along the edges of the old Rittenhouse Street probably represent structures and/or activities relating to its operation. A school belonging to the nineteenth-century village stood on the high ground to the northwest of the present village and a string of mills, several originally owned by members of the Rittenhouse family, dotted the banks of the creek below. All of this is invisible and without it RittenhouseTown appears to be something it never was, a quiet hamlet in a woodland glade. The challenge is to make the invisible visible, to bring to life the purpose of RittehouseTown and its people. An Archaeological Role The work done by SJS Archaeological Services, Inc. with the help of a trained group of volunteers in 1990/1991 revealed foundation walls belonging to two apparently separate structures (see D on the map). The buried walls were interpreted as possibly

3 During two seasons of fieldwork, SJS Archaeological Services, Inc. uncovered stone foundation walls belonging to at least two different buildings. They also looked for remains of the first paper mill and defined the edges of the mill pond and raceway. Their methods and finds are described in a detailed report, In Search of the Rittenhouse Paper Mills: 1990 and 1991. Archaeological Investigations Conducted at Historic RittenhouseTown, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, submitted by Elizabeth Y. Rump, Anne M. Jensen, Glenn W.Sheehan and Randall H.Wise, 1993. On file, RittenhouseTown.

9 belonging to the third mill built in the village and to what the archaeologists believed was a still later mill building. This later building, depicted in an 1889 photograph (see RittenhouseTown:A Journal of History, 1, 1: 35), was still standing when the Fairmount Park Commission took over the land. The earlier of the foundations probably belonged to the mill Nicholas Rittenhouse built sometime between 1708 and 1734. It was not the first mill on the property nor even the second (Mill II), the exact location of which is yet to be determined, but it may eventually have been connect- ed to that second mill creating a complex of buildings that would have dominated the center of the community. An 1885 map identifies that complex as a “factory.”4 Nicholas Rittenhouse, called Claus, worked with his father in the paper mill business from the very beginning and took over the mill when his father died in 1708. With his wife, Wilhelmina, Claus built the earliest (1707) extant house at RittenhouseTown, known as “the homestead” (207 Lincoln Drive), and he probably also built the separate kitchen or bakehouse (207A LD) around 1730.5 The census records tell us that Claus and his wife had seven children, three sons and four daughters. From his will we know how he disposed of his property at his death and that he continued to use the Dutch language for at least some family documents,6 but we know nothing of the family’s everyday lives. We don’t know how they lived or how they fit into Philadelphia society. Their house, an artifact in itself, reveals a mixture of Dutch and German architectural traits, but what about the rest of their possessions?

4 G. M. Hopkins, City Atlas of Philadelphia 2: 21st and 28th Wards. 5 Timothy Noble presents convincing circumstantial evidence for these dates of construction in his Historic Structure Report, The 1707 Claus Rittenhouse Home and the c.1730 Unidentified Outbuilding, Historic RittenhouseTown, March 29, 1996. On file, Historic RittenhouseTown. 6 James M Duffin’s study of the 1726 will of Nicholas Rittenhouse (Claus Rittinghuisen) demonstrates how one document can manage to express the complex cultural influences—Dutch, German, English—that reflect his background and community. J. M. Duffin, “The Face of Ethnic Tradition Revealed in the 1726 Will of Claes Rittinghuisen,” RittenhouseTown:A Journal of History, 2. 1: 20-37.

10 Although the family spent only ten years in Holland before emigrating, did this exposure to Dutch culture have a lasting influence on the food they ate, the things they chose for their house, their sense of identity? Or did their much deeper roots in German culture reappear in their new home? Are there recognizably German characteristics in their diet and personal possessions? The archaeological survey of RittenhouseTown, done in 1988 by John Milner Associates, Inc. as part of the master plan for the site, identified a shaft feature full of artifacts about 50 feet east of the northeast corner of the “homestead” (see map). What Philadelphia archaeologists call shaft features are the omnipresent, deep, mostly brick-lined circular holes in the ground that served as wells, cisterns (for underground water storage) or privies (the holes beneath outhouses, or necessaries as they were called historically). In Philadelphia, as in other cities, these holes, especially privies, were used for trash disposal once they had been retired from their original function. That trash, including broken dishes, glassware, buttons, bones and every other kind of household good, provides archaeologists with a window into past behavior, into peoples’ tastes, their economic wherewithal, their ethnic background, and even their aspirations. The shaft feature near 207 may well have been a privy,located just about the right distance from the door for convenience and comfort. We cannot know whose trash was deposited in the feature until it is excavated, but some may have belonged to Claus Rittenhouse’s household or to his son,William. William lived in the house with his large family (the census lists 11 children) after his father died and he was followed by his son, Nicholas, and his family. When archaeologists excavate a feature they keep each fill deposit separate. Once we have dated the artifacts in the separate layers we use census and other written records to determine who was living on the property when the trash was thrown out.

11 For archaeologists, artifacts are not just material objects. They are a language, and our aim is to interpret what the language means. We use the artifacts in combination with everything else we can find (e.g., census data, tax records, architecture) to weave together a picture of peoples’ lives, to figure out who they were and who they wanted to be. This interpretive approach to historical archaeology allows us to construct vignettes in the past within the constraints of what we know.We do not make up stories, but just as historians string facts together to build narratives about the past, we use artifacts in addition to the written record to make sense of what we find. Statistics and long lists of artifacts do not tell a story and pretty things are not enough to tell you what people’s everyday lives were like. Writing narratives, i.e., telling stories, is in this case not merely entertainment. It is a method for pulling everything we know into a coherent whole.7 We haven’t done this at RittenhouseTown. We haven’t added the language of things to the wealth of other kinds of information that has been so carefully compiled: the Historic Structure Reports, the recently completed cultural landscape report, J.M. Duffin’s research on the German-Dutch background of the Rittenhouses, and Andy Zeller-Frederick’s research on the Revolutionary period. We haven’t added material objects because they are still safely buried in the ground, but we know they are there because various projects, including the John Milner Associates 1988 survey and the work done by LuAnn DeCunzo in

7 The interpretive approach in historical archaeology grew out of the work of anthropol- ogist Clifford Geertz. This approach is well described by Mary C. Beaudry, Lauren J. Cook, and Stephen A. Mrozowski, “Artifacts and Active Voices: Material Culture as Social Discourse,” The Archaeology of Inequality, ed. Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA 1991), 150-191. Storytelling was the subject of an issue of the discipline’s major journal in 1998: Rebecca Yamin,“Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology, 32:1: 74-85. This and another article,Yamin,“Alternative Narratives: Respectability at New York’s Five Points,” The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes, ed. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154-170, discuss and illustrate the method.

12 1996 in association with the Historic Structure Report for 207, have identified the rich archaeological potential of the site. This article is not a call to dig it all up. It is merely meant as speculation into what we could learn from doing at least some digging and what that information would contribute to interpret- ing life at RittenhouseTown. My focus is two potential stories we might tell at RittenhouseTown with the help of archaeology. The first is about the early generations of papermakers who carved out a life in a new land and the second is about the prosperous fifth generation, the Rittenhouse who took over the business at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Storytelling is a relatively new approach to presenting archaeological finds, but those of us who do it believe it is the best way to integrate the written record with the archaeological record. One is not more important than the other; they are intertwined. Beginning at the Beginning– The Early Generations The re-excavation of the mill foundations already identified and an expansion of the excavation to include all extant remains of the entire Mill II complex could provide a central focal point for the site more in keeping with its original identity as an industrial community than what appears aboveground today. Done in concert with an excavation of the shaft feature and yard associated with the “homestead,” the lives of the early generations of Rittenhouse papermakers and their families might be brought to light. Even the process of recovering the mill remains and household goods would connect people–both participants in the excavation and onlookers–to the past in a way that is different and, I would argue, more powerful than merely describing the past from the written record alone.

13 The excavations would answer questions about the chronology of expanding the second paper mill, and they might even illuminate the technology used to connect the mill race to the wheel, something that is not yet understood. Once the excavations were completed, the foundation walls could be left exposed. Their physical presence in the middle of the site would physically tie the present to the past and make the community’s reason to be visible. The excavations near the “homestead” would have a very different purpose. They would bring to life the various Rittenhouse family members who lived there, how the yard was used, how that changed over time, and what kinds of things they chose to own and could afford to own. While the “homestead” is itself an artifact that ties the Rittenhouses to their Dutch-German background, smaller artifacts, even food remains, could be used to learn more about their ethnic allegiances. Food remains, such as the butchered bones left over from meals, are particularly powerful expressions of culture because people, as we know from our own experiences, often retain dietary traditions long after they have assimilated other aspects of their adopted cultures. Timothy Noble has shown how stylistically Dutch the architecture of 207 and its outbuilding were, but what about the food the inhabitants ate? Was it also Dutch? Using data from several sites in lower Manhattan, once New Amsterdam, archaeologist Meta Janowitz found that the Dutch adopted some new foods, corn for instance, but they used it for porridge as they had used other grains in Europe.8 They preferred domesticated animals over wild species and continued to eat a good deal of fish as they had at home. Janowitz’s best evidence for Dutch foodways came from the Dutch style ceramics dishes that

8 Meta Janowitz, “Indian Corn and Dutch Pots: Seventeenth-Century Foodways in New Amsterdam/New York,” Historical Archaeology, 27. 2: 6-24.

14 were found. They used small, three-legged, bulbous pots called grapen for cooking and eating, and shallow skillets with celery-shaped hollow handles for melting butter and making pancakes. According to Janowitz, bread was the mainstay of the Dutch diet and while we cannot recover it archaeologically, the presence at RittenhouseTown of a bakehouse (207A), built in FIGURE 5: Vessel forms include: top, grape (after Hurst the European tradition with a et al. 1986:Figures 186, 196); middle and bottom, huge fireplace that people skillets (after Hurst et al. 1986:Figures 198, 199). Reprinted with permission from Historical Archaeology, vol.27. would have walked into9 suggests the continued importance of that traditional food. Whether any of the Rittenhouse households used the characteristically Dutch ceramic vessels found in New York awaits excavation. The seeds of plants are also preserved in privy contexts and they too provide information on diet as well as medicinal practices. Peach pits thrown out in the eighteenth century look identical to peach pits thrown out today, but smaller plant remains, the tiny seeds of strawberries, for instance, need to be identified by a paleoethnobotanist under a microscope. Once identified, they add to a picture of what people ate everyday and even how they treated disease. Chenopodium (wormseed), a fairly common wild plant, was used to cure Acaris (giant intestinal roundworms), a parasite whose eggs are preserved in privy soils. Parasitologists use special

9 Timothy Noble, personal communication, November 2004.

15 techniques to identify the miniscule eggs and from them they can tell us what stomach ailments were common, whether people suffered from diarrhea or various other kinds of worm-induced disease. In combination with the medicinal herbs and medicine bottles recovered we can say something about the state of people’s health, how they treated disease at specific times, and how they attempted to prevent it. RittenhouseTown and the Industrial Revolution One of the unusual things about the Rittenhouse family is how many generations stayed in the paper business. Even Enoch Rittenhouse, a member of the fifth generation, identified himself as a “papermaker” although he eventually converted the mill into a cotton operation. Enoch took over the mill in 1811 and found himself in charge during an economic boom in the local economy that apparently resulted from a ban on English imports during the War of 1812.10 Enoch made money and built not one but two houses, the first, 209 Lincoln Drive, sometime between 1818 and 1830, and the second, 208 Lincoln Drive, in 1840 or so. Presumably,the first was for his own small household (in 1830 only three people are listed in the census including Enoch, his wife, and a young man between 15 and 20 years old). There were no children. Isaac Rittenhouse, Enoch’s nephew, lived in the second house (208) and when Enoch died Isaac inherited both houses.

10 That Enoch’s prosperity resulted from a temporary boom in the local economy is suggested in John Milner Associates, Inc., Historic Structure Report for the Jacob Rittenhouse House, 209 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 2003: 1-2. On file, Historic Rittenhousetown. A recent study of artisans who lived in South Sixth Street in Philadelphia during the first quarter of the nineteenth century might be used compar- atively: Yamin, with contributions from Alexander Bartlett, Tod Benedict, Juliette Gerhardt, Claudia Milne, Leslie Raymer, Karl Reinhard, and Nikki Tobias, After the Revolution—Two Shops on South Sixth Street” (2000). The study was done for the National Park Service in conjunction with the construction of a new Liberty Bell Center on Independence Mall. On file, National Park Service, Philadelphia, PA.

16 We know from John Milner Associates’ 1988 archaeological survey that there are lots of artifacts buried between the two houses and on either side of them (see map). The springhouse was also located between the two houses, which shared one historic lot, and there were other outbuildings, fences, and gardens. A systematic archaeological study of the grounds surrounding both houses would provide insights into life in mid-nineteenth century RittenhouseTown. There is an opportunity here to not only collect artifacts from sheet midden deposits (i.e., trash-strewn backyards) or pits, but to expose the historic organization of the space including the foundations of outbuildings, pathways, fence lines, and garden plots. Like the foundation walls of the mills discussed previously, the now invisible building and outbuilding foundations, as well as the well-worn routes the residents traveled and the areas where they worked, could be left exposed. It would be much easier to imagine the bustling mid-nineteenth century industrial community if at least some of its component parts were visible. Enoch Rittenhouse and the other millers in the vicinity presumably distinguished themselves from the mill workers, their employees, but we don’t know how they did this or even definitely if they did. While comparative studies of workers’ and owners’ possessions may not be possible at RittenhouseTown, it should be possible to compare the possessions associated with Enoch’s rather grand residence with the possessions of the less prosperous members of the family and tenants. There is a rich trash midden on the hillside to the east of 208 Lincoln Drive associated with the small house (referred to as the “chimney house” because of the chimney in the middle (“C” on the map)), right next to the mill. It is not absolutely clear who lived in this house, but it may well

17 have been the foremen in the mill. The 100 artifacts recovered from one shovel test and the surrounding area included sherds of utilitarian redwares, imported earthenwares (some with blue transfer-printed decoration and others with hand painting), and whitewares. There were fragments of wine bottle glass, embossed medicine bottles, clay pipes, food remains, and a small metal medallion with a glass bead center. From these and the many more things that still lie buried in the ground we will be able to learn something about the people who lived in the little house and threw their trash out the back door. The class position of artisans in the first half of the nineteenth century is not well understood and different artisans seem to have chosen different routes to respectability. The artifact assemblages associated with the different nineteenth-century households at RittenhouseTown will provide material that can be compared to material associated with other artisan households. It will show us both what life was like at RittenhouseTown and how it compared to life elsewhere in Philadelphia. Telling the Stories—Constructing the Past There are lots of stories to tell at RittenhouseTown: stories of building the second mill and expanding it, of living in a new land and clinging (or not clinging) to old ways, of making money and entering the industrial age. These are not new stories, but with archaeology they could be more complete stories, and most important of all, they would be more believable. There is nothing like the archaeological process to connect people to the reality of the past and also to the laborious process of figuring it out.

18 But archaeology cannot be taken lightly. In one sense, the process itself destroys the buried record. No matter how carefully we dig we can only do it once. We are walking where past generations walked and erasing their footsteps as we go. It is absolutely essential that any archaeology that is done at RittenhouseTown be done by professionals. Ideally, a nearby university would be willing to conduct annual fieldschools and field courses at the site. Every aspiring archaeologist is required to take a fieldschool and professors need places to train students. The students work under the close supervision of professionals; first and foremost they learn how to excavate and record properly but they also learn how to think about archaeological remains and how to talk to the public about what they are doing. Artifact processing and analysis are the same in the sense that they,too, need to be done under profession- al supervision. In this case, however, it is conceivable that community members as well as students could be involved in laboratory activities, especially if they were conducted somewhere on the site. The past does not reveal itself easily. The stories do not tell themselves. It takes imagination and many minds to make sense of the fragmentary information. At RittenhouseTown we are at an advantage because so many people have already given the place and its people so much thought. What we need to do now is add the material record to the written one and weave them together to gain a fuller picture of everyday life in this historic community. It was not the idyllic hamlet of houses that fool us in the present. It was a vibrant industrial community and with archaeology we can begin to make that vibrancy visible.

19 Willem Rittinghuÿsen as Minister: A Steady Presence in an Unsteady Context John L. Ruth

“It would be interesting,” mused Milton Rubincam in 1959, “to know the reasons that impelled the Mennonites at Germantown to select William Rittenhouse as their first regular minister, but unfortunately the records are silent on that score.”1 Almost half a century later, while it would be more interesting than ever, the picture remains veiled. Nevertheless, a revisiting of the ecclesiastical context in which Germantown’s Mennonites approached the threshold of covenanting might throw revealing patterns on the spiritual role of America’s first paper-maker. Re- reading correspondence with and among Germantown’s European sympathizers can make their influences more discernible. Weaving all hints found into as dense a narrative texture as possible may put a few more pixels in the portrait than sparer chronology has so far yielded. As a result, our impression that the Mennonite sense of church order found in Rittinghuÿsen a worthy if cautious steward will be confirmed. This is of course niche history; Mennonites constituted only a minority in the growing village of Germantown of 1683-1708 (in contrast to the reiterated myth of “thirteen Mennonite families” on the Concord). By the time of their calling a preacher in 1698, only about two dozen families of their affiliation seem to have straggled in. Their first “minister” was an academically untrained businessman and their first “bishop” a wood craftsman. The ragged flock consisted primarily of weavers and yeomen. Yet, however

1 Milton Rubincam, “America’s First Mennonite Minister,” in Milton Rubincam and Thomas R. Brendle, Willliam Rittenhouse and Moses Dissinger:Two Eminent Pennsylvania Germans, Pennsylvania German Society vol. 58 (1959), 49.

20 dimly glimpsed, because theirs is the first community of Mennonites to persist in America2, and because their first known minister was Willem Rittinghuÿsen, they and he will continue to haunt the imagination of both American Mennonites and the Rittenhouse progeny. In re-introducing this familiar subject, I shall not repeat the usual documentation of the scenario of early Germantown Mennonitism. Much of it has been often rehearsed and augmented since the foundational writings of Marion D. Learned, Samuel W. Pennypacker and William Hull began to appear over a century ago. More recent material consulted will be documented. Readers may well struggle with the story’s viscous detail. The lack of coherence in Germantown’s early Mennonite presence was not unique to them. It was part of the larger instability in early Pennsylvania, where “There was neither harmony nor authority,”according to a recent historian quoting another, but “only ‘wholesale confusion and chronic friction.’”3 Beyond this, whatever unity the incoming Mennonites sought had to deal with diverseness in their own backgrounds. Their infant fellowship represented four main, geographically separate Mennonite communities in Europe, each with its own accent and idiom. There were (1) textile-producing Krefeld and its environs on the Lower Rhine; (2) cultural capital Amsterdam near the North Sea, around those years the world’s richest city; (3) Hamburg and its adjacent whaling port of Danish Altona on the Elbe River; and (4) Kriegsheim, a vineyard-girdled Palatine village just west of Worms in “High Germany.”

2 A few Dutch Mennonites were recorded as living on Manhattan and Long Islands in the 1640s, and a colony of some two dozen Mennonite families lived for a year (1663-64) before being broken up at the site of present-day Lewes, Delaware. 3 Michael Zuckerman, “Authority in Early America: The Decay of Deference on the Provincial Periphery,” Early American Studies, 1 (Fall 2003), 6-7 (quoting Gary Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968).

21 It apparently did not prove hard for young individuals from this quadruple assortment to mix their genes in Germantown. What took time and patience was bringing into common focus enough Mennonite motifs of ideal church order to constrain them from organizing abortively. In the town’s preliminary quarter-century, the shape of their cautiously organizing fellowship was likely little or no more amorphous than those of other European-born church groupings–whether exotic or mainline–that fizzled, or took even longer than that of the Mennonites to get their acts together in Pennsylvania. Whatever these Mennonite immigrants may have lacked as they waited for a church order they could own, they did evince a sharing of a spiritually congenital sense of international church family. They repeatedly responded to the other ecclesiastical options available in their new setting–Quaker, mystic, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist–with the answer, “None of the above.” “Although they did not all agree,” recollected an immigrant of 1701,4 “they found it good to have exercises together.” Surrounded by a mixture of Quakers who would have been glad to accept them in worship, they continued to regard themselves as a potentially–if unprecedentedly–covenanted overseas extension of Mennonite congregations spread from the North and Baltic seacoasts to the Alps. That international network, hallmarked as a Christian wehrlos (nonresistant) spiritual species, characteristically stayed in mutual touch regarding themes common to their varying Anabaptist origins. Whether of northern Dutch or southern Swiss-German derivation, they had been imprinted at their Sixteenth Century births with the conviction of congregational

4 Attributed to Mennonite bishop Jacob Gaetschalcks in Andreas Ziegler, Isac [sic] Kolb and Christian Funk (Skippack, Indian Creek and Plain) to Wynan Peter Wynands, Wopke Molenaar, Sino Van Abema and Johannes Cuperus ( Krefeld and Utrecht), March 1, 1773, translation in John C.Wenger, History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference (Telford, Pa.: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937), 397.

22 accountability as a practical test of authenticity. It is this instinct of spiritual mutuality that explains why the straggling diaspora of European Mennonite offspring collecting in Germantown gathered for worship with their own kind, and, rather than acting briskly on their own, wrote back to Europe for ecclesiastical sanction from leaders whose wehrlos church authority they could acknowledge. Mennonites wanted not only spiritual fellowship, but, as a Palatine grandfather of immigrants to Germantown put it in 1681, the rechte Gemeinschaft.5 “The right fellowship” was one in which the reconciliation worked by Christ’s sacrifice was the keynote to all human behavior, superseding whatever civil or cultural regimen amidst which it appeared. To accept this mentality,less creedal than practical, was to acknowledge what felt like an apostolic and authentically recognizable succession. It was Willem and Gertruid Rittinghuÿsen’s lot to be drawn from their Dutch Reformed mentality into the Mennonite sense of an accountable nonresistant fellowship as the “right” or fully Christ-following one. During that process, not only the geographical and cultural variety among Germantown’s Mennonites,but also the persistent internal divisions among each of their four parent church communities slowed their quest for organizational unity. With this in mind, we might regard any established order at all in a shaky new community as a noteworthy achievement. As for businessman Willem Rittinghuÿsen, it is an intriguing comment on his reputation that for over a decade in his final years it was this adopted brother who was called to the center of the Germantown Mennonite gathering process, and re-affirmed as leader at its culmination.

5 “The right fellowship,” a phrase from a 16-page ms minister’s manual by Bishop Hinrich Kassel of Gerolsheim in the Palatinate, Menno Simons Historical Library, Harrisonburg,Va. Quoted in John L. Ruth, Maintaining the Right Fellowship: a narrative account of life in the oldest Mennonite community in North America (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1984), 51.

23 Fellowship among both Dutch and German Mennonites across northern Europe had been complicated by missionizing Quakers since the 1650’s. With their founder George Fox recently freed from prison, Friends’ emissaries had viewed ethically conscientious Mennonites on the Continent as ripe for harvest. From Amsterdam to Krefeld to Hamburg to the Palatinate to Danzig, Mennonite communities had found, to their consternation, some of their membership accepting the more pneumatically gathered arrangement that the Friends brought. In the historically oft-cited year of 1677 Fox himself had been among the Quaker itinerants, along with protégés William Penn and converted Scottish Presbyterian George Keith. Their trajectory had included cultured Amsterdam, bustling with affluent fourth-generation Mennonites; cloth-weaving Krefeld; tiny Palatine Kriegsheim; and even Mühlheim, the Lower Rhenish birth community of Willem Rittinghuÿsen, where the missioners were literally chased off. Residents of the village of Kriegsheim had been in debilitating trouble over taxes as they had shifted from quietist Mennonite to bold and even confrontive Quaker manners. Likewise at Krefeld, Mennonites-turned-Quaker were roughly harassed after they had learned from their new mentors to refuse to doff their hats in ordinary obsequious greeting. The British visitors offered encouragement to their persecuted Germanic converts, for whom Penn himself would soon open a refuge in his transatlantic colony. Both Quakers and Mennonites who went there beginning in 1683 brought along quite fresh memories of their recent tribulations. Why did not persons such as the aristocratic silk merchant Dirck Keyser or the capable paper-maker Willem Rittinghuÿsen– both coming to Germantown from Amsterdam in the late 1680’s– simplify their lives by joining the frontier village’s dominant

24 grouping, the Quakers? Instead, we are told by the later-arriving Jacob Gaetschalcks, that since they “could not agree” spiritually with the other Germantown inhabitants, they met by themselves. They preferred this, Gaetschalcks records, even if they could then only have “reading” rather than preaching, communion and baptism services. And this would go on for a quarter of a century after the first Mennonite couple arrived in 1683. What spiritual outlook might Willem Rittinghuÿsen, born to a Reformed family of the Lower Rhine and business-schooled in the Netherlands, have carried with him in 1687/88 to this four-year-old, one-street, linen-weaving village? For one thing, it was the mentality of a Mennonite convert. A decade earlier in 1678, when in his mid-thirties he had moved his family, for reasons of business, from little Roosendaal in the Province of Gelderland to Amsterdam, he was a trusted representative of his uncle’s paper mill. As a christened member of the Reformed Church, he had then taken an oath of citizenship in Amsterdam. This required formulaic words that non-swearing Mennonites had from their beginnings declined to use. What had then motivated him to accept their baptism-requiring fellowship? It would seem that there was no particular social advantage to joining the affluent Mennonite businessmen in the canal-patterned metropolis. On the other hand, there may have been an economic attractiveness to being part of that well-known fraternity. It took, for instance, many reams of quality paper to publish the two-volume, folio-sized, vellum-bound, coffee-table edition of the Mennonite Martelaersspiegel in 1685, seven years after Rittinghuÿsen had come to the city, and probably by that time become Mennonite. Paradoxically, now that the genteel Doopsgezinden could afford one of the country’s best artists to illustrate such a volume, they

25 were losing members. Many of their own children had outgrown the minority, martyr-venerating outlook of the ghastly (for them) mid-16th century recalled by the great Mirror, and were in the process of returning to the Reformed affiliation which Willem would soon leave. A factor for someone considering Mennonite affiliation was the foreboding phenomenon of multiple entrenched divisions among Dutch Mennonites ranks. Several of the fault lines ran dis- turbingly through Amsterdam, where the largest congregation was the liberal, Collegiant-influenced “Lam” on the Singel Canal. At this great center of Mennonite life Quaker William Penn had twice publicly debated with the pastor, most recently in the year before Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s move into town.6 The Lam’s impressive membership had then numbered well over 2,000 members. But fourteen years earlier it had lost some 500 to controversy, when a conservative grouping established a congregation nicknamed the “Zon” (Sun) several blocks distant on the Singel. Zon minister Samuel Apostool, of whom Willem Rittinghuÿsen must certainly have known, was much more protective than the Lam’s Collegiant leaders of the “teaching authority and sacraments” of the church he led, holding that the church order of his congregation was that of “a direct and undefiled descendant of the apostles.”7 The debate over this issue of authentic Christian membership spread, as a recent historian puts it,“across the entire Dutch Mennonite community and polarized the Mennonites around the Lamist and Zonist parties.”8 The tensions would persist well beyond the 1708 death of Rittinghuÿsen, and still be of more than passing concern

6 In that discussion, to hear George Fox tell it, Penn had quite “confounded” his liberal Mennonite interlocutor. George Fox, Journal of George Fox (London: Friends’ Tract Association, 1891), II, 310. 7 Andrew C. Fix, “Mennonites and Rationalism in the Seventeenth Century,” From Martyr to Muppy, eds. Alistair Halmilton, Sjouke Voolstra and Piet Visser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), 168. 8 Ibid., 173.

26 to his ministerial followers in Pennsylvania six decades later.9 Rittinghuÿsen would obviously have observed the unresolved Mennonite tensions during his residence in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, sometime in the decade between his arrival there and his migration to Pennsylvania, he would so well espouse life-long Doopsgezind (Mennonite) convictions that he could eventually be regarded as an appropriate choice for a spiritual leader’s role among persons whose Mennonite pedigree was familial. Surely,as a purchaser in Amsterdam for his uncle’s paper mill in the Province of Gelderland, Rittinghuÿsen had also made the acquaintance of businessman Dirck Keyser, third-generation silk- maker and seller on the Prince Canal, not far from the Lam on the Singel. Keyser’s mentality was that of a venerable line of Anabaptists. His maternal grandfather, an influential preacher, had been one of the signers of the 1632 Doopsgezind “Peace Agreement” of Dordrecht that Willem Rittinghuÿsen would later promote in Pennsylvania, and that is still owned as an official confession of faith by thousands of conservative American Mennonites. Dirck himself would prove to be of lifelong Mennonite loyalty and leadership. Conversation with such a person–known to be interested in relocating in America–might well have influenced a younger business acquaintance. It would be fascinating to learn how early these future neighbors in Germantown made each other’s acquaintance. According to some records, both businessmen were contemplating emigration around the same time, since they are listed as purchasing land in Germantown within seven weeks of each other, in September and October of 1687.10

9 Ziegler, Kolb and Funk, letter of 1773, 402 (n. 4): “Further, we should like to know whether there is any division between you and the Waterlanders and Frisians, and whether there is any division between the above mentioned and the United Flemish and Waterlanders, and in what the division consists, and if there is a division whether they seek to bear themselves toward each other with love?” 10 For the date of Keyser’s purchase, see “Descendants of Dirck Keyser, 1635-1714, Part I,” The Dirck Keyser Newsletter, I (September 1988), p. 2. For the Rittenhouse date, see n. 11.

27 Surely both of these entrepreneurs, being party to Amsterdam’s economic gossip, would also have been aware of the outspoken investor Jacob Telner, who, though locally baptized Mennonite in 1665, had become an insistent Quaker. They would hear that he had spent several years (1678-81) across the Atlantic with Quakers in the New Netherlands, and in 1683 his investment in 5,000 acres, as one of the “First Purchasers” of William Penn’s brand new American colony, was likely common knowledge. On the one hand, Dirck and Willem might have taken a dim Mennonite view of Telner’s notorious penchant for noisily disruptive admonition of conventional Christians. On the other hand, they could have recognized economic possibilities in the venture which they saw Telner–now living in Krefeld, but often mentioned in Amsterdam –taking up. We have no specific information about the decision of the Rittinghuÿsen family (parents Willem and Geertruid, two sons Nicholas and Gerhart and daughter Elizabeth) to emigrate, or how they traveled. Perhaps they landed in New York, since there, son Claus was soon in the process of successfully courting a sixteen- year-old Reformed girl who had come from Friesland. We do know that on September 6, 1687,Willem was recorded as purchaser of a fifty-acre lot–one of the last then available–on Germantown’s lengthening thoroughfare.11 Two decades later the first Mennonite meetinghouse in America would appear on part of this very site. Here the Rittinghuÿsens were originally surrounded and partly disturbed by a clan of ex-Mennonites from two backgrounds, his own native Lower Rhine and the “High German” Palatine village of Kriegsheim. Most had joined the Quakers several years before migrating. Krefeld’s Friends had all gone to Pennsylvania by 1685, and by the following year Kriegsheim too

11 James M. Duffin,“Germantown Landowners, 1683-1714, Installment II,”Germantown Crier, 39 (Summer 1987), 66.

28 had been totally emptied of the element spawned there by Quaker missionaries three decades earlier. Arriving in Germantown with Kriegsheim’s Schumacher and Hendricks families in 1685 had come a young bachelor named Heivert Papen, native of the Rittinghuÿsens’ Mühlheim region. Whatever his spiritual background may have been, before long he would marry Willem’s daughter Elisabeth and become a member of her Mennonite fellowship. Not far down and across the road lived Jacob Telner himself, the town’s largest landowner, who also had arrived from Amsterdam with wife and daughter in 1685. Still vigorously making himself heard, he was expressing views that were decidedly too mystical- freethinking for sober Mennonites. He was accused of doubting the divinity of Christ. The few Mennonites who had preceded the Rittinghuÿsens in Germantown were from Krefeld. These included weaver Jan Lensen and his wife Mercken Schmit, who had come with the original contingent of settlers in 1683, and a son of First Purchaser Jacob van Bebber. This was Isaac van Bebber, who had arrived as a young bachelor in 1684. The marriage of Lower Rhenish Isaac to Palatine Frances Schumacher, daughter of the elderly ex- Mennonite widower Peter, brought Isaac’s Krefeld Mennonite identity into close relation with her Quaker background among the interrelated Kriegsheim clans. This and other family kinships running dendritically through the Quaker and Mennonite popu- lace of Germantown would interflavor its denominational history (and perplex amateur historians) for generations. The Mennonite Lensen couple, though quite outnumbered by the formerly Mennonite Quakers with whom most locals gathered informally for worship, seem to have been firmly rooted in their

29 orientation. This can be inferred from their waiting twenty-five years in Germantown to take legitimate communion in their own accountable fellowship, and from Jan’s repeated declining, on the basis of “conscience,”civic roles that required the application of the force of law. In contrast, the socially more consequential van Bebber families (of father and two sons) would prove less fixed in long-term Mennonite loyalty. Arriving in Philadelphia shortly before the Rittinghuÿsens came had been a young Quaker printer from Leicestershire, William Bradford. Could hints of his industrial need for paper for the shop he set up in 1685 have drifted into the business community of Amsterdam? In any case, in America this need led rather quickly to a partnership with Willem Rittinghuÿsen. Floated by two Philadelphia financiers and a favorable lease, the Rittinghuÿsen father and son Nicholas jointly with Bradford established a paper mill near Germantown in 1690. Disappointment with local politics that soon had Bradford thinking of returning to England must have augured some social instability to the Rittinghuÿsen family. Another disturbing note in the community’s life was the slave-owning practice of some local Quakers. It was around the time of the Rittinghuÿsens’ immigration that three of the village’s ex-Mennonites joined their learned Lutheran neighbor Franz Daniel Pastorius, likewise from the European Continent, in their memorably written in-house Quaker protest of 1688. Even more provocative was a brewing communal doctrinal controversy. Jacob Telner was reported to have been speaking “against original sin, psalm singing, baptism, communion, and the righteousness ascribed to Christ.”12 These and similar ideas held by other “Public Friends” in Philadelphia provoked the ire of Penn’s former companion, the Scottish schoolmaster George

12 William I. Hull, William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1970), p. 246.

30 Keith, who had arrived in Pennsylvania two years after the Rittinghuÿsens. By the time the paper mill was founded, this fellow missionary of William Penn and George Fox, though having been an outspoken Quaker for three decades, was becoming seriously unsatisfied in his affiliation. An interesting glimpse into Germantown’s religious scene comes from the date June 7, 1690, on which a visiting Dutch Reformed minister visitor reported hearing Jacob Telner preaching to Quakers. The community’s few Mennonites had no preacher as such. The visitor described the sixteen non-Quaker families in town as “Lutherans, Mennonites and Baptists, who are very much opposed to Quakerism.” This motley grouping which met separately was observed listening to the recently arrived Dirck Keyser reading sermons from a book by Jobst Harmenson.13 Taken at face value, this report seems to indicate that two or three years after the Rittinghuÿsens had arrived there was no specifically Mennonite meeting, simply a non-Quaker reading session. This fairly peaceful description would certainly have been changed had it been written two years later, when it could have reflected the effect of the witness of Philadelphia’s George Keith. While the fiery former Presbyterian had sojourned in Germany as co-missionary with Penn in 1677, he had been strong enough in Quaker beliefs to have encouraged the Palatine Schumacher, Hendricks and Cassel families in their adopted Friends’ convictions. But now he was increasingly scandalized by the latitudinarian beliefs evident among some of his Pennsylvanian Quaker co-religionists. After Germantown was granted a royal charter in 1691, and Jacob Telner accepted the office of the town’s first burgess, Keith argued heatedly that no Christian could hold an office that used force. With this the quiet Mennonites would have

13 Rudolphus Varick, June 7, 1906, quoted Naaman Henry Keyser, Old Historic Germantown (Lancaster, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1906), 63.

31 been in agreement. But they would have been dismayed when Keith’s rhetorical challenge to Telner’s heterodox spiritual authority reached such a pitch in 1692 that it shattered Germantown’s peace. Caught in the middle was the Rittinghuÿsens’ partner and main customer Bradford, who had printed a tract in Keith’s defense. One of the paper mill investors, Samuel Carpenter, was on the opposite side of the controversy. Finding himself actually jailed for his business activity, Bradford disgustedly abandoned the strife- torn community and relocated in New York. Such social fraying, with acrimonious name-calling among ex-Mennonite Quakers, was certainly not what Willem Rittinghuÿsen and his Mennonite friends would have emulated for their own fellowship. In 1694, with the Keithian imbroglio simmering, an equally fractious element swirled into the Germantown mix. It was a strange immigrant grouping boasting the sponsorship of the same friend of William Penn, Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam, who had backed both original land purchasers from around Krefeld in 1683 and Quakers from Kriegsheim two years later.The latest newcomers were followers of a learned Boehmist astronomer named Jacob Zimmerman, who had died just before they sailed. Regrouping in Pennsylvania under passionate young leader Henry Bernhard Köster, they remained preoccupied with comets, catastrophes, and the end times, boldly predicted in exotic spiritual language. Strange as they were, they were at once allowed by Isaac van Bebber’s father Jacob, a Krefeld baker who had been one of Penn’s first purchasers, and had now followed his son to Germantown, to preach in his own home, some eight lots distant from the Rittinghuÿsens. Was this affluent Mennonite, in whose son Isaac’s house the Mennonites held their gatherings, no more fixed in his inherited faith than that? In any case, like the Quakers before them, the newly arrived German mystics envisioned “a great

32 harvest” from other Christian persuasions (and even the native “Indians”). This hope was encouraged by their impression that their sympathetic Mennonite host was minded to join their exodus from organized Christianity.14 And indeed, within a decade Jacob van Bebber would, with his two sons Isaac and Mathias, opt for a parallel if less dramatic mystic community of Labadists in Bohemia Manor in Maryland. The fissiparous Germantown society now featured dramatic confrontations at baptism, even physical shoving among Quakers. This too was certainly not an interesting option for the quiet businessmen Willem and Claus Rittinghuÿsen. They were surely among the little but growing group of Mennonites meeting “lovingly…every Sunday” to hear the elderly “Mennist” Dirk Keyser from Amsterdam read a sermon. Significantly,during the tumultuous jailing of their mill partner Bradford and his quick move to New York, his Rittinghuÿsen colleagues remained largely off the public record. In fact, while their substantial mercantile status (and life-long inter-colonial cooperation with Bradford) would continue steady, their names would only minimally appear on the simple dockets of Germantown’s civil government. They were, to be sure, among the men assigned the status of citizens under the town’s Royal charter granted in 1691. Son-and-brother-in-law Heivert Papen, who was also prospering, was chosen for both Committeeman and Recorder, and built a substantial house along the Main road in 1694. Though among those eventually called to the higher office of burgess, Papen is believed to have declined that role out of conscientious (apparently adopted Mennonite) scruples.

14 Daniel Falckner, “Copy of a Report from the New World, being an Account of the Dangerous Voyage and happy Arrival of some Christian fellow-travelers, who undertook their Pilgrimage to the end of spreading the Belief in Jesus Christ.” Reproduced in Oswald Seidensticker,“The Hermits of the Wissahickon,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, II (1887), 427-44.

33 During the excitement of the German mystics’ arrival there had been a quieter incident, an interesting case of communal responsibility, in which one of two neighbors called to act was Willem Rittinghuÿsen. Their assignment was to arrange a dwelling and support for a blind man, Cornelis Plockhoy (son of pioneer Peter Cornelis Plockhoy), who had moved with his wife Judith from his father’s failed Dutch Mennonite community on the Delaware Bay.15 For us, the role of Rittinghuÿsen in such a project is a quiet token of his standing in the town’s slowly gathering Mennonite presence. The fact that the pauper couple’s little cottage was located adjacent to, or taken from the Rittinghuÿsen property,eventually the site of a Mennonite meetinghouse, suggests an identification with the community’s Mennonite population. That this was not, however, to remain the fixed residence of the Rittinghuÿsen family, is evidenced by a record of 1695 listing Willem as resigning from an office he had held in the township.16 Whatever motivated this move, which brought his and son Claus’s families to the site of their paper mill outside of the village, did not effect any inconvenient distance from the consciousness of the slowly accumulating local Mennonite fellowship. Only a trickle of Mennonites came over the next two or three years. But in 1698 Henry Sellen, a Germantowner who had gone back to Europe, returned with a number of other Mennonite immigrants from “Krefeld and elsewhere.” It was at this threshold that the expanding fellowship was recorded as meeting in the house of Isaac van Bebber. As noted above, their host himself, though of at least third generation Mennonite identity, was of less than fixed commitment to that persuasion. His wife Veronica

15 For the most recent corrections of the Plockhoy story, see Leland Harder, “Plockhoy Revisited,” Mennonite Life (Internet publication, March 2005),“last updated 3 May.” 16 See J. M. Duffin’s note 12 in Isaiah Thomas,“Additional Memoranda for the History of Printing” (1814), in J. M. Duffin, “The First Successful Attempt to Rescue from Oblivion the History of the Rittenhouse Family and Their Paper Mills,” Rittenhouse Town: A Journal of History, 1 (Winter 2000), 29.

34 Schumacher, whom he had met after her 1685 arrival in Germantown, was the daughter of a Palatine family that had turned from Mennonite to Quaker at Kriegsheim around the time she was born. But not all of her family had converted. Her older sister Agnes had married the strongly Mennonite Thielmann Kolb, who had been ordained a bishop known throughout the Palatine Mennonite communities. No fewer than five of their sons would be ordained as Mennonite leaders. In these sons of her sister Agnes Kolb,Veronica and Isaac van Bebber had back at Kriegsheim a set of nephews whose 1707 arrival in Pennsylvania would figure largely in the Germantown Mennonite congregation, after the van Bebbers, its earlier hosts, had left it. In 1698 the growing group of Mennonites assembling at Isaac van Bebber’s home, including the Rittinghuÿsens, agreed that some stated leadership was necessary and possible. A deacon was needed. For that role the choice fell to one of the new arrivals, Krefeld weaver Jan Neuss. His wife too had Quaker relatives in Germantown, in the pioneer Lukens family. But who would be given the more weighty function of preacher? Would it not likely be the sixty-three-year-old Dirck Keyser of long Mennonite inheritance, who had been reading to the local Mennonites at worship, and would later in life be called a diener, a “minister”?17 Surprisingly (to us), no; the choice instead was the fifty-four- year-old papermaking entrepreneur of our interest, the Lower Rhenish-born convert Willem Rittinghuÿsen. While no record exists of the method employed in this choosing, we may assume that among these Dutch and Lower Rhenish Mennonites it was not the method traditional among Swiss-Palatines, which was the casting of lots. In any case, the choice was firm. The untrained businessman preacher would be encouraged in this ministerial role for the remaining decade of his life.

17 See n. 49.

35 At this point of organizing, the gathering Mennonite congregation was almost purely of Lower Rhenish stock. This means that the conversation in the selection of leaders had been carried out in “Low German.” Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s subsequent sermons must have had a native Low German ring in comparison to that of Dirk Keyser, whose reading from a book of Dutch sermons would have had the accents of Dutch in Amsterdam. This was of course not a great deal of cultural variety to deal with. There were as yet no Palatine Mennonites (except ex-Mennonites) in town, nor any from Hamburg. But that was about to change, as Philadelphia’s port welcomed a constantly growing overseas traffic. Two years after the selection of minister and deacon, a wave of some 200 immigrants arriving in Philadelphia brought another cluster of Mennonites. Though Dutch-speaking, the earnest new arrivals had come from Hamburg in northern Germany (culturally, East Friesland). Once again, the financial backer had been Penn’s friend Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam, his bent toward promoting spiritual experiments not yet exhausted. The new shiploads brought Germantown fresh controversy in the person of Daniel Falkner, one of the mystics who had arrived there in 1694. He had gone back to Europe to negotiate with both Furly and the original group of backers of Francis Daniel Pastorius in Frankfurt. There he had succeeded in having himself legally appointed to replace Pastorius as the leader of Germantown’s original colonizing company. Of course the civil fur now flew, to the extent of Pastorius calling Falkner a drunken fraud. Again the town’s Mennonites faced an uninviting legal context, whose acrimony doubtless confirmed their traditional inclination to non-involvement in civil proceedings. And it would be only a few years until an advisor of Britain’s Queen Anne, bemused by the inability of the village to properly order its government, would bring her in 1707 to revoke

36 the somewhat provisional Royal charter under which William Penn’s “German” town had operated since 1691. Once again, then, the citizenship of the town’s inhabitants, including that of Willem Rittinghuÿsen, would become temporarily ambiguous. Some of the Mennonites arriving from Hamburg in 1700 had roots in Amsterdam, and some were from Friedrichstadt north of Hamburg. All seemed to have been apparently spiritually awak- ened in Pietist manner, and were already familiar with both Quaker-inspired and internal Mennonite divisions. As they began to buy lots in Germantown, they were dismayed by the inchoate church order of the community’s Mennonite fellowship. If it was still gathering in the van Bebber house to hear Willem Rittinghuÿsen preach, the congregation would have been on the verge of seeking a new venue, since this was about the time Isaac and Veronica van Bebber were moving out of town and changing their spiritual affiliation. It was one thing, felt the newcomers from Hamburg, to have an elected preacher and deacon, but how, they wondered, could baptism and communion be authentically administered without a confirmed elder (bishop) installed under authentic Mennonite auspices? It must have been evident that papermaker Willem Rittinghuÿsen, who had not grown up in this fellowship, had no intention of filling its most solemn role. Something Rittinghuÿsen did do, a few months after the Hamburg Mennonites arrived, was to sell to one of them, Arnold van Fossen (in partnership with earlier immigrant Lenart Arets), the original fifty acres, Germantown’s Lot Nineteen, where Willem and Geertruid Rittinghuÿsen had lived until at least 1695.18 This transaction, possibly in connection with Willem’s residential move to the paper mill location outside of town, must certainly have had to do with communal Mennonite considerations. As we have noted, it would be, after all, an extract from the tract now sold that

18 See n. 10.

37 would be the site of a Mennonite meetinghouse in 1708.19 Well before 1700, of course, when numbers of the immigrants were arriving seriously ill,20 a place would have been needed for burials. Whatever the recently arrived van Fossen’s purchase meant, it did not satisfy the concerns of his fellow arrivals from Hamburg. One of them, Claes Berents, wrote home complaining of the lack of a Mennonite elder who could lead out in the ordinances. A reply from Hamburg, written in March 1702, came back with the observation that sending a European elder to carry out an ordination in Pennsylvania would require a journey “too far and too difficult” to justify. Rather, the Hamburg Lehrdienst (Mennonite ministerial body) advised the leaders of their compositely struggling daughter community simply to make clear to their members that “the need for [such] service” should be balanced against their loyalty to the church order they had imbibed in their European spiritual communities of origin. They were to exhort the flock to an interval of prayer that God would “look favorably on the available ministers [Rittinghuÿsen was the only preacher then],”and grant them the ability to take up this grave responsibility. The urgent “necessity” for the ordinances of baptism and communion, add the writers, “must take precedence over all ordinary churchly procedure.” Biblically, after all, there were the examples of baptisms by the Apostle Paul and the deacon Philip, neither of whom had been ordained to the office of bishop.21

19 “The sixteenth day of the 12th month 1702/3. Arnold van Vossen delivers unto Jan Neuss in Behalf of the representatives of that Religious Society of Baptists called Mennonites a deed of sale containing three square perches of land in Germantown out of the said Arnold van Vossen his lot.” Quoted from the ms record kept by Francis Daniel Pastorius in Robert Ulle,“Materials on Mennonites in Colonial Germantown,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, LVII (October 1983), 375. 20 Cf. the report that “we have all been sick,” by newly arrived Johann Jawert (Germantown) to his father Balthaser Jawert (Lübeck), November 17, 1700, transcribed and printed in Lübeckischen Anzeiger, January 1905, 18-19 as “Brief eines im Jahre 1700 nach Amerika ausgewanderten Lübeckers.” Photocopy from Henry Schuler. 21 Pieter Verhelle, Jacob van Campen, Gerrit Roosen and Jan de Lanoi (at Altona/Hamburg) to Claes Berends (at Germantown), March 1702, tr. Heinrich van der Smissen, reprinted in Wenger (n.4) , 405-6.

38 This letter did not tip Willem Rittinghuÿsen, now in his mid- fifties, over any line. He was doubtless then quite preoccupied with business concerns, since he and son Claus, probably in the spring before the Hamburg immigrants arrived, had lost their paper mill, along “with a considerable quantity of paper, materials and tools,” to a springtime freshet. At this stage of life Willem could have found the disaster terminally discouraging had it not been for the partnership of son Claus, some twenty-two years younger. Also encouraging was the region’s general recognition of the value of the paper mill on their scene, exemplified in the support of none other than Proprietor William Penn, who was in those months back in his Colony. Penn himself made a financial contribution for rebuilding and encouraged others to do likewise. His oft-quoted post-flood reference to Rittinghuÿsen as “a decrepid old man” was doubtless meant primarily as sympathetic rather than disparaging.22 Penn himself, now tormented with business and political troubles, had been born in the same year (1644) as Rittinghuÿsen, and both Williams would remain active for most of another decade. Whatever else may be true, the advisory letter from the Hamburg ministry failed to bring preacher Rittinghuÿsen to the point of accepting the initiative of the “full eldership.” It was not that he did not have the congregation’s respect. They would continue looking to him for leadership for six more years, so that he would still be their choice for the role in 1707/8. His social reputation in his and his son Claus’s business was satisfactory; Claus himself would eventually be chosen as a minister. The business, recovering well from serious loss, was becoming independent of both partner Bradford in New York and the original Pennsylvania financial backers.

22 William Barton, Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse, LLD.F.R.S. (Philadelphia: E. Parker, 1813), 83-4.

39 Business expansion was one thing; in the church fellowship, by comparison, Willem Rittinghuÿsen was not ready to advance in function. Meanwhile, the unbaptized cohort listening to him preach continued to grow. It was augmented in the fall of 1701 by a devout Dutch-speaking couple coming from Goch in the Lower Rhine: thirty-six year-old lathe-operator Jacob Gaetschalcks and his wife Altien. Both Jacob and his Quaker cousin Tunes Kunders, in whose house the first Germantown Friends had met for worship, were of long Mennonite lineage. Unlike Tunes, Jacob would stay firmly Mennonite. Within a year he would buy a property five lots up the road from the Kunders’,23 making such a good impression on the anxious Mennonite assembers that he was before long viewed as a potential sharer of Rittinghuÿsen’s ministerial role. Soon after the encouraging advice from Hamburg arrived in the fall of 1702, the congregation tried to follow it by supplement- ing the work of their fifty-eight-year-old papermaker-preacher. The two men chosen to assist him were, like him, of Lower Rhenish stock: recently arrived Jacob Gaetschalcks of Goch, and Hans Neuss of Krefeld, one of the 1698 arrivals.24 But both men, native speakers of the Dutch language, would be of only partial aid to preacher Rittinghuÿsen, since both could serve “only by reading.” With their former host Isaac van Bebber leaving the fellowship while moving or about to move to Maryland, the Mennonite congregation was apparently reaching the point of building a meetinghouse (as were the Quakers, already for the second time). For on December 16, 1702, less than three months after the addition of Gaetschalcks and Neuss to the ministry,it was recorded that

23 James M. Duffin, “Germantown Landowners, 1683-1714,” Germantown Crier,39 (Winter 1986/87), 40. 24 And usually considered to be a brother of the Jan Neuss chosen deacon in 1698.

40 Arnold van Fossen, one of the recent immigrants from Hamburg, delivered “unto John Neuss25 in the behalf of the representatives of that Religious Society of Baptists called Mennonists a deed of sale concerning three square perches of land in Germantown out of the said Arnold van Vossen his lot.”26 This was a small section of the town’s Lot Nineteen, on the east side of the road, bought by Willem Rittinghuÿsen in 1687, and sold to van Fossen a few months after the latter’s arrival in 1700. Stability had certainly not yet arrived for the congregation; in fact, something going off course here may have involved the congregational land transfer. As Jacob Gaetschalck would record it, before long the new minister Hans Neuss felt personally wronged by Arnold van Fossen. The fragility of the brotherhood was all too evident as Hans withdrew not only from his recently acquired ministry but from the congregation itself. That left Willem Rittinghuÿsen with only one assistant, a non-preaching one at that. Meanwhile, the father-and-son paper-making business was comfortably stabilizing. Partner Bradford of New York,more than satisfied with the Rittinghuÿsen quality, was ordering reams of paper annually, even while reluctantly allowing the Rittinghuÿsens to buy him out of ownership in the business. Likewise, the last of the other two investors would soon be paid off. Bradford wanted to buy all the mill’s output,and there were other customers waiting. In the realm of church, however, though persons were requesting Mennonite baptism, their preferred leader Willem Rittinghuÿsen seems to have sensed continuing reasons for caution. As their spiritual leader, he wrote to New York–surely to his partner Bradford–to inquire about getting an English

25 Was this the 1698 elected deacon Jan Neuss, or [his brother?] the Hans Neuss who had arrived from Krefeld in 1701? 26 See n. 18, above.

41 translation of the Dordrecht Confession. It was disappointing to find the price quoted to be beyond the means of his people who had to scramble to build homes from scratch. Such was only the latest, among both Mennonites and their neighbors, of disappoint- ments. What a list of them Willem had observed! He had seen the town’s three op den Graeff brothers swept into controversy, and Quaker Keith leaving for England and coming back an Anglican. The German mystics’ leader Bernhard Köster had come, flared apocalyptically, and gone. Jacob Telner had given up and was back in Europe. Francis Daniel Pastorius himself had been abandoned by backer Benjamin Furly. The Mennonite van Bebbers were moving to Philadelphia and the Labadist colony in Maryland. William Penn was in legal trouble in England, and not returning to his colony. Dirck Keyser’s son had married a Quaker widow. Hans Neuss, whom Willem had helped to choose for assistance in preaching, was quitting. The young Jacob Gaetschalcks, faithful as he was, could not serve in the ministry beyond “reading.” Claus Berents of Hamburg, discouraged, was selling his property and returning home.27 Even public citizenship itself had become ambiguous, as the Germantown Royal charter of 1691 was being revoked. On March 1706, “151 high Germans who have been here for 22 years” appealed for citizenship under the new charter. Since “Some [ca. twenty] being Mennists, who (with their Predecessory for above 150 years past) could not for Conscience sake take an oath,”28 another way had to be found. Indeed, some Mennonite men, such

27 On May 31, 1705, Cornelius Clausen and son-in-law Claus Berents, yeoman, sold three acres “on the street of the town” to Peter Keyser of Germantown, shoemaker son of Dirck, for 24 pounds 10 shillings. Witnesses were Mennonites Hendrick Sellen and Jan Conrads. James M. Duffin, “Germantown Landowners, 1683-1714: Installment V (Conclusion),” Germantown Crier, 42 (Fall 1990), 88. 28 Petition of 1706 summarized in the “Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania” (Colonial Archives, II, 241-2), by William Hull, William Penn (n. 11), 418-20.

42 as Jan Lensen, Jacob Gaetschalck and even the Rittinghuÿsens’ son-in-law Heivert Papen, were recorded as declining any civil responsibilities involving the use of force. They could not, as Willem Rittinghuÿsen had once done in Amsterdam, settle the issue by swearing their loyalty. As a consequence, the town’s Mennonite men were more proportionately than others drawn on as fence inspectors.29 Even that, however, was problematical. Lensen, who had not been to communion in two decades, was not weakening in his Mennonite scruples. Both he and newcomer Gaetschalcks made it clear at least twice that they were not willing to “betray their neighbors,”30 such as the Behrends of Hamburg, who soon after settling in at Germantown had been cited for inadequate fencing on their property along the main road.31 When in doubt, one could always write again to Europe. And indeed, in March of 1707 there was another letter from Germantown in the hands of the Mennonite ministers of Hamburg. In addition, and apparently also on the subject of Germantown’s leadership issue, a letter had come to Hamburg from friends of Germantown in “Krefeld and Goch,” and still another from the Zon ministers in Amsterdam. Perhaps the one from Pennsylvania had been brought back to Hamburg by the family of Claus Behrends. Having five years earlier written unsuc- cessfully to Hamburg on the subject of bishop leadership, Claus had sold his lot in Germantown32 and given up his American dream.

29 On a list provided by J. M. Duffin entitled “Office Holders of the Corporation of Germantown,”the names of Mennonite men are almost entirely absent from most cat- egories. However, about nine, including the Rittinghuÿsen father and two sons and son/brother-in-law Heivert Papen, are listed as having accepted service as Wegmeister (roadmaster) and thirteen as fence inspector. 30 Robert F. Ulle, quoting Germantown’s Records of the Courts of Record, June 13, 1704, in “Materials on Mennonites in Colonial Germantown, Second Installment,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, LIX (April 1985), 151. 31 Ulle,“Materials on Mennonites in Colonial Germantown, Mennonite Quarterly Review, LVII (October 1983), 357. 32 See note 26.

43 At this point, with Germantown’s Mennonite church-order plight beginning to involve three and soon all four of the European parent communities, our plot thickens. Quickly replying to the Zon leaders, those of Hamburg addressed their thoughts to Hermann Schijn, the learned physician-pastor of that Dutch congregation. They were in full agreement, they wrote, with Schijn’s version of what could be done at Germantown. Therefore, would he, as a man trusted by the Lower Rhenish members of the little overseas congregation, please immediately write them a letter himself, repeating the unsuccessful Hamburg advice of 1702, and subscribe his own name? That signature, suggested the Hamburg ministers (while promising to co-sign), would have more inganck, more entrée, into the conscientious attitude of Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s struggling congregation than their own former letter had found. Their suggestion was that the name of a conservative pastor familiar to Rittinghuÿsen from the time he had accepted Mennonite membership in Amsterdam would carry more weight, even though Schijn was of a cultural sophistication that might have embarrassed his colonial friends, than the less familiar signatures from Hamburg.33 Just as interesting is the Hamburg leaders’ mention of some “friends” that were then on the verge of leaving for Pennsylvania. Later evidence identifies these unnamed emigrants as a set of Mennonites from the Palatinate.Their coming would have impli- cations for the Mennonite fellowship in Germantown, where the only Palatines on record so far were the ex-Mennonite Quakers coming from Kriegsheim in 1685-6: Schumachers, Hendrickses

33 Geeritt Roosen, Jan de Lanoy, Jacob van Campen, Jan Elias Münster, Carel de Vlieger and Jan Reboom (Hamburg) to the “Eersame Discrete Doctr Hermanus Schÿn, Leraer der Doopsgesinde a Amsteldam,” March 11, 1707, #2244t, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, transcribed by James Lowry.

44 and Cassels–and a Mennonite, Hans Grof, who had bought land just north of the old village in 1704.34 Three of the “friends” mentioned by the Hamburg ministers would prove to be a set of sons of Mennonite bishop Thielmann Kolb of Kriegsheim. Their extended family had been spiritually divided when their grandfather Peter Schumacher–but not his daughter Agnes–had converted to the Quakers and left for Pennsylvania in 1685. There, as we have noted, Agnes’s younger sister Veronica had married a Krefeld Mennonite, Isaac van Bebber. It was for preaching at Mennonite gatherings in her home that Willem Rittinghuÿsen had been chosen in 1698. Agnes Schumacher Kolb’s oldest son Peter was, like his father Thielman Kolb, a Mennonite bishop. Now four younger brothers of Peter, who lived at Kriegsheim, had their sights set on Germantown, where their aged Quaker grandfather still lived. Their coming would be the introduction of the Palatine component that was destined within a decade to overwhelm the Dutch-speaking Mennonites whose pioneer arrival in America had preceded theirs. The Hamburg letter to Amsterdam’s Zon leaders urged Pastor Schijn that, since “ships usually depart from England for Pennsylvania in May,”he should act expeditiously,likely so that the emigrating “friends” could have the advisory letter in time to take it along to Pennsylvania that summer. Though imagining that the epistle would carry a more apostolic weight if it were further approved by a conference of Dutch Mennonite leaders, the Hamburg ministers felt that time lost in waiting for such a session

34 Jane Evans Best, “Germantown Links to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Families,” Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage,VI (October 1983), 18. In 1715 Hans Groff, then living at Strasburg at Conestoga, would sell his 175 acres in “Krisheim” next to Germantown. The Graff name, originating in the Canton of Zurich, had reappeared after 1650 among Mennonite refugees in the Kraichgau region “above Heidelberg” (then part of the Palatinate). This was the source of the first sizable Mennonite immigration to Pennsylvania that would occur in 1717.

45 would be “regrettable,”since thereby the Palatine “friends would be delayed the longer.” The promised “friends” did indeed turn up, in the fall of 1707, at Germantown, in the persons of Martin, Johannes and Jacob Kolb.35 These brothers probably brought with them the letter written at Hamburg and cosigned by Pastor Schijn of Amsterdam. But the Kolb presence resulted in some initial disappointment. The three brothers, whose aunt and uncle Veronica and Isaac van Bebber had left Germantown and its Mennonite congregation, also declined to participate. Were they, as Palatines, distrustful of sixty- four-year-old minister Willem Rittinghuÿsen and his likewise Dutch-speaking co-minister Jacob Gaetschalck, both of Lower Rhenish origins? Willem himself and his co-leaders were finding the “instruction” of the Zon-signed letter a “good” and “sufficient answer” to their request for counsel. In fact, reported the old preacher’s companions, he “received [the advice] with joy.”36 This meant that the great moment had come at last: after a quarter century without Mennonite ordinances in Pennsylvania, it was now “fully resolved to give baptism upon request to those who were asking for it and to those who had already asked.”37 But, as several months flowed by, the Kolb brothers remained apart from Rittinghuÿsen’s congregation. Their scruples, which certainly differed from those of their Quaker relatives in town, must also not have easily meshed with those of the Mennonites whose background was Lower Rhenish, Dutch or Hamburgian. At least two of the three brothers had very strong spiritual

35 Martin (ca. 27) was a widower, Johannes (ca. 24) probably married, and Jacob (ca. 22) still single. 36 Jacob Godtschalck, Harman Kasdorp, Martin Kolb (ministers at Germantown), Isaac van Sintern and Conrad Jansen (deacons) to “Hermannus Schijn and fellow ministers of the Mennonite congregations in Holland,” September 3, 1708, #2247, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, transcribed and translated by James Lowry. A translation by Harold S. Bender appears in Mennonite Quarterly Review, VII (January 1933), 44-46. 37 Ibid.

46 commitments of their own. They had no children of approaching baptismal age to motivate them to push for quick changes in the leadership at Germantown. Their aloofness was so weighty that it seemed, to some in the disappointed congregation, to last a year. It was certainly persisting at the end of 1707, by which time Ritinghuÿsen had not yet followed through on his intention to baptize. Two considerations can help to make the Kolbs’ hesitation in Germantown understandable. One is the Swiss-originating, traditional Palatine Mennonite uneasiness with church order more relaxed than their own. This had been finding expression even as the Dutch Doopsgezinden had been sending relief funds into the Palatinate in the early 1670s. Concern had arisen then about members of the “United Flemish [Lam] and Waterlander [Toren] congregation at Amsterdam” coming “to look into the conditions and circumstances” of refugees streaming in from Switzerland, and their overwhelmed Palatine hosts. A Mennonite minister from Kriegsheim, Jacob Everlingh, had reported back to Amsterdam’s conservative Zon leaders that the liberal Dutch visitors had asked what kept the Palatines from acknowledging them as brothers (which would have allowed them to share communion). In reply, wrote Everlingh, he had explained to the visitors the Palatines’ impression that the Dutch churches had moved away from basic Mennonite beliefs and practices. The Palatines feared that these generous visitors, reputedly heavily influenced by the Collegiant movement, might have taken the liberal view of the doctrine of justification, teaching that Christ’s death,instead of being on behalf of human guilt, had been only “an example for us to follow him through suffering to salvation.”38

38 Jacob Everlingh, (Dutch copy of) report to Zon leaders Samuel Apostool, Hans Vlaming, et al., March 1672, with Document 1417, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives. Cf. a translation by Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, tran- scriber and translator, Letters on Toleration: Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites 1615-1699 (Rockport Maine, Picton Press, 2004), document 128, p. 327.

47 Ecclesiastical housekeeping too was an issue. The Palatines sus- pected that the Dutch had admitted some to communion who had not yet been baptized, and had not disciplined those who married outside of the church fellowship.39 The visitors countered by reading to the Palatines a confession of faith put out by the Lam’s famously liberal pastor Galenus Abrahamsz. On the doctrinal question the Palatines could be satisfied, but not on the standards of church discipline. On this they were unyielding, and even challenged the correctness of the Zon leaders to whom they were reporting the discussion.40 Particularly sensitive was the question of ministers reportedly allowed to administer communion without having first been examined.41 That exchange had occurred back in 1672, when Willem Rittinghuÿsen had still been a Dutch Reformed layman in Gelderland. But a quarter century later, as by virtue of being named a Mennonite preacher, Rittinghuÿsen had been moved deeper into the inter-Mennonite dialectic, the foundational Anabaptist concern for accountable church order had not abated. Palatine Mennonite reserve can be sampled in a letter of about 1698 by old Christian Pliem, predecessor of Peter Kolb in the office of bishop at Kriegsheim. Somewhat delicately,Bishop Pliem reminded Dutch leaders that his people in the Palatinate were concerned to keep in unity (even while their cousins in Bern and Alsace had suffered an Amish split). But tending church order had been made difficult when impoverished members of Palatine congregations who sojourned in Holland brought back the divided loyalties they had imbibed from Dutch congregations among whom they had fellowshipped, and then made trouble

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 327-328. 41 See Joahnn Andries commenting on Everlingh’s opinions to Frans Beuns, May 21, 1672, ibid., document 129, 328.

48 about communion. The Dutch leaders were asked not to under- estimate the earnestness of the Palatine Mennonites’ intention to hold always to “the old and true foundation which Christ, his ministers, and apostles laid for salvation,” and their determination to “exert ourselves to keep the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.”42 Modern readers skimming over these essential Mennonite expressions would miss how precisely they correspond to the issues then affecting the overseas mix of both Dutch and Palatine Mennonites. A second possible reason for the initial distance kept by Kolb’s three younger brothers at Germantown in 1707 is more obvious: they expected to be followed shortly to Pennsylvania by another of their brothers, twenty-eight-year-old Henrich. He would bring with him the authority of a bishop, as vouchsafed to him by the ordination of another bishop, quite probably their oldest brother Peter.43 Since Henrich’s coming was imminent, why, his three brothers may have wondered, should Germantown Mennonites be planning to go ahead and baptize with only a home-made bishop, and a convert at that? Even with the Kolbs’ absence, however, the congregation sensed that the latest European letter had made Willem Rittinghuÿsen finally willing to act as their bishop. It was now “fully resolved”44 to move ahead. But just as this hope flared, it was

42 Christian Pliem to David Rutgers, January 25, 1698, ibid., Document 247, p. 460, tr. James Lowry. 43 There has never been a satisfactory clarification of the international process of legitimizing the bishop ordination for Germantown. An important but obscurely phrased sentence in the Germantown ministers’ report of September 3, 1708 (n. 35) has puzzled all translators. The Germantown leaders state that they “van den Broedern [i.e., the Kolb brothers] verstaen dat heÿ [Henrich Kolb] met sulcken Eÿver angedaen waer door het versoek van de diennaeren van hamburg pieter kolb genaemt seynde tot een ousten verkooren.” Translated by James Lowry as, “we understand from the brothers that he was so much affected by the zeal and seriousness by the request of the ministers at Hamburg that Peter Kolb be named as chosen elder.” An alternative translation might be: “. . . by the request of the ministers of Hamburg, that Peter Kolb be named to choose a bishop.” In either case the syntax remains unclear. 44 Ibid.

49 memorably dashed. Soon after the dead of winter in 1707/8, when an unexpected, fast-moving sickness visited Germantown, wills were quickly written or dictated by several well-known elderly citizens. Within days Aret Klincken (64), Mennonites Paulus Kuster (68), Willem (64) and Geertruid (66) Rittinghuÿsen, and their son-in-law Heivert Papen (53) were all on deathbeds. Willem and Geertruid’s illness apparently progressed so swiftly that he was given no time to make a will. A shocked circle gathered around his bed, no doubt including, in addition to son Nicholas, ministerial assistant Jacob Gaetschalcks and deacon Jan Neuss. There, on February 18, they heard in their preacher’s familiar voice a last “kleÿne vermaeninghe” (short admonition). A few hours later came the “painful farewell,”45 shortly to be followed by the passing of Geertruid. Perhaps this occasioned a double burial; in any case the burial site was that of the now Mennonite-owned lot along the town’s central street, part of the acreage purchased by Willem for the first Rittinghuÿsen home in Pennsylvania. A “further grief” of the congregation’s surviving leaders was finding Jacob Gaetschalcks, who still “served . . . by reading,”newly alone in the ministry. But in only a few weeks came an encouraging surprise, when the three formerly distanced Kolb brothers suddenly cast their lot with the sorrowing fellowship. Apparently, since the departing of the man who was about to act as bishop, they had no more issues. Cheered by this addition, and with the momentum of having come so close to satisfying requests for baptism, within a month after their minister’s death the thirty-three member congregation arranged for firmer leadership. On March 2, 1708, they designated three men as what they termed “deacons and overseers”: Isaac van Sintern (of Hamburg), Hendrik Kassel (Palatinate but moved to Hamburg?) and Conrad Jansen (Krefeld

45 Ibid.

50 area?) Seven weeks after that, on April 20, they named two preach- ers. One was shipbuilder Harmon Karsdorp from Rotterdam and Hamburg, now living in Philadelphia. The other, surprisingly, was the recently arrived Palatine widower Martin Kolb, one of the three brothers who until two months earlier had not yet accepted involvement. This was indeed an impressive bringing together of what had threatened to be mutually uncongenial backgrounds. A latent desire for unity was powerful enough to have overcome the cultural differences. Chosen from three of the congregation’s four main European backgrounds, the leaders now totaled six for a membership of thirty-three. Eleven more souls were waiting for baptism. The new team was in such full accord that it took less than three more weeks to fulfill its mature work. On May 9, 1708, Jacob Gaetschalcks, who had well proved his sincerity as a non-preaching preacher for the past six years, went ahead in the role Willem Rittinghuÿsen had finally, but too late, become willing to take up. It was a historic moment for the congregation, and a threshold for Mennonites in America, as under a Lower Rhenish lathe-turner they at last “celebrated with one another,”in his solemn words,“the memorial of the bitter suffering and death of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ according to His ordinance and the practice of His apostles.”46 The legitimacy of accession, as confirmed by writing from Amsterdam and Hamburg, was accepted. On the same day, probably just prior to the communion, Gaetschalcks performed eleven baptisms, giving the congregation a twenty-five percent increase of membership. The sudden death of Willem and Geertruid Rittinghuÿsen brings their story to a close just before the arrival of the unity

46 Emphasis added. September 3, 1708, letter to the Zon, n. 35. Cf. the parallel wording in the account of Jacob Gaetschalcks included in the 1773 letter to Krefeld and Utrecht (n. 4): “The 23rd of May we celebrated the suffering and death of our Saviour by observing the Lord’s Supper as instituted by the Apostles.”

51 Willem’s decade of ministry had helped to prepare. Consequently, this may be as far as readers interested primarily in his personal career may wish to follow. But a meaningful coda is added to the story by dynamics in the Germantown and daughter Skippack congregations following the death of their first minister. These add evidence of the traditional seriousness with which the issue of regular Mennonite ministerial succession was felt in Germantown. In the fall of 1708 Jacob Gaetschalcks and four other Germantown leaders sent a both sad and hopeful report and request for help to their friends in Amsterdam. Five months later their letter was read aloud in council at the Zon. “It grieved us,” as the Zonists put it, to hear that the “waarde brouder willem Rittinghuÿsen” had been taken by death. On the other hand, they rejoiced to hear that this break had been filled by the selection of two other brothers. They would help to promote the brotherhood in Germantown by sending over books and 400 copies of the Dordrecht Confession which Rittinghuÿsen had been requesting. The Zon leaders also took note that the (Kolb) brothers, now cooperating in the fellowship, had let it be known in Germantown that there was another brother, a minister, back in the Palatinate, who was “minded” to join them, and that the Germantowners were hoping the Dutch would aid and bless him on his transatlantic journey.47 The Dutch wrote back on March 27, 1709 that the “brother” the Germantowners had mentioned was at that very moment “ready to cross over to you.” This was Henrich Kolb, of whom the Zonists knew because just then Henrich’s older brother, thirty-eight-year-old Bishop Peter Kolb of Kriegsheim, was in Amsterdam on a visit to keep good relations between the Dutch and the Palatine Mennonite congregations.

47 [Herman Schijn, et al., leaders at the Zon] to Jacob Godschalk, Harman Karsdorp, Martin Kolb, Isaac van Sintern and Conrad Jansen, March 27, 1709, copy, document #B 8751709e, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, tr. James Lowry.

52 The trusted church emissary Peter Kolb, a grandson and nephew of Quakers who had been in Germantown for two decades, had brought to Amsterdam the news of his brother Henrich’s impending voyage. Peter himself was most anxious to make the transatlantic move, much to the Zon leaders’ dismay. But they endorsed Peter’s authority, as discussed with them in the recent letter from Hamburg, to choose a leader for Germantown.48 As a result of this choice, the Zon ministry now regarded Henrich as an oudste, an elder or bishop like his brother Peter. Their prayer was that Henrich’s gift, i.e., his “talent” or ordination, as entrusted by God, would be fruitful in the life of the Germantown congregation. Henrich Kolb’s imminent departure, by the way, was taking place in the midst of a massive, frenetic emigration via nearby Rotterdam by thousands of “poor Palatines” suffering from the historically frigid winter of 1708-9, and dreaming of a better life in the transatlantic colonies of the Queen Anne whose deceased husband had been a German. This drama was beginning to frighten the Dutch Mennonite leaders into calling for a ceasing of Mennonite emigration. Back in Germantown, while Henrich and Barbara Kolb were on their America-bound voyage, there was “good peace.”49 The fellowship’s international connections had been cemented that spring when one of the new ministers, twenty-nine-year-old widowed Martin Kolb had married Magdalena van Sinteren, daughter of deacon Isaac of Hamburg. In the fall, the community was again strengthened as the newly arrived Henrich and Barbara Kolb settled in at Germantown’s fifteen-mile distant daughter colony at Skippack, along with the Palatine Mennonite families of Gerhart Clemens and Andreas Schrager.

48 See n. 42. 49 Sept. 3, 1708, letter to the Zon, n. 35.

53 But Henrich Kolb’s coming raised again the issue of authentic succession of ministerial authority. His bringing the standing of oudste (bishop or elder) stirred up in the Germantown-Skippack congregation some of the fractiousness that had remained latent during Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s ministry. Within months two parties emerged, some members following the Palatine Henrich, since he had been regularly ordained in Europe. Others stuck with Lower Rhenish Jacob Gaetschalcks, who, though not ordained by a European bishop, had begun to function as one under the written permission of European leaders. Which man was the legitimate representative of church order? As soon as ships left for Europe in the spring of 1710, each of the two parties, accusing the other, wrote separately for advice to their favorite authority, Dr. Herman Schyn of the Zon in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, another wedding came up in the congregation. It was again a case of a Palatine groom and a Dutch-speaking bride, specifically the brother and sister of the recently married Martin and Magdalena van Sintern Kolb. Jacob, the youngest of four brothers now in the congregation, was marrying Sarah, another daughter of deacon van Sintern. Since there were now two bishops with opposed followings, we may well imagine that there may have been uncertainty as to which would perform a wedding ceremony. Would it be Jacob Gaetschalck or Jacob Kolb’s brother Henrich? Strangely (to us), it was neither. For reasons we can but guess at, on Jacob’s twenty-fifth birthday the officiating was done by seventy-five year-old Dirck Keyser, the merchant whose silk coat, according to oral legend, was supposed to have bothered the plain Palatines! Based only on what we have known up to now, we might find this hard to believe, were it not written in Jacob’s own hand that he was married on May 2, 1709, to Sarah van Sintern “in our congregation in Germantown by our diener Dirk

54 Keyser.”50 Jacob’s use of this German word51 makes it specifically clear that Keyser’s role was more than that of a layman. Leaving this intriguing note for others to resolve, we find the Amsterdam Mennonites responding to the rival appeals in a pastoral tone of mild alarm over the possibility of a tweespalt (split) at Germantown. Each of the separate letters they quickly wrote back ended with an impressive column of nine signatures, headed by that of senior leader Herman Schijn. To “Jacob Goedschalk and those with you” they confessed sorrow to hear of a threatening “root of bitterness.” “God is a God of peace,” they admonish (though Amsterdam Mennonites had little to boast about in this regard), “and Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace." A difference of opinion as to who is the right bishop, they warn, is not a sufficient matter to justify a split. Though Jacob had of course not been regularly ordained, he had been counseled by the Dutch to go ahead; now that a man (Henrich Kolb) “die een oudste is” (who is an elder, or bishop) has come, there was the opportunity for Jacob to be regularly confirmed by him in a shared full eldership.52 The letter to Henrich Kolb began slightly differently, with the friendly observation that Henrich’s complaint seemed to be in the handwriting of deacon Isaac van Sintern, father-in-law of two of the Kolb brothers. Then comes a warm rebuke to Henrich and his party for questioning the validity of the baptisms performed by

50 The complete entry on the flyleaf of a Bible reads, “Anno Dominÿ 1685 Den 21 Den May Bin ich Jacob Kolb in disse Welt gebohren Dess nachts um 12 uhr und bin mit Sarra Van Sintern getraut Im Jahr 1710 den 2 Dag Maÿ, in unsser gemeinde in Germantaun von unsserm Diener Dirick Keisser.” Transcription supplied by Alan G. Keyser. 51 “Diener / deenar,” the German / Dutch word for servant, is the term typically used for the modern equivalent of minister. What would be later meant in English as “bishop” was referred to as “Älteste,” Elder. 52 Hermanus Schÿn, Hermen Reÿnskes van Overwÿk, Johannis Brant, Jacob Vorsterman, Cornelis Beets,Wilm van Laer, Pieter Krael, Hendrik Thesink and Leendert Velsen to “Jacob Goedschalk en die met u Zÿn” (and those who are with you), April 22, 1711, Document B 875 #1711G, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives.

55 Jacob Gaetschalck, and whether Jacob should keep on functioning as a bishop. “To avoid all strife,” the Zonists advise, now that they have a regularly ordained bishop among them, Jacob could be regularly confirmed himself, and the two bishops could labor side by side.53 This counsel must have worked, since six months later the two Germantown parties wrote back in separate but parallel letters reporting to the Zon that they were at peace. Had there been a service in which the Palatine Kolb had regularly ordained the Lower Rhenish Gaetschalcks? The Zon leaders guessed that a majority vote might have been taken, which procedure they felt would have been “the right way.”54 Interestingly, some of the Zon’s counsel sounded too one-sided to please those who had favored the Kolb side of the unrest. On their behalf Dirk Keyser, nearing eighty, took up his pen to complain that some of the statements from “Jacob’s side” had been given unfair weight by the Zon leaders. The Zonists wrote right back, insisting in love that they were only admonish- ing, not accusing, and that the Germantown leaders should try not to be unnecessarily sensitive.55 Stability was indeed being achieved. Whereas the membership at the time of Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s death had numbered thirty-three, four years later there was a total of ninety-nine at Germantown and Skippack.56 The relaxation of tension, as members were increasingly relocating outward. from

53 The same council to “Hendrik Kolb, en die met u sÿn” (and those who are with you) April 22, 1711, Document B 875 #1711K. 54 [Zon leaders] to Dirck Keyser and “The ministers and elders, as well as teachers and deacons, of the Mennonite churches in Germantown and Skiepbach,” July 19, 1713, Document B 875 #1713ke, Mennonite Church Archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, tr. James Lowry. 55 Ibid. 56 This number, given by Jacob Gaeltschack, was cited in the letter to the Netherlands of 1773, n. 4.

56 Germantown, was possibly enhanced by the fact that neither of the two bishops planned to live in Germantown. Whereas the Rittinghuÿsen sons Claus and Gerhart each had a mill near the village, Jacob Gaetschalck was moving to Towamencin, and Henrich Kolb had bought land beside his brothers at Skippack. The successful interweaving of four strands from two major Mennonite groupings, northern Dutch and southern Swiss- German, toward which Willem Rittinghuÿsen had worked in Germantown, had a significance beyond itself. It served as preparation for what happened on a larger Mennonite scale in the counties around Philadelphia. When Mennonites began coming by the boatload from the Palatinate in 1717 and following years, the template of unity they took up was the one worked at so cautiously in the Germantown beginnings. Longevity granted to Bishop Jacob Gaetschalck, lasting three decades after the death of Henrich Kolb in 1730, gave him a lengthy influence as senior bishop in what became the “Skippack,” later “Franconia” Conference. By the time his and Willem Rittinghuÿsen’s native “Nieder Deitsch” (Low German) or “broken Hollandish” language died out in the 1820’s, the pattern of accountable unity they had stewarded was strong enough for the Mennonite fellowship to segue without controversy into a stable spiritual community becoming in tongue almost completely pfälzisch (Palatine–Pennsylvania German). “Aller Anfang,” the German proverb has it, “ist schwer und unvollkommen.” That all beginning is difficult and incomplete was certainly exemplified at Germantown. And beginnings, though interesting, are also difficult for even wise scholars to understand, because the rearward lenses are always imperfect, the records often silent on topics about which our–if not their–times have made us

57 curious. As we peer back at Germantown’s infancy, whether in economic, cultural or spiritual terms, we will continue to be tempted to mythologize, oversimplify and project. But with those difficulties conceded, we will continue to find the figure of Willem Rittinghuÿsen, quality papermaker and faithful minister, standing as a representation of his adopted Mennonite fellowship’s sense of an accountable church.

58 Historic RittenhouseTown Board of Directors

President: Vice President: David C. Hamme Frederick W.Clark, Esq. Treasurer: Corporate Secretary: Elizabeth T. Lukens James M. Duffin

Board of Directors Sarah S. Bacheler Carol L. Franklin William Mifflin Christopher Ellen L. Goodwin William Millhollen Rittenhouse Bentley David C. Hamme Mary Rittenhouse Charlotte H. Biddle William Rittenhouse Schwartzentruber Lee Bingham Harman Jeffrey Scott Frederick W.Clark, Esq. David R. Knapton Carolyn Sutton Gerry L. Davis Monica Letzring Anna Coxe Toogood Jack Dundon Elizabeth T. Lukens Rebecca Yamin John McCoubrey

Executive Director: Editorial Board: Christine Owens Dena Dannenberg James M. Duffin Director of Education and David R. Knapton Program Development: Monica Letzring Anna Coxe Toogood Ariel Wilson

59 Historic RittenhouseTown is a National Historic Landmark located in the Wissahickon Valley in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. It is the site of the first paper mill in British North America, founded in 1690 by William Rittenhouse, America’s first Mennonite minister and patriarch of the Rittenhouse family. It is also historically significant as the birthplace of David Rittenhouse, 18th century statesman and scientist, and as the site of an early American industrial village. Historic RittenhouseTown, founded in 1984, is dedicated to the protection, restoration, preservation, and active interpretation of the site, as well as the continuing careful study of its history.

For more information, contact Historic RittenhouseTown, 206 Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia, PA, 19144 Phone: 215 438 5711 Fax: 215 849 6447

Email: [email protected] Webpage: www.rittenhousetown.org