Rob Neufeld

Columnist

Jacob Schuck was 14 when his grandpa, Johannes Schuck, “mindful of (his) mortality,” wrote his last will and testament.

Johannes bequeathed nearly everything to his wife, Anna Maria, who, with him and five children, had survived a starvation, mutiny and disease-wracked journey from the German Rhineland to Pennsylvania in 1732.

When Anna died, he instructed, his estate should be divided between four of their children, including Jacob’s dad, George.

His daughter, Catherine, would also receive, immediately upon his death, five pounds (nearly enough to rent a house for a year, according to contemporary ads), and his daughter Rosina would get a total of one shilling.

Catherine had been the first family member to leave home and go to Carolina — as a teen, settling along the Catawba River with her teen husband, Henry Jacob Eigner.

And Rosina? The reasons for her disinheritance are unknown. She’d been an infant on the ship from Europe. At age 14, according to genealogists, she married Frantz Nerbass, whose surname translates as "gourmand." That’s as much as we have.

Sit by me

We can imagine Jacob attending to his granddad. The old man commanded a lot of respect. George and his brother-in-law, Wilhelm Volprecht, would not leave him to settle along the Catawba until after his death.

Grandpa John would have beckoned Jacob, eldest son of his eldest son, to sit by him and hear about the family legacy.

“Angst macht der Wolf größer” — fear makes the wolf bigger — Johannes might have said, quoting a proverb.

Jacob, who was bilingual, would have heard his grandfather, speaking only German, praise the beauty of his homeland, its vineyards and its diversity of people. Huguenot refugees had fled there from Louis XIV’s persecution.

Jacob would also have heard Johannes lament the way imperial powers had exploited religious tensions to gain territory.

It’s an old story. Jacob would see it repeated in his adult life as British, French and colonists inflamed Indians, Tories and Patriots to gain military advantages.

The journey

Around 1769, the Schucks headed down the Great Wagon Road in a Conestoga wagon.

It was a two-month trip down a road that had been widened and made relatively safe since it had been the Great Indian Warpath along the east side of the Appalachian Mountains.

Don’t think that it was like the Beverly Hillbillies on the move, though the Schuck’s wagon was probably as loaded up as the Clampetts' jalopy.

The Schucks were on an adventure, a long camping trip, and they had money, as did Alexander Boyd who, in 1760, offered five pounds reward for the return of “a Pocket-Book, covered with black Leather, with Thirty-two Pounds, or thereabouts, in paper Money.”

­He’d lost it at the Sign of the Hat, an inn east of Lancaster, Pennsylvania — that is, right at the start of his journey. By the 1760s, the wagon road was populated with inns and taverns, much like the Buncombe Turnpike in the early 1800s here, and much like it, it was prone to thieves.

Danger from Indian warriors was not absent in the mid-1700s. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was active in trying to both pacify and fight Iroquois.

In 1753, he offered to educate Indians in English colleges, but the Indians replied that they’d already tried that and their youths returned “absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catching beavers, or surprising an enemy.” The Indians then offered to take some of the colonists’ children into their schools.

In his autobiography, Franklin commented, after describing how various tribe members had gotten drunk at a treaty meeting, that “if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.”

Rum was plentifully available along the road. Andrew Reed, a merchant at the Delaware River ferry, advertised “good Barbados, St. Christopher’s, and Philadelphia Rum.”

He also offered “cocoa, chocolate, and oil flints, muscavado sugar in barrels, dripping pans of several sizes (good for cooking birds and baking cakes); choice good Jesuit’s bark (a malaria remedy), pork, gammons pack’d in barrels, middling and ship-bread, mackrell, melasses, New-England chairs, and very good gunpowder in half-barrels.”

Pocket-sized jaw harps were popular roadside sales items and supplemented fiddles, banjos and campfire entertainments. “Wagoners were often natural storytellers, and some emerged as minstrels of the Wagon Road,” Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr write in their book, “Wayfaring Strangers.”

A popular pioneer song, “The Wagoner’s Lad,” emerged from the experience. It’s a musical dialogue between a girl en route and a wagoner who laments, “Your parents don’t like me because I am poor.”

The cultures of Germans, Scots, English, French, Irish, African-American, Indian and others mixed on the trip, as families relaxed, got news and looked after their children and livestock. Woodland dangers worried hunting parties, and rowdies along the way tested religious families.

Jacob was 20 at the time of his family’s migration to present-day Catawba County (until 1842, Lincoln; from 1777 to 1782, Burke; and, from 1753 until that time, Rowan).

He met and married Isabella Weitzel either in Pennsylvania or in North Carolina, where they got a license in 1770, as a new law prescribed. They may have fallen in love on the road.

At that time, the Old St. Paul’s Lutheran Church served as the local center of government because the county seat, Salisbury, was 60 miles to the east. The community’s elders translated documents into English for the Rowan court and “mediated disputes and organized community efforts such as barn raisings and cooperative harvests,” Wilma Hicks Simpson writes in “Greater Than the Mountains Was He,”

The acculturation of the Germans into American society happened within a generation.

Jacob’s dad, George, changed the spelling of his name to Shook, and though Jacob married a German, their children’s marriages show how the Shooks got shaken together with Haywood County families sorted by their new faith, Methodism, more than by nationality.

John, the first child, married Polly Deal, whose father changed his name from Diehl. Then Abraham married Elizabeth Burford, descendant of an Englishman who had come to Virginia around 1640. Other spouses were named Hicks, Hyde, Evans, Goodwin and Cooper.

The fourth son, David, married Sarah Haynes, whose parents are not now known, but were probably of English or Welsh ancestry. David and Sarah named two of their children Temperance and Wesley, indicating a Methodist embrace.

Coming up

Last week’s column revealed the Shooks’ legacy in the Palatine area of Germany and in Williams Township, Pennsylvania. It shed light on the German migration and promised a follow-up about Jacob’s involvement in the Revolutionary War in this region.

As it turns out, the Appalachian migration became too big a subject, and I will have to let Jacob fight his battles next week. Before closing, however, there’s one more episode to note.

When the Shooks arrived in Rowan County, the Regulator Movement was in full force. It was largely about government corruption and unfair taxes that favored the east over the west — higher taxes for whiskey than for wine, for instance.

The Rowan County sheriff was instructed to inflict harsh sentences on tax evaders, and, Samuel Ervin Jr. wrote in his 1917 “Colonial History of Rowan County,” “the situation became so perplexing that in 1770 there was no sheriff in Rowan” for fear of legal as well as violent reaction.

On Aug. 1, 1771, Gov. William Tryon wrote Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies, following victory over rebels at Alamance and the execution of Regulator leaders, that he was willing to pardon other participants if they’d surrender their arms and take the oath of allegiance.

On June 4, Tryon learned that the western counties, including Rowan, were still “meditating Hostilities,” and commanded his army to “March through those parts, and Compel the inhabitants to take the oath (and) Suppress any insurrection among them.” There were more hangings.

Though the Regulators sought reform rather than revolution, they sometimes called themselves the “Sons of Liberty,” echoed later by the name “Liberty Men,” which American revolutionaries gave themselves. Also, Jacob would have had to negotiate the subversive undertow that pervaded a populace submitting to a false show of loyalty.

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.