Visiting Our Past: German immigration to WNC

It was a terrible thing. Victims of violence and poverty fled over borders and across a sea to a country (England) that had advertised to them and then spent months in refugee camps.

Sent to America, many of the refugees arrived undocumented.

These were the Germans from the Palatine and Rhine River regions who, in the early 1700s, suffered from a French military invasion, bad weather, disease and ruinous debt.

The survival rate for the immigrants was low. When a contingent finally found footing in the Chester area, west of Philadelphia, “Newlanders” (German-Americans seeking countrymen) and land speculators pressed for continued migration.

One of the later-comers was Johannes Schuck, a Lutheran carpenter from Niederbronn, now part of a historic park in Alsace-Lorraine. (You can go there for a spa vacation.)

Once a Roman healing resort, the area had become a French and German war zone, its occasional prosperity and diversity smashed by overlords putting down local rebels. A revolutionary war had been going on there, with no ocean separating opposing sides.

You can still visit the massive castle of Conrad de Lichtenberg, 13th century Bishop of Strasbourg, who died fighting revolutionaries in Freiburg in 1299.

These places — Niederbronn, Strasbourg, Freiburg — were all along the upper Rhine River, on its mountain passage to the Mediterranean Sea.

Wine was the big industry, so Johannes would have known a market that reached out to the world. He also would have known the castle, and the metaphorical horsemen of the Apocalypse hanging back waiting to strike.

“Game of Thrones” gets its legitimacy from such hot centers of power.

Imagine a rich man in a mineral bath getting bad news. There had been some of those in Alsace-Lorraine.

Or imagine a happy craftsperson in a little hamlet, wondering if the crackdown was going to hit his place and, in any case, desperate because of a collapsed economy.

Johannes’ experience

In 1731, Johannes said it was time to get out. He was in his mid-30s and decently well-off, as were many of the leaders of the 1730s exodus.

He had been a toddler in the mountains west of Mannheim when Louis XIV’s war against the region sent many families east. It ended in a stalemate that divided Alsace from Lorraine.

He’d been 14 when, in 1709, Louis XIV’s army returned, occupying the region’s urban centers. Shiploads of poor families rushed to boats, indentured themselves and left the killing ground, worsened by a record cold winter.

The British distributed copies of “The Golden Book,” with Queen Anne’s picture on the cover and “the title page in letters of gold … to encourage the Palatines to come to England, in order to be sent to the Carolinas,” Daniel Rupp wrote in an 1876 history of the migration.

With his wife, Elizabeth; daughters Dorothea and Christina, ages 11 and 9; son George, age 6; and infant daughter Rosina, Johannes travelled up the Rhine and Maas Rivers to Rotterdam, where they boarded a sloop captained by Constable Tymperton.

Tymperton, sailing to Dover, England and then Philadelphia, went mad in the Atlantic, according to some accounts, and succumbed to a mutiny.

“Sunday last arrived here Capt. Tymberton, in 17 weeks from Rotterdam, the ship Pink John and William … with 220 Palatines, 44 died in the passage,” the Philadelphia Gazette reported on Oct. 19, 1732.

“About 3 weeks ago,” the article continued, “the passengers, dissatisfied with the length of the voyage, were so imprudent as to make a mutiny.” They landed at Cape May and “those concerned with taking the boat are committed to prison.”

Johannes was not among the mutineers. He and his family were probably just trying to survive in their closet-sized floor space below deck as rations and drinking water dwindled to crumbs and cups.

Five months later, the Gazette noted that 15 heads of household on the ship had not paid for their passage. Johannes was not among this group, either.

He was among those who eventually settled 60 miles north of Philadelphia in Williams Township, a German enclave since 1725. He received 80 acres of rocky land in territory that William Penn wanted from the Lenape.

The local connection

Johannes was happy enough to live in Williams Township for the rest of his life, but for his son, George, and his son-in-law, Wilhelm Volprecht, there were greener pastures on the Catawba River in North Carolina, where the Lord Granville lands were being advertised and sold.

In 1765, the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to the Blue Ridge Mountains was widened to accommodate horse-drawn wagons. George and his Schuck family — including his 20-year-old son, Jacob — acquired one of Lancaster County’s famous Conestoga wagons, family historians deduce, and ended up on Lyle’s Creek, near present-day Conover.

“George probably never spoke English,” Wilma Hicks Simpson writes in “Greater Than the Mountains Was He,” her 2013 book about Jacob Shook. “Jacob probably became more or less fluent in that language.”

Jacob changed his name from Schuck to Shook, and Wilhelm Volprecht became William Fulbright.

In 1773, Jacob married Elizabeth Weitzel; and they had their first child, Betsy, when Gen. Griffith Rutherford enlisted Jacob and Jacob’s six-years-younger brother, Andrew, to fight Scots Tories in Cross Creek, near Fayetteville.

After a month of service, the brothers returned home, but three months later they answered Rutherford’s call again, joining him to destroy Cherokee villages from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Murphy.

During this campaign, Jacob would camp two weeks in what is now Clyde, a place to which he’d return around 1786 to become one of the pioneers of the community there.

It is this local connection that we will pick up in next week’s column, as we witness Jacob’s rise to prosperity and conversion to Methodism, as well as relive his experience in the Revolutionary War.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, The Read on WNC. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.