'>^ ^' ^ ^:^ ^^1-%^ ^.., ^ .':^)^^^ -^o. ^1 ^^•n> *^m>r^ ^ Va^. "^^ A^ ' **^ v^9- -^^^^^ '"- V /.-:^.'\ .<.^;:X co^-^.'\ The Whitefield House ON The Ephrata Property AT NAZARETH, PA. 1740-1914 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH by The Rev. A. L. Oerter, A.M. 1914 bethlehem, pa. Times Publishing Company 1914 lyq H A LITTLE FOREWORD The author is aware of the fact that the history presented in these pages is not new to most Moravian readers, but somehow he was led to reproduce it in a somewhat different form. Visitors to the Whitefield House have sometimes expressed a desire to have a printed account of the origin and history of the building that seems to impress all who are susceptible to the influence of such venerable structures as strong links connecting the busy present with the historic past, and this narrative may possibly tend to satisfy such a desire. May it at least not prove al- together unworthy of perusal, and perhaps contribute its mite towards the preservation of the knowledge of worthy and noble deeds worthily and nobly done by our Moravian spiritual forefathers. Authorities consulted for the history were, chiefly, the Rt. Rev. L. T. Reichel's "Early History of the Moravian Church in North America," the Rt. Rev. J. T. Hamilton's "History of the Moravian Church," the Rt. Rev. J. M. Levering's "History of Bethlehem," and the "Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society." Hearty thanks to those friends whose kind liberality has procured the publication of this booklet, and especially to the Rev. S. J. Blum, D.D., for his very kind encouragement and practical, fraternal coopera- tion. Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2010 witii funding from Tine Library of Congress littp://www.archive.org/details/wliitefieldliouseoOOoert The Whitefield House NAZARETH, PA. The Rev. A. L. Oerter, A.M. Nazareth, in Northampton County, Pa., a thriving municipality of about four thousand inhabitants, the seat of the widely-known military academy Nazareth Hall, is indebted for its name to that great evangelist of the eighteenth century, the Rev. George Whitefield, whose own name is perpetuated in the town by the historic Whitefield House, the White- field Lodge, F. & A. M., and Whitefield Street. The story of the origin and building of the interesting edifice just mentioned carries us back almost two hundred years to the time when this part of Pennsylvania was an unbroken forest-wilderness, still claimed and in part occupied by its aboriginal owners, the Delaware Indians. The man who had conceived the idea of building such a large and substantially constructed house in this wilderness must have been no ordinary individual, and must have had an extraordinary motive for so doing. Such was indeed the case, and therefore, before we proceed to speak of the house which he had planned, but did not eventually build, it may seem apropos, especially in view of the fact that on De- cember 27th of this year the bicentennial of his birth will be observed, to rehearse briefly what has been recorded of his life and work. The Rev. George Whitefield was born December 16 (O.S.), 27 (N.S.), 1714, in the city of Gloucester, a place of note in history from the very earliest times, the capital of the county of the same name, in the southwest midland district of England. He was the youngest of a family of six sons and one daughter. His father, an inn-keeper in Gloucester, died when George was two years old, but his mother con- tinued the business. His paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had been clergymen of the Established Church, and he perhaps in- herited from them his talent for pulpit oratory. His mother, desiring to give him a good education, sent him at twelve years of age to a grammar-school in the city, where his skill in elocution attracted marked attention. He also became fond of read- ing plays, thus laying the foundation for the conspicuous dramatic ele- ment in his preaching. Three years later he was taken from school, and for a year and a half assisted his mother in the public-house as a pot-boy or waiter. In his own account he refers to his conduct in his early years as reprehensible. Returning to school in order to prepare for the university, the re- ligious impressions he had felt at different times were deepened, and when he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor, in 1732 or '33, he resolved to live a holy life. Under the influence of the Wesleys, his religious impressions were still further deepened and he joined the so-called Holy Club, observing its stringent rules so zealously that his health failed and he was obliged to return home after having passed through great distress of mind before he found peace and professed conversion. The Bishop of Gloucester, noticing his sincere and fervent piety, or- dained him a deacon in 1736. Returning to Oxford, he took his degree as B.A. and began to preach in several cities, his eloquence attracting 6 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE immense multitudes. The Wesleys having requested him to come to them in Georgia, he sailed for America in December, 1737, or Janu- ary, 1738, arriving at Savannah in May. Here he spent six months, preaching with great acceptance, and founding an Orphanage which he named Bethesda. He returned to England to receive priest's orders, and to solicit contributions for the support of his Orphanage, but was coldly received by the clergy and some churches were closed to him, probably on account of the Calvinistic views he had adopted. Many pamphlets attacking his doctrines were published, to which he replied with some asperity. With the Wesleys he maintained the doctrine of justification by faith and the new birth, and preached in those churches that would receive him. In 1739 he went to Bristol, and meeting with opposition preached to colliers and others in the open air, sometimes to as many as twenty thousand hearers. Then he began his evangel- istic career in Wales and Scotland, accompanied with great results. In August, 1739, he embarked again for America, remaining in this country for two years, preaching to delighted multitudes in all the principal towns and elsewhere, from Massachusetts to Georgia. When he preached in Boston, the great revival which had begun in North- ampton, under Jonathan Edwards, "broke out anew, and perhaps Boston never saw a greater awakening." Whitefleld early became Calvinistic in his views, and was regarded as the leader of the Calvinistic Methodists. This produced a tempor- ary disagreement with Wesley, but they were soon united again in a firm friendship and each pursued his own special course of activity. In London Whitefleld's friends built a church for him which was named the Tabernacle. A second visit to Scotland was followed by another to Wales, where, in 1741, he married Mrs. Elizabeth James, a widow. A son born to them died early. Of home life Whitefleld saw little, his activities engaging him constantly. After another visit to America, 1744-'48, he found his congregation at the Tabernacle dispersed, and was in great financial difficulty. The Countess of Huntington, however, befriended him, appointed him one of her chaplains, and built and endowed Calvinist Methodist chapels in various parts of the country. The remainder of his life was spent chiefly in evangelizing tours in Great Britain, Ireland and America. In 1769 he returned to America for the seventh and last time. In appearance he had changed so much that he looked like an old man, fairly worn out in his Master's service. He placed himself on what he called "short allowance," preaching only once every week-day and thrice on Sunday. To those who advised him to take some rest, he replied, "I had rather wear out than rust out." His last sermon was preached in Exeter, Mass., where, notwithstanding his great weak- ness, he made a last great effort and held the audience spellbound for two hours. On the same day he proceeded to Newburyport, intending to preach there the next day. In the evening, as he took his candle, intending to retire, he was asked for an exhortation, which he con- tinued until the candle burned out. The next morning, September 30, 1770, he died. In accordance with his own desire he was buried before the pulpit of the Presbyterian church in Newburyport. In person Whitefleld has been described by one writer as "graceful, well-proportioned, above the middle size in stature, his eyes dark blue, small and sprightly, his complexion fair, his countenance manly. Both his face and voice were softened with an uncommon degree of sweet- ness, and he was neat, easy in deportment and without affectation. He had a strong, musical voice, under wonderful command. Twenty thou- sand people could hear him. Every accent of his voice spoke to the ear; every feature of his face and every motion of his hands spoke to the eye." Another writer says: "While in presence he was not the most ma- jestic or the most attractive, all defects were lost sight of the moment that eloquent voice began to peal out its unrivalled music. The term AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 7 'seraphic' was not given to him for his exterior grace or his symmetri- cal features. It was the spirit within him shining through and illumi- nating those features, until the audience, hushed or excited, were ready to doubt if the speaker were a man or an angel. The eloquence of Whitefield was owing to a combination of qualities rather than to any single excellence. The great foundation of it all lay in a soul of intense emotions stirred to its very depths by the power of religion. He was a consecrated man from the first. * * * This burning zeal for Christ found expression in the gesture, the countenance and the voice. In gesture no man ever excelled, perhaps none ever equalled him. A single movement of his finger, with the accompanying expression of his face, could thrill an audience or dissolve them in tears. His face, radiant with the light from heaven, which he had caught on the Mount of Com- munion, begat an immediate sympathy as all eyes were riveted upon it. But when that face began to throw off from its lustrous surface the rays of divine intelligence, and when tears and smiles alternated, as the sub- ject \yas pensive or joyful, how did the audience with responsive sym- pathy weep or rejoice under the eloquent preacher! But the voice, what shall we say of that? It could be heard distinctly, on a clear, still even- ing, for a mile. It was smooth, variable, and could express the gentlest emotions. It was capable, also, of swelling into thunder-peals, and then every ear tingled and every heart trembled. If the organ of some grand cathedral had the power to speak and could express the finest and 'most tender sentiments from its delicate pipes and roll forth the majestic thoughts on its largest ones, it would give some idea of Whitefield's variable and powerful tones.' Lfecky, the noted British historian, does not write so enthusiastically. He says, "Whitefield was chiefly a creature of impulse and emotion. He had very little logical skill, no depth or range of knowledge, not much self-restraint. His one talent was his gift of popular oratory, the secret of which was his command of clear and direct English, his remarkable elocutionary and dramatic skill, and his passionate fervor and simple pathos." The fact remains that by his eloquent and persuasive sermons he exercised a powerful influence for good over large numbers of people, convincing many of sin, and turning them to righteousness. His preach- ing is said to have melted Dr. Jonathan Edwards to tears. Benjamin Franklin, who went to hear him in Philadelphia, experienced his great persuasive power. On that occasion he perceived, as he himself wrote, that a collection would be taken for the benefit of Whitefield's Orphan- age in Georgia. Although he had gold, silver and copper in his pocket, Franklin resolved to give nothing. But as the preacher proceeded, "I began to soften and concluded to give the copper. Another stroke of his oratory determined me to give the silver, and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collection dish, gold and all." But Whitefield's activity was not limited to his powerful pulpit utter- ances. In his sermon on his departed friend, Wesley spoke not only of 8 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE his "unparalleled zeal" and "indefatigable activity," but also of his "tender-heartedness" and "charitableness towards the poor." The poor and lowly no doubt constituted the great majority of his audiences. His sympathy for the poor and his practical benevolence led him to appoint John Cennick, later a prominent Moravian evangelist and pastor, as schoolmaster for the children of colliers at Kingswood, England, and to establish an orphanage, which he named Bethesda, in Georgia. The Baeony of Nazareth. The same spirit of benevolence caused him, when on his voyage from Savannah, Georgia, to Pennsylvania, in 1740, to determine "to establish a Negro school in Pennsylvania, where he proposed to take up land in order to settle a town for the reception of such English friends whose hearts God should incline to come and settle there." On board ship he wrote to the Secretary of the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: "To me Pennsylvania seems to be the best Province in America for such an undertaking. The Negroes meet there with the best usage, and I believe many of my acquaintance will either give me or let me purchase their young slaves at a very easy rate. I intend taking up a tract of land far back in the country." There it was his in- tention not only to found a school for negro children, but also a village or tojvn in which such persons as were oppressed in England might find a place of refuge. On his first visit to Pennsylvania, in 1739, "seeing the moral destitu- tion of the Germans, who formed a large part of the population, and not being able to preach to them in their language, he wrote to Count Zinzendorf, requesting him to send German missionaries. Zinzendorf complied with this request, and thus Whitefield was partly instrumental in introducing the Moravian Brethren into Pennsylvania." In the following year, when he sailed from Savannah, Georgia, for Pennsylvania, he gave a passage on his sloop to the Rev. Peter Boehler and the rest of the Moravian colonists in Georgia, who had remained there until that time, the colony being then abandoned. Carrying out the plan he had formed on this voyage, of taking up land in Pennsyl- vania, "far back in the country," Whitefield, with the aid of his finan- cial agent, William Seward, purchased for £2200 five thousand acres of land in the "Forks of the Delaware" — the tract being almost identical with the present Upper Nazareth Township in Northampton County — from William Allen, of Philadelphia, to whom an unlocated holding of ten thousand acres had some years before been conveyed by William Penn, grandson of the original Proprietor. To this tract Whitefield, with the intended school and village especially in mind, gave the name which the present town and township still bear — Nazareth. "In records of Colonial times this tract is occasionally called 'The Barony of Nazareth,' because its title carried with it certain old seign- iorial prerogatives of the Hundreds and Baronies of Great Britain and Ireland, being part of a grant of twenty-five thousand acres made in AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 9 1682 by William Penn to his daughter Letitia Aubrey, the Deed grant- ing 'the Franchise, Royalty, Right, etc., to erect the said five thousand acres of land, or any part or parts thereof, into a manor, and to have and to hold Court Baron therein, etc., etc' These dignities and privi- leges passed with the title through the several conveyances and nomi- nally pertained to it until the termination of Proprietary government in Pennsylvania rendered them null and void. The romantic quit- rent— a red rose in June— led to naming the Moravian hostelry on the northern border of the Barony 'The Rose'." (Bishop Levering's History of Bethlehem.) Having secured his title to the land, Whitefleld's first object was to find a suitable location for the erection of a house that would be adapted to the purpose for which he designed it, and to obtain me- chanics who would build the house. It was to be a large building, fifty- six feet in length and thirty-five feet in breadth, of two stories and a garret, and was to be solidly constructed of stone. On the fifth of May, 1740, Whitefield was preaching at the house of Christopher Wiegner, one of the pioneer settlers, whose farm was in the Skippack woods, (now Montgomery County,) about two miles south of the present Kulpsville, and about eight miles southwest of Hatfield station on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Wiegner was one of a company of Schwenkfelders who had come to Pennsylvania in 1734. These people had been enjoying Count Zinzendorfs protection on his Berthelsdorf manor until a royal edict of 1733 compelled them to leave Saxony. Wiegner and several others had entered into close fellowship with the people of Herrnhut and, hence, in his house in the Skippack woods many Moravians found hospitality on their journeys in Pennsylvania. He had been one of the conductors of the colony of Schwenkfelders. George Boehnisch, the first Moravian to come to Pennsylvania, had been another, and he made his home at Wiegner's house and farm. Here also Spangenberg, commissioned by Zinzendorf to look after the Schwenkfelders, in whose welfare the Count was interested, to investi- gate the spiritual condition of the Germans generally and to gather in- formation about the Indians, had sojourned in 1736, working as a com- mon laborer on the farm, "so as not to be a burden to any one, to identify himself with the rustic population and to disarm the prejudice of those sects which disliked schoolmen and gentry, and laid much stress on extreme plainness of dress and habit as a religious distinc- tion." At Wiegner's house religious services had been held regularly since 1738, and hence it came to pass that Whitefield, having been at Phila- delphia, thirty miles south, was preaching to "a multitude of people" at Wiegner's house on the fifth of May, 1740. On the same day Peter Boehler, who was sojourning there, preached in the German language for those who did not understand English, and from the meeting of these two eminent men on that day important consequences were to result. For Whitefield, knowing that some of the Moravian brethren 10 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEriELD HOUSE who had come with him from Georgia were carpenters, proposed to Peter Boehler that he should superintend the building of the house he designed as a negro school on his land in the Forks of the Delaware, employing for the work the Moravians who had come with him to Pennsylvania. Boehler, who saw in this offered employment the possi- bility of preventing the dispersion of his brethren, agreed in the first place to go to the Forks of the Delaware and locate Whitefield's land. On the evening of the same day Whitefield preached at the house of Henry Antes, "the pious layman of Frederick Township," whose home- stead and mill were some miles west of Wiegner's farm, and on the afternoon of the next day Boehler, accompanied by Anthony Seiffert and Henry Antes, all on horseback, set out to look for Whitefield's tract in the forest-wilds of eastern Pennsylvania. The Pioneer Explorers. Peter Boehler, Anthony Seiffert, Henry Antes— a Christian trium- virate, whose names are venerated and their memory cherished wher- ever their altruistic and devoted labors are known. The first two were young unmarried men, but both of them ordained Moravian clergymen; the third had been married fourteen years and was the father of a family, a member of the German Reformed denomination and a faithful friend of the Moravian Brethren. Peter Boehler, born December 31, 1712, in Frankfort on the Main, had not yet completed his twenty-eighth year. Student at the univer- sities of Jena and Leipslc, magister legens or junior professor at the former, he there, through the influence of Spangenberg, found the way of life, and formed a life-long friendship with Count Zinzen- dorf. Accepting a call to enter the service of the Moravian Church and go to America as pastor of the little colony established at Savan- nah, Georgia, and as a missionary among the slaves of South Carolina, he was ordained by Bishops Zinzendorf and Nitschmann in the chapel of the old feudal castle of the Ronneburg in Wetteravia, and in 1738 left for England. In London he became acquainted with John Wesley and his brother Charles, and was instrumental in leading them and others into the light and peace which they had not yet found. His discourses and conversations in German, Latin and English were at- tended by many inquirers, and when he left London Wesley wrote in his journal: "Peter Boehler left London to embark for Carolina. O what a work has God begun since his coming into England! Such a one as shall never come to an end till heaven and earth pass away." After a voyage that lasted altogether for five months Boehler and his assistant, George Schulius, arrived at Savannah. Owing to the po- litical troubles occasioned by the war with Spain the settlement had decreased, and after laboring faithfully for a year and suffering many privations, severe illness proved almost fatal to him and his assistant died. Seeing that under the circumstances the small remnant of the colony could not remain in Georgia, Boehler gladly accepted the offer of the Rev. George Whitefield, who had arrived at Savannah on Janu- ary 1, 1740, to take them with him on his sloop to Pennsylvania, and on the 25th of April they arrived at Philadelphia. Having in his heart the peace that passeth all understanding, Boeh- ler's cheerful, practical piety, his love and good-will toward all his fellowmen, were mirrored in his pleasant countenance, and caused him to perform any task, however humble, in the service of his brethren and his Divine Master. An accomplished linguist, known at the uni- versity as "the learned Peter Boehler," he was willing to deny himself and to suffer the loss of worldly honor, and manifested admirable tact in the leadership of his brethren for which he was destined. His well- AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE H knit frame and robust health gave him great power of physical endur- ance, and possessing a voice of great compass and melody he often led the service of song in the congregations he addressed. Full of zeal and activity, he was worthy of the honor conferred upon him when he was consecrated a bishop in 1748; worthy also of the testimony of one of his biographers, that "next to Zinzendorf and Spangenberg no one among the early Moravian Fathers in America is better known and more highly celebrated in the Christian Church generally than Peter Boehler." Anthony Seipf,brt was one of the Georgia colonists who had come with Peter Boehler to Pennsylvania. A Bohemian by birth, the third of the six sons of George Seiffert, who with his family held to the evan- gelical faith and practice of the Ancient Unitas Fratrum, to escape from the cruel persecution of all Protestants and find refuge where they could enjoy religious liberty, he, with his brothers Joseph and Frederick, emigrated from Bohemia to Herrnhut in Saxony, whither his aged father, in his eighty-fourth year, followed him four years later, alone and on foot. In 1735 Seiffert had arrived at Savannah with eight other brethren of the first colony under the leadership of Spang- enberg. The next year Bishop David Nitschmann, the first Bishop of the Renewed Brethren's Church — to whom, on March 13, 1735, the episcopacy of the Ancient Unitas Fratrum had been transferred by the Rt. Rev. Bishop Daniel Ernestus Jablonsky, D.D., Royal Court Preacher at Berlin, Church Counsellor of the Royal Consistory, etc., etc., and oldest Senior and Bishop of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren in Great Poland, and his colleague, the Rt. Rev. Bishop Christian Sitkovius^ — arrived at Savannah with another colony of twenty Moravians. John and Charles Wesley had sailed on the same vessel from Eng- land, and soon became intimate with Bishop Nitschmann and much im- pressed by the Christ-like spirit which he and his brethren displayed, and by their calmness on the occasion of a storm. Soon after their arrival Bishop Nitschmann organized the colony as a regular congregation, ordained Anthony Seiffert to the ministry, in- stalled him as pastor of the congregation, for which office he had been chosen by the colonists, and at the same time ordained Spangen- berg — by virtue of his Lutheran ordination in Germany regarded as in deacon's orders- — a Presbyter of the Renewed Brethren's Church. This ordination, we are told on good authority, is noteworthy as being the first regular ordination performed by a Bishop of the Christian Church in the Englis.h Colonies of North America, for until after the Revolu- tion the ministers or representatives of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches remained under charge of the Bishop of London, and of the Vicar Apostolic of London, respectively, and there was no Bishop of those Churches resident in the Colonies.' The election of Anthony Seiffert by the colonists, and his ordination by Bishop Nitschmann, as well as his subsequent services and official position, show that he was evidently qualified for the ministerial office, and was regarded as a capable leader of his brethren. Some years older than Boehler, of a quiet and unassuming disposition, calm and self-possessed, as he showed himself on more than one occasion, he too was ready to render any service that might be required of him, and to be a faithful co-worker with his brethren in their arduous under- takings. Henry Antes, the third of this little group of explorers, having come to America with his father prior to 1725, had been living on his farm and working at his trade as a wheel-wright and mill-wright, his home- stead and mill being probably on the Swamp Creek, "in the country back of Pottstown," (since 1784 Frederick Township in Montgomery County) then called Falckner's Swamp and included in Philadelphia County. He had been married in 172 6 by a clergyman of the Reformed Church, of which he was a member. In 1736 he became acquainted with Spangenberg, who was then sojourning at the farm of Christopher Wiegner, in whose house a number of earnest men of various creeds met for mutual edification and counsel for the religious improvement of the spiritually destitute region, forming the undenominational union known as "The Associated Brethren of Skippack," an unpretentious 12 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE Evangelical Alliance. Henry Antes was the leading spirit in this work, and in 1741 issued a Circular which led to the formation of the Synod of Pennsylvania, in which most of the religious denominations of Pennsylvania were represented, and in which he was a very prominent member. Through these meetings he was brought into closer relations with the Moravian Brethren, in 1745 became a resident of Bethlehem, for a number of years rendered eminent services in superintending tem- poral concerns, especially the erection of mills, and in 1749 was made a Consenior Civilis, having the legal care of the Brethren's estates and property. As a Justice of the Peace in the county of Bucks he also performed many timely services for the Moravians, and in 1752 accompanied Bishop Spangenberg to western North Carolina to select a tract of land for a projected Moravian settlement. But this was twelve years after he had accompanied Peter Boehler and Anthony Seiffert on their expedition to locate Whitefield's tract in the Forks of the Delaware, whither we now, after thus forming their acquaintance, propose to follow them. Whitefield's Tract Located. It was the afternoon of the sixth of May, 1740, when these three riders started on their journey to an unknown location "far back in the country"; a journey that was fraught with possible peril from wild beasts of the forest and from hostile Indians; a journey the issue of which was clouded with uncertainty, but which was to have momentous and happy results for many generations. But these three men are not faint-hearted weaklings, dreading possi- ble hardships or danger. It is not the first time that they have taken their lives in their hands and gone forth to the execution of purposes that led them to peril by land and sea. They have endured hardships manifold and have successfully contended with and overcome difficulties and dangers, and have been well trained in the school of patient and brave endurance, so unavoidably necessary in their day. Capable of physical as well as mental endurance, stout of heart in the conscious- ness that they are entering upon a mission that has been providentially assigned them, firm of faith in the ever-present guardianship of that Almighty One whose servants they rejoice to be, this journey into an unbroken wilderness, a trackless forest through a great part of which none of their race has yet penetrated, has no terrors for them. Clad in their ordinary civilian gai'b, unarmed save for the axes that may be needed to hew their way through the dense undergrowth, in calm se- renity of soul they set forth, neither knowing nor fearing what may betide them. We can picture to ourselves the scene as they cheerfully mount their stout steeds — a moderate mastery of equestrianism being an indispens- able accomplishment in those pioneer days — with the necessary provi- sion for man and beast in their saddle-bags, as they will probably have to bivouac in the woods. Antes affectionately bids farewell to his family, then consisting of his aged father, wife and seven children, the eldest being a daughter of fourteen years and the youngest an infant son of two months, who lived to become a Mioravian missionary in Egypt, where he was crtielly bastinadoed by an avaricious Bey. Boehler and AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 13 Seifeert also bid good-bye to their kind friends, and then the cavalcade starts, in the first place, perhaps, for the Wiegner farm, or else for Joseph Mueller's in the Great Swamp. Antes is naturally the leader of the party, and with his trusty rifle, that may be needed for defence from the wild beasts of the forest, precedes his two clerical companions, as the narrow trail forbids their riding abreast. There is no King's highway there, and the way may be rough, but as they ride through the primeval forest they beguile the time sometimes with serious and anon with lively conversation, for they are no gloomy ascetics, and the hearts of two of them are glad at the prospect of useful occupation in their time of need, and the possible opportunity of friendly intercourse with the red children of the forest, to whose need of spiritual instruction they would be glad to minister. Their conversation is chiefly in their native German, although they have acquired some knowledge of the English language, and the magister of Jena can discourse fluently in the language of the ancient Romans, and in others if need be. It is the beautiful month of May. Nature, fully awakened from the long repose of winter, smiles upon them from the fresh foliage of oak and chestnut, birch and maple, and all the rejuvenated woodland family, vocal with the songs of the birds that have returned from southern climes, where two of these travelers had also spent some time with the ill-fated Georgia colony. Nothing daunted by past sad experiences, ready to take the new task that is given them gladly, with cheerful hearts they follow the trail that leads them away from the habitations of their kind and the haunts of civilization into the domain still claimed by its aboriginal savage inhabitants. The songs of the birds along their way remind them that they also have songs to sing — Boehler has a voice of great compass and melody — and anon they lift up their voices, and the solitudes of the Pennsylvania forest hear the sweet songs of Zlon resounding in the grand old Ger- man chorales they learned in their far distant European home. Peace- fully and unmolested they pursue their way through the northeastern corner of Bucks County and into the extreme eastern part of Lehigh County (then, with Northampton County included in Bucks,) until they reach the farm and mill of Nathaniel Irish, agent for William Allen, from whom Whitefield had bought the tract of five thousand acres which they are seeking. Mr. Irish had cleared a farm, built a mill and established a land-office as agent of William Allen, near the mouth of the Saucon Creek, where the village of Shimersville is now situated. About a mile southwest of Shimersville, in the forks of the Hellertown road, he had a stone- quarry which was the terminus of the first highway, or King's road from Philadelphia to the Lehigh. His place was a general rendezvous, so that it would seem very natural for these horsemen to halt there and have an interview with him before proceeding farther, especially as Mr. Irish could inform them of the exact location of Whitefield's 14 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE tract, the lines of which had been run when it was purchased by Wil- liam Allen. It appears likely that they lodged that night at Mr. Irish's house, or at that of the good Hollander Ysselstein, on the south bank of the Le- high River, where either this party of pioneers or the following one in December of the same year passed a night on their way to the Nazareth manor. They had ridden twenty or twenty-five miles that afternoon, and would have to ride twelve or fifteen more before they would reach their destination. Moreover, we are told by historians, that they started on their journey on the sixth of May and reached the tract on the seventh, and if that is correct, they must have spent the night of the sixth somewhere on the way. Assuming, then, that they set out from Mr. Irish's or Ysselstein's house on the morning of the seventh, they ere long reached the banks of the Lehigh River on its winding way from its sources in the hills and mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania to its junction with the Delaware River at the site of the present city of Easton. Into its clear waters they entered, crossing it at the old Indian ford, a little distance belo'W the point where the Monocacy Creek flows into it. Ascending the forest-covered elevation on its northern side, they passed within a stone's throw of the spot on which the very next year the little log house that should be the first house of Bethlehem was to stand, "aside of the Indian path that led up from the ford into the northwest trail to the mountains." It may be they stopped for a refreshing draught from the copious spring that gushed forth at the foot of the declivity, and that was to be of such prime importance to the future settlement. Passing on over the future site of the settlement, they little thought that in years to come it would be covered with the buildings of a town that would grow into a large and prosperous municipality, nor dreamed they of the purchase of five hundred acres on this northern bank of the river, that would be offered to them and their brethren by Mr. Irish. The silent forest covered it all and received them into its mys- terious depths as they journeyed on northward in the neighborhood of the present villages that line the road from Bethlehem to Nazareth, until they finally knew that they had reached the tract purchased by Mr. Whitefield. The day was passed in a careful survey and examination of its to- pography and natural resources, "its timber, stone and springs of water, and in discussing various eligible building sites," and their conclusions were of a favorable character. But they find that they will not be the first to occupy a part of this five thousand acre tract. In an opening in the forest they discover a considerable Indian village, with patches of corn and a peach orchard around its wigwams. The Delaware or Fork Indians are they, claiming this region as its original inhabitants, under their chief, Captain John, "one of the six doughty sons of the noted Delaware chieftain called old Captain Harris; high-spirited, sensitive men, cherishing grudges against AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 15 the English, and smarting under the indignities put upon them by the Six Nations," their conquerors. With great displeasure they have seen the gradual encroachment of white settlers upon their lands, although by a treaty made with them some years previously, based on a deed purporting to have been made by several chiefs to William Penn, they were required to vacate the Porks of the Delaware. Did our explorers perhaps visit these original lords of the soil in their wigwams and assure them — as some of them understood and spoke more or less English^of their friendly sentiments and peaceful inten- tions? It would appear not an unlikely thing for them to do, as one of the principal objects of their coming to this continent was the be- ginning of a mission work among the Indians, and they had inaugu- rated such a work among the Georgia Indians under their friendly chief Tomotschatschi. At all events, they were not dismayed or alarmed by the presence of these dusky dwellers on Whitefield's tract, and hav- ing concluded their labors for the day they proceed to encamp for the night a short distance from the Indian village, which occupied ground northeast from the site of "Old Nazareth," where the first buildings for the occupancy of the farming community of Nazareth were subsequently erected. "On a gentle acclivity, at the foot of which ran a little brook" through the natural meadows subsequently named the Long Meadows, they find a large, wide-spreading oak tree, evidently a veteran of the forest, whose softly rustling leaves whisper a welcome to the weary travelers as they offer them protection. Here they dismount, and after seating themselves beneath the oak, * which was to become historic as "Boehler's Oak," and in the bark of which his initials and those of Anthony Seif- fert could be seen as late as 1799, they join in an evening sacrifice of praise and prayer, and then compose themselves to rest sweetly and securely under the shadow of the Almighty. The dawning of the next day finds them ready to start on their re- turn to Henry Antes' farm, and thence to Philadelphia, where Mr. Whitefield is waiting to hear their report. This being favorable, he closes his contract with William Allen, and renews his proposal to the Moravian brethren as to the building of the house. * It is to be regretted that the precise location of this tree is no longer known. Bishop Boehler, when making an address during the loTefeast on the lawn of the Whitefield House, on the occasion of the laying of the corner-stone of Nazareth Hall on May 3, 1755, pointed out the tree to his hearers, and therefore it cannot have stood very far from the Whitefield House. In a paper by H. A. Brickenstein, read before the Moravian Historical Society, on March 9, 1857, entitled, "Peter Boehler's Oak-tree," we read : "The King's highway, extending from Bethlehem to the Indian settlements of Minnesink, 7-an close by the tree, through the present orchard (formerly belonging to the farm known as Plantation No. 4) to the Rose tavern." This farm is located just outside of Nazareth, on the northeast, at the turn of the road leading to Nisky. The King's highway above mentioned was not in ex- istence when Boehler and his companions rested under the oak. It would appear, therefore, that the tree stood N.N.E. from the Whitefield House. Some years ago the late Bro. Andrew G. Kern, Sr., of Nazareth, who was greatly interested in the history of Nazareth, and diligently examined the diaries of the congregation, located the stump of the tree, and a part of it was deposited in the museum of the Moravian Historical Society, but no one can now point out the exact spot on which the tree grew. 16 an historical sketch of the whitefield house The Pioneer Btjh.ders. His proposal being accepted, two of the explorers, Boehler and Seiffert, together with five other brethren, John Martin Mack, John Boehner, George Zeisberger and his son David, Matthias Seybold, two women, George Zeisberger's wife Rosina and Hannah Hummel, who had come from Georgia with the brethren, and ,two boys, Benjamin Sommers and James , who had also come with them from Georgia, prepare to go to Whitefield's tract, in order to begin the build- ing of the house. They set out from Philadelphia May 27th, all on foot, the women of those days being inured to hardship as well as the men, and after a toilsome march of three days on the King's highway, leading from Philadelphia to Irish's stone-quarry and thence along the old Indian trail through the forest, they reach the grand old black-oak under which the three explorers had rested three weeks before. "Their first act was one of worship. Sitting beneath a black-oak tree, they returned thanks in the sweet hymns of their native land for God's protection and loving care. It was the evening sacrifice of the first congregation that wor- shipped the Lord at Nazareth." Huts made of a rude fraine-work of poles roofed with bark and wattled with the branches of trees were soon constructed as a needed shelter from the rain which added to the discomfort of these solitary pioneers, until they were able, at the end of July, to complete a house of unhewn logs near the site at which Whitefield's commissioners, who had meanwhile arrived, marked off the dimensions of the large house that was to be built. "The edifice was to be of massive stone, and its plan was so extensive that it would have been a great undertaking even in the populous sections of Pennsylvania; in a wilderness such as con- stituted its site difficulties of every kind presented themselves." However, Boehler displayed his usual zeal and activity. He "secured a force of lime-burners, quarry-men, masons, board-cutters and teamsters from Goshenhoppen, Whitemarsh, Maxatawny, Lower Saucon and elsewhere," and rejoined his brethren on the last day of June. Then, we may suppose, their Indian neighbors looked on with mingled feelings of wonder and displeasure while these pale-faces busied themselves with the excavation of the two cellars, quarrying and hauling the stone for the foundation-walls, felling the trees that stood on the selected site, "on a gentle hill commanding a noble view of rolling forests to the distant valley of the Delaware eastward." But the aboriginal dwellers in Welagomeka, as they named their village, offered no opposition, al- though they may have thought that the Great Spirit was not favoring the undertaking, as "it rained frequently, and there was difficulty with the lime and sand and the incompetence of some of the workmen." Boehler was not to be discouraged. "Like Paul, he became all things to all men." The learned professor of Jena superintended the carpenters, worked with them as much as he could, walked every week ten miles to the nearest mill — Irish's — and procured the necessaries of life, H^ AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 17 "preached the gospel to his brethren and prayed with them day by day. In the whole course of his long career as Professor, Minister and Bishop there was no period in which his work set forth features so heroic as when he cheered and consoled, enlivened and kept united this little band of Moravians in the face of the many discouragements that sur- rounded them." But the secret counsels of the Supreme Disposer of events had decreed that the house which Whitefield had planned with a benevolent purpose should not be built for him; that it should indeed be built, but should serve a purpose different from that which he intended. The month of September ushers in another rainy season, and with the walls laid only up to the door-sills, for which £300 had already been expended, it is evident that the house cannot be completed before winter. Boehler repairs to Philadelphia, reports to Whitefleld's agents and obtains permission to put up a comfortable building in which to pass the winter. This second one of the two small log houses that stood near the stone house was ready for occupancy early in November.* The Building Suspended. Upon Boehler's return from Philadelphia the hired workmen are dis- missed, and the company of pioneers build the second log house, "of hewn logs," both houses being thirty feet long and twenty-four feet broad, with three dwelling-rooms and other appurtenances, and make provision for wintering in the wilderness. At the beginning of Novem- ber the second log house is ready for occupancy, and Boehler, learning that Whitefield had arrived at Philadelphia from Georgia, goes thither a second time in order to report to him personally. To his surprise he finds that, as a climax to all the difficulties they have encountered, they are now in a position still more threatening. Whitefield, whose mind has been prejudiced against the Moravians by the misrepresentations * Opinions differ as to which one of these two log houses was the first one built. In his "Early History of the Church of the United Brethren in America" Bishop Levin T. Reichel gives the priority to the one that is still standing, "the small log house that was afterwards enlarged," and states that afterwards "they erected a two-story log building which was finished in November." This one was taken down about sixty years ago. On the other hand, in his "History of Bethlehem," published 1903, Bishop Levering speaks of "the older of the two log houses, long ago de- In a note to a paper, entitled "Disjecta Membra," by the late Rev. W. C. Reichel, published in the Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society. Vol. I, Part X, the priority Is given to the log house that is still standing; while in an address delivered by the first President of the Moravian Historical Society, the late Mr. James Henry, at the first anniversary meeting in November, 1858, he said : "When autumn came on it was found expedient to suspend operations and throw up the tico-story log building, as is generally supposed. Our chroniclers of the present day differ as to which was the very first of those two log buildings, but from the fact that seventeen persons took shelter here during the ensuing winter, I should conclude that a single cabin with but two or three rooms, like the lower one of these buildings would have been inadequate." However, by the time that winter cpme on. and before the arrival of Bishop Nitschmann and his company, both of the log houses were standing and could be occupied. The first log house was built of unheivn logs, the second of liewn logs. The log house that stood nearest to the Whitefield House was a two-story building, as may be seen m the picture. The one-story log house, still standins and occupied, is known as the gray cottage." A bronze tablet on its front states that it is the second house of Nazareth. 18 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEEIELD HOUSE of some who were opposed to their settling in Pennsylvania, receives him coldly and at once starts a theological discussion in Latin about the doctrines of free grace and election or predestination, on which they differed, and finding that he could not convince his opponent of error and of the correctness of his own position, gives an instance of that want of self-restraint charged to him by the historian Lecky, and sum- marily commands Boehler and his brethren to leave his land. Thus they are threatened with ejectment from their little log-houses and with exposure as homeless wanderers to the rigors of the winter that was even then at hand. But they are not to suffer this additional hardship and distress. By the interposition of Mt. Irish, who, by his intercourse with the Mora- vians, and especially with Boehler, had been favorably impressed with their character, Whitefield is persuaded fo retract his hasty and unkind order, and they are at least permitted to remain at Nazareth during the winter of 1740 and '41, which proved to be unusually severe. "We can imagine with what astonishment the lonely dwellers in the two log houses listened as they were gathered together and heard Boeh- ler's account of his interview with Whitefield and of their abrupt dis- missal from the work for which he had engaged them and their expul- sion from his land. Faithfully they had thus far fulfilled their part of the contract, and were ready to resume their labors as soon as it should be possible to do so, but now the door had been shut in their faces, and as they looked upon the unfinished walls of the house they had expected to build, and in place of the scene of activity that had so lately enlivened the solitude of that forest-wilderness noted the silence and desolation that now had usurped its place, sad thoughts will natu- rally have burdened their minds, and the uncertainty of their future destiny when the winter should be past and they would be forced to leave the only home they had in the wide, wide world, will have at least temporarily agitated them. But they put their trust in Him who had led them and providentially cared for them thus far, and they knew that He would not forsake them. So they address themselves to the work of necessary preparation for the rapidly advancing winter. A store of firewood is gathered and made ready for use, provisions such as they can obtain are laid up in advance of the time when the trail through the forest will be covered with deep snow and well nigh impassable, and the log houses are made as capable as possible of excluding the freezing temperature. "Man's extremity is God's opportunity." In the midst of their per- plexity, while sadly making these necessary preparations for their iso- lated winter sojourn in the wilderness, with none but the Indians of Welagomeka as near neighbors, a messenger arrives! With joy they greet one of their brethren, who, lately arrived from Europe, brings to them the cheering intelligence that more brethren and sisters are coming in a short time, and that there are prospects for carrying out the plan of founding a permanent settlement in Pennsylvania. RT REV. PETER BOEHLER RT. REV. DAVID NITCHMANN RT. REV. A. G. SPANGENBERG RT. REV. JOHN MARTIN MACK REV. DAVID ZEISBERGER AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 19 On the eighteenth of December a company of five persons, who had reached Philadelphia three days before, arrived at the log houses on Whitefield's tract. Their leader was Bishop David Nitschmann, accom- panied by his uncle, David Nitschmann, Sr., Christian Froehlich, Anna Nitschmann, daughter of David Nitschmann, Sr., prominent among the women of Herrnhut and subsequently Count Zinzendorf's second wife, after the death of the Countess, and Mrs. Johanna S. Molther. Thus six were added to the eleven pioneers who had been dwelling on that spot since the end of May, making seventeen persons to be accom- modated in the two log houses. The accommodations were naturally of the most primitive character; but they were all willing to endure hardship as good soldiers of the cross, and knew that whatever discom- fort they might now experience would be but temporary. For Bishop Nitschmann confirmed the tidings brought by the brother who had pre- ceded this company, and soon after purchased from Mr. Irish a tract of five hundred acres, which the latter had offered to Peter Boehler on the north bank of the Lehigh River, the site on which afterwaras arose the Moravian town of Bethlehem. But the joyful anticipation of dwelling on land which they could call their own was tempered with keen regret at parting with the man who had been their faithful and efficient leader, for Boehler was recalled to Europe, his services being needed in England, and, accompanied by Bishop Nitschmann, left them on the twenty-seventh of December, after holding with them the first Christmas service and the first Moravian celebration of the Holy Communion in the Forks of the Delaware. By this time the snow had come, and lay at least two feet deep all around them, and in the cellars and upon the unfinished walls of White- field's house and all over the landscape which they could see through the bare limbs of the trees, stretching away for miles eastward. But they are not idle in their isolation. David Nitschmann, Sr., commonly called Father Nitschmann, an emigrant from Moravia to Herrnhut in January, 1725, who had suffered imprisonment and bodily torture in his native country for the sake of the gospel, now in his sixty-fourth year but still hardy and vigorous, went with two other brethren over the snow-covered trail through the forest to the tract purchased on the Lehigh, and there felled the first tree for the building of the first house of Bethlehem on the site selected by them in the rear of the present Eagle Hotel. But they could not proceed with the building of the house until the beginning of the next year, 1741. Meanwhile, when the storms that beat fiercely on the two log houses on Whitefield's tract permitted, they made the first missionary attempts among their neighbors, the Delaware Indians, and succeeded in gaining their good-will, so that the chief. Captain John, desired to make his ten-year-old son the permanent ward of Brother Froehlich, with whom he spent the winter. Gathered around the fire on the hearth these hardy pioneers found many subjects for interesting conversation, or en- gaged in the simple domestic duties of their housekeeping, falling 20 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE largely to the share of the devoted sisters who had not hesitated to hrave the hardships of this pioneer life in the forest-wilds on the frontier of civilization. Daily they united in family worship and their voices sweetly joined in glad hymns of praise and thanksgiving, or were lifted in fervent prayer and supplication to the God who dwells in the wilderness as well as in the populous abodes of men, the Saviour whom they loved and served^ Their abode in these first houses on the Nazareth tract was coming to an end. The house on the Lehigh tract being nearly ready for occu- pancy in the spring of 1741, those of the pioneers who were working at it took up their abode there, and before the end of June the rest of them had finally removed from the Barony of Nazareth to the tract on the north bank of the Lehigh. They were seventeen in number, eleven men, four women and two boys constituting the household in the first house of Bethlehem, a building of "square-hewn logs, twenty by forty feet in dimensions, one story high, with sleeping quarters for a number of persons in the attic under the steep-pitched roof." The Whitefield Tract Deserted. Now, in place of the expected resumption of activity on the Whitefield tract, no sound is heard within or around the two deserted log houses, and the desolate foundation-walls of the intended stone house bear silent testimony to the futility of human plans, however good, when not in accord with the wise decrees of Providence. The stones that had been quarried and hauled await in vain the hands that should place them in their destined position, and the trees that have been cut down lie where they fell around the site of the building doomed to wait for its completion until the snows of two more winters have covered its foundation. The Indians of Welagomeka are again monarchs in their wild domain, and miss, some of them, at least, not without regret the friendly pale-faces who sought to teach them of the ways of pleasant- ness and the paths of peace. They will come again. Captain John, and will come to stay, for the entire five thousand acres of the Barony of Nazareth have been purchased for £2500 by the Moravian Brethren from Mr. Whitefield, who, in embarrassment through the death of his financial agent, Wm. Seward, is unable to prosecute his well-intentioned plan, or even to hold the land he had bought from Mr. Allen. The Lehigh tract is the scene of active building operations. The first small log house having been completed and occupied, the brethren, sure of permanent occupancy, begin to fell timber for a larger house. Father Nitschmann as active as any of them. Henry Antes and Anthony Seiffert have come to assist them, and before the end of the year the •two-story house, forty-five by thirty feet, built of hewn logs chinked with clay and straw, is almost completed. * Two apartments in it are made ready in December for Count Zinzendorf and his daughter Be- * It still stands, with the addition built soon after, increasing the length to ninety-three feet, weather-boarded in recent years, the oldest house in Bethlehem, at the northeast corner of Church and Cedar Streets. AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 21 nigna, who, with some other brethren and sisters arrive on the twenty- first, in time to join in the Christmas Eve service on the twenty-fourth, in the first house, on which occasion the new settlement receives the name "Bethlehem." Land is cleared for cultivation, and a congregation is organized, but the unoccupied Whitefield tract is not forgotten, and in June of the next year Captain John and his tribe are surprised to see visitors on the premises of the two log houses, for Count Zinzendorf has come to in- spect the forsaken locality. He has an interview with the Indians, but does not succeed in convincing them that they ought to vacate the tract in favor of its new owners. Therefore, a colony of fifty-six immigrants from Germany and England having arrived at Bethlehem, those from England are sent to occupy the log houses on the Whitefield tract. These colonists "consisted mainly of young married couples and single men, representing various professions and handicrafts. They were all not only people of some education, a few being university men, but were also of well tested Christian experience, capable of carrying out the plans that had been made for itinerant preaching, founding schools for the hosts of neglected children in Pennsylvania, and doing mission work among the Indians." With this colony, to the joy of his old friends, came Peter Boehler, who for two years had been active in Eng- land, and had there married a most capable and estimable wife. The English brethren at Nazareth can hold converse with those of Captain John's Indians who understand their language, but their stay is brief, for in a few months they are removed to Philadelphia, and one of the log houses is occupied the next fall and winter by care-takers, as the Indians had been maintaining their ownership of the land by trespassing on the premises, thCj garden that had been made by the pioneers probably tempting them to appropriate its products. It was evidently very necessary that these undesirable neighbors should be removed, and therefore, when Count Zinzendorf again visited Nazareth, in December, 1742, shortly before his return to Europe, he opened negotiations with them, offering to pay them for their peach orchard and other improvements, and to these terms they agreed, especially as their over-lords, the Six Nations, who had conquered them and made them "women," had previously ordered them in very con- temptuous and stern language to leave the tract at once. Before the end of the year they departed for the Minnesink region, beyond the Blue Mountains, but some were not satisfied, and cherished an intention to seek revenge, which they joined with others in carrying out fearfully some years later. Two Indians, however, remained in the vicinity. The well-known Delaware chief, Tatamy, who had received the name Moses when he was baptized by David Brainerd, the missionary among the Indians in New Jersey, who employed him as an interpreter, was one of them. He had taken a patent for a tract of three hundred and fifteen acres, a few miles north of the site of Easton, in the neighborhood of the present 22 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEriELD HOUSE Tatamy Junction on the Northampton Traction Company's electric line, and lived there. The other was Captain John, the half-brother of Teedyuscung, the famous warrior. He had not gone to the Minnesinks, and as a land-owner and professed Christian obtained permission to re- main in the Forks of the Delaware. He built a cabin at the "Deep Hole," up the Bushkill, then called Lehietan and Lefevre's Creek, where he lived in solitary state until his death in 1747. Occasionally he took game and furs to Bethlehem, and in August of the year just named sent to Biethlehem for medicine, as he was very ill. He died a few months later, and had requested that his remains should be interred in the little Indian graveyard at Welagomeka, which the brethren then living at the place had enclosed with a fence and kept in repair. And thus came to an end the Indian history of Welagomeka. The First School at Nazareth. After Oaptain John's Indians had evacuated their village, solitude and silence reign again around the unfinished stone house and the two unoccupied log houses. Unoccupied until July 18, 1743, when in one of them a school for boys is opened by Brother John C. Franke, who has come from Bethlehem through the intervening forest with ten boys. Thus the first school on the Barony of Nazareth, the forerunner of Naza- reth Hall, is founded. The voices of teacher and scholars are heard in the little log house that has become the earliest seat of learning at the very place where Whitefield also had contemplated founding a school, and the environs of the unfinished Whitefield House resound with the joyous ebullitions of youthful spirits and witness the jocund sports of boyhood; while doubtless they make excursions with their teacher into the surrounding forest, and in the fall of the year discover many a nut tree that yields to them a generous store of its esculent fruit so welcome to the heart and palate of boyhood. Roaming abroad after school hours they find many an interesting nook in the glades around their primitive home, and are the first to explore the site of Welagomeka for Indian arrow-heads and other relics of its aboriginal inhabitants. It may be Oaptain John comes sometimes from his cabin on the Bushkill, and gives them lessons in woodcraft, teaching them to make bows and arrows, and showing them how to hunt for squirrels and to set traps for rabbits and other small game. At any rate, they probably enjoy their residence in this woodland home, and when in September the masons and the carpenters come to work at the Whitefield house, what a new source of interest and enjoyment it is to see the progress of the work and be sometimes allowed to help here and there as sturdy boys can. For in the Moravian schools of those days— and there were a number of them — the children were instructed in manual as well as in intellectual pursuits. Building Resumed. The brethren at Bethlehem, where they have built a grist- and saw- mill and made other improvements, are too busily engaged there to do ATS HISTOKICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 23 anything on the Nazareth tract except perhaps to make an occasional brief visit. But in August, 1743, they receive word that a large colony may be expected to arrive in a few months, and as a considerable part of the colony is intended for the Nazareth tract, which is to be devoted chiefly to agriculture, the time has at last come to resume work on the large stone house that has been left desolate for almost three years. Masons are therefore sent up from Bethlehem, some of them from Germantown, and there being now plenty of other good help, the soli- tude of the deserted spot is broken by the active and energetic labors of the mechanics engaged in the work of completing the erection of the Whitefield house. More stone must be quarried, more trees must be felled, lumber must be brought from the saw-mill, and all the various interesting operations be performed that pertain to the building of a house. Difficulties must be encountered and overcome, for this is an un- inhabited region and there are no good roads anywhere. But Christian manliness and courage prevail over every obstacle, and all work to- gether in glad harmony, and the walls rise higher and higher day by day to the music of the ringing trowels and other tools and the sound of miany cheerful voices enlivening toil with pleasant word and song and laugh — for they do not consider it wrong to laugh — and together they take their frugal repasts in the log houses, and together morning and evening they join in family worship, until the solid walls have reached the required height and all the carpenters of Bethlehem come to raise the frame-work of the roof and shingle it, Anthony Seiffert, one of the original pioneers, formerly a carpenter, but oraained by Bishop Nitsohmann in Georgia and now the Elder of the congregation at Beth- lehem, having the oversight of the wood-work. And so the space that has been so long open to the elements in every season of three solitary years is covered now with a substantial roof, and with all possible speed the work on the interior is pushed by twenty carpenters from Bethlehem, that the house may be ready for its destined inhabitants when they arrive. Three floors are laid, partitions are set up, doors and window frames have found their appropriate locations, and before the end of the year behold a well-built structure fit for hu- man habitation and solid enough to stand for centuries. The Whitefield House has been built. It is a massive stone building, fifty-six feet in length, * thirty-five feet in breadth, two stories high be- sides the garrets, with a gambrel or double-pitched roof under which there are a number of attic rooms on the third floor, in addition to eleven dwelling-rooms, two very large rooms or halls on the first and second fioors, and two cellars. On the south side there is a row of brick inserted in the wall between the first and second floors — in accordance with a European custom, we are informed — breaking the otherwise un- adorned expanse of solid limestone, and there is a plain board porch at the door in the center. There is not time to paint the interior of the house, and the substantial woodwork is left to show its natural tints for * An extension built in 1907 makes the present length eighty-six feet. 24 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE many years. It has been said that the door-sills were made of a finely variegated soapstone, reputed to have been brought from abroad. The First Occupants. Meanwhile the expected large colony has gradually arrived at Bethle- hem, almost exhausted by their journey after disembarking at New York, for men and women alike have come on foot the most of the way from New Brunswick, and have suffered from bad weather, bad roads and lodging, and often scarcity of food. On their arrival at Bethlehem they are tenderly cared for. Boehler and other brethren have sat up and waited until late at night the last detachment for that day arrives, when all gather in the chapel and hold a lovefeast. The next morning another company arrives, "very lame and feeble, but all cheerful and happy." "In the afternoon the two Bethlehem wagons come with eleven of the women and several men who have quite given out. Then friends from Saucon, Maguntsche and the Great Swamp began to come in to welcome them to Pennsylvania." This colony consisted of more than a hundred persons, and the White- field House being ready for occupancy, those who were destined for Nazareth, thirty-three young married couples, accompanied by others, start for their new home on the second day of January, 1744. "They all went afoot, the men in advance with axes making a better road through the forest — the first public road between the two places was not laid out by order of Court until March, 1745 — the women following with pro- vision for a meal on the way. It was evening when they arrived at their destination. Bishop Nitschmann, Boehler, Seiffert and Nathaniel Seidel (later a Bishop) were there to usher them into their new quarters. With their first evening prayer was combined the consecra- tion of the chapel in that large building, which for many years was the place of worship, ordinarily, for the entire population of the Barony of Nazareth. The next day the first organization of a congregation at Nazareth took place. The heavy luggage of the colonists had been transported by water from the hold of the Little Strength to a ware- house at New Brunswick, and numerous trips were made by the Beth- lehem wagons during January and February until this considerable quantity of freight was conveyed to Bethlehem and Nazareth." (Bishop Levering' s History of Bethlehem.) Thus the Whitefield House received its first occupants, the sixty-six young married people who were to develop the resources of the Naza- reth tract. By some of them, however, one of the two log houses was also probably occupied, the boys' school remaining in the other until June, 1745, when it was transferred to the farm of Henry Antes in Fred- erick Township, where a more extensive establishment was opened, with Francke as Superintendent and a corps of assistants in secular and religious instruction and manual training, together with farmers AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 25 and a miller to operate the whole plant as given up by Antes for the support of the institution. * During these first years many changes were made in the external arrangements at Bethlehem and Nazareth, as such changes became necessary, and the Whitefield House was destined to become the scene of some of them, a house of many uses, variously occupied by youth and age. "Old Nazareth" Begun. Before the end of the year, at the beginning of which the thirty-three young married couples had taken possession of the house, preparations were made for the erection of extensive barns and stables, which event- ually completed the four sides of a spacious quadrangle, at a spring not far from the stone house. When some dwelling houses had also been built there, one of which afterwards contained the meeting-hall of the congregation, the place came to be known as "Old Nazareth," after Naza- reth Hall and other buildings of the present Nazareth had been erected. ![ Into the dwelling houses of Old Nazareth, near the barns and stables, the young married couples who were to be the agriculturists on about four hundred acres pertaining to this plantation were gradually re- moved, as the Whitefield House was now to be an institute for children. At the same time it was resolved, in accordance with the suggestion made by Henry Antes, that six farms should be opened on the Nazareth tract, in order to develop the resources of the domain as the chief supply for the support of everything carried on by the central adminis- tration at Bethlehem. A Girls' Boarding-School. A visitor to the Whitefield House in June, 1745, would have heard the sound of youthful voices and seen the forms of young maidens in the house and on the spacious lawn around it, for it is now occupied by eighteen young girls from New York, Long Island, Philadelphia, Ger- mantown, Frederick Township, Bethlehem, and other places, six of them being Indian girls, with their teachers and guardians, some of the single women of Bethlehem, and has thus become a Girls' Boarding-School. At the same time all the rest of the single women and girls of the Beth- lehem congregation, where accommodations for them are not yet suffici- ent are transferred to Nazareth, where one of the log houses near the Whitefield House is assigned to them as a residence, besides, probably, some apartments in the large house. Here they remiained until 1748, when they returned to Bethlehem and occupied the building still known as the Sisters' House. * Between the years 1745 and 1748 schools for boys and girls were opened and conducted with good patronage at various places in Pennsylvania, not only for the children of Moravian parents, but for others also whose parents were glad to em- brace the opportunity of having the mental, religious and practical education of their children thus provided for. ^ One of these dwelling houses, a small log house, is all that is left of Old Nazareth. It stands on the east side of Whitefield Street, below Belvidere, where its position, forming an angle with the street, indicates the location of Old Nazareth. 26 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE A year passes peacefully away, and then, in July, 1746, a visitor does arrive at the "Whitefield House whose presence doubtless creates some- thing of a sensation. He has never been on the Barony of Nazareth be- fore, although he was a former owner of it, the Rev. George Whitefield himself, accompanied by Henry Antes, a Mr. Dean and a servant. The Diary kept at Nazareth says: "Whitefield was very cordial. He was particularly struck by the order and cleanliness observable in all parts of our establishment, and among other things stated it to be his convic- tion that to care for and train awakened souls was the special calling of the Brethren's Church. We set the best we had before him at dinner, but he and his companions partook sparingly. While viewing the school he manifested extreme delight to see the children spinning with the distaff instead of the wheel. The Indian girls, however, were the objects of his most regardful interest. In fact, he was reluctant to part from them, and also from Becky Burnside, whom he had baptized in Georgia. 'My hopes,' he observed, 'are partly realized, as Nazareth has become the seat of a school somewhat after my plan. It causes me much joy to find Nazareth peopled with children of God. Of this the Lord gave me an earnest.' At four o'clock the visitors set out on their way to Bethlehem, by way of Gnadenthal. Whitefield took an affection- ate farewell, remarking as he turned to go, 'Can there any good thing come out of NIazareth? Come and see.' " Mr. Whitefield's visit to Nazareth was well timed, for had it occurred a few years later he would have found other occupants of the large stone house. Another institution that had arisen at Bethlehem through the necessities of the times was transferred to Nazareth. On the new road that had been laid out between the settlements the Bethlehem wagons might have been seen on the sixth of January, 1749, transport- ing the girls of the school, with their teachers and all their parapher- nalia, to the stone building in Bethlehem sometimes spoken of as the Old Seminary, but commonly known as the "bell house," fronting on the well-known quadrangle on Church Street "where the unbroken local existence of the school now known for many years as the Young Ladies' Seminary, began." The Nursery. On the next day the same wagons conveyed the quite young children of the Nursery at Bethlehem, twenty-nine little boys and twenty-six little girls, with their nurses and attendants, to Nazareth, where they were domiciled in the Whitefield House, hence for the next fifteen years known as The Nursery. Here the infant children of those parents who were engaged either as missionaries or at various industrial pursuits, working, as necessity required, in a cooperative union, with no adequate provision for separate family homes, were cared for and reared "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." Not only were their physical wants duly attended to, but such instruction, secular and religious, as their tender years were capable of receiving was also given to them, so AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 27 that this institution "may justly be called the first infant-school that ever existed." It was "under the general superintendence of an intelligent and relia- ble married couple with the assistance of such others in the external work of the establishment as the number of children, sometimes up- wards of seventy, required." Thus the Whitefield House, as a children's home, presents another interesting phase of its manifold utility, and we can see its little occu- pants in their daily infantile activity, standing on life's threshold, and taking the first steps in their innocence towards a later comprehension of that life, as yet to them a hidden mystery; or as they close their eyes in slumber upon their little cot-beds, safe from harm by day and night, "for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven." Improvements on the Nazareth Tract. In this same year a large accession is made to tne population of Beth- lehem and of the Barony of Nazareth, for two more companies of immi- grants have arrived from Europe. With the first company the brethren at Bethlehem are delighted to greet "good old Christian David," the in- defatigable evangelist among his persecuted countrymen in Bohemia and Moravia, who had brought about their settlement at Berthelsdorf and the founding of Herrnhut in 1722, and who was now on his way to Greenland, with the pioneer missionary, Matthew Stach, to build a storehouse. While the timber for this house was getting to New York, he helped the carpenters to put up the main structure of the group later called "Old Nazareth." The two colonies that had arrived brought a large number of young men, sturdy farmers and mechanics, and building operations and other improvements progressed rapidly at Bethlehem, and three additional settlements and farms were opened on the Nazareth tract — Gnadenthal, Christiansbrunn and Friedensthal — with saw-mills and grist-mills, and various other industries besides the farming operations. The road between Bethlehem and Nazareth was improved by two companies of brethren, one at each end, who succeeded in making it far superior to others in the surrounding country. A road was also made to the Indian missionrstation at Gnadenhuetten, on the Mahony, twenty-five miles to the north, beyond the Blue Mountains, where a fiourishing settlement of Christian Indians had been founded in 1746 by the missionary, John Martin Mack. About one mile north of the Whitefield House, on the northern border of the Barony, a primitive tavern had been built for the accommodation of travelers to and from the Minnesinks. It was called "the Rose," because a red rose was painted on its sign-board, commemorating the quit rent for the Barony of Nazareth of a red rose in June of each year. * * After being conducted for twenty years, during the latter part of tlie time m connection with a store to which the Indians came to trade, and after sheltering refugees from the terrible outrages committed by Indians who, in 1755 and '56, 28 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE Most important of all, as Count Zinzendorf expected to come to America again, the corner-stone of a house for him and those who should come with him, and which was to contain a central place of wor- ship for all the people on the Nazareth domain, was laid May 5, 1755, on which occasion the lawn at the Whitefield House was the scene of a large assemblage at a lovefeast, during which Bishop Peter Boehler made an address in which he gave historical reminiscences of the place since he led the first band of pioneers to the locality, and pointed out the oak-tree under which they spent the first night. May 7, 1740, fifteen years, less two days, before. The new building was to be a manor-house, and as the limestone walls arose until, on August 13th, the masonry was finished and the frame- work of the roof could be raised, the house was seen to be of stately proportions, even as it still is, named since October, 1756, "Nazareth Hall." Indian Outrages. The panic of the awful November of 1755 interrupted the work at the manor-house and, during the months of terror that ensued, it was en- tirely suspended. For the Indians, in alliance with the French, had taken up the hatchet, and in fulfillment of their cherished plan of re- venge, were attacking the settlements north of the Blue Mountains with tomahawk and torch and scalping knife, and those who escaped their cruel and murderous enmity were fleeing to the settlements farther south. "Within a short month fifty farms, with their houses, were plundered and burned, and upwards of a hundred persons were killed on the frontier of Northampton, on both sides of the Kittatinny or 'end- less hills.' " The mission-station at Gnadenhuetten was attacked and burned to the ground, eleven of the missionaries stationed there were massacred, and but few escaped with some of the Indian converts and fled to Bethlehem. Bishop John Martin Mack, who was living with the converts in the new settlement started by their request on the opposite side of the Le- high (now Weissport), saw the flames of the burning buildings of Old Gnadenhuetten, where the other missionaries stationed there lived to- gether, and were killed by the savages in the most cruel and brutal manner. Bro. Mack brought such of the Christian Indians as had not fled into the forest to Bethlehem, and then hastened to Nazareth, where he superintended the guards who patrolled along the line of the Mora- vian settlements. On the twenty-fifth of November upwards of sixty terrified men, women and children from the country north of the Barony of Nazareth came to the Rose Inn, seeking shelter and protection from the maraud- ing Indians. In January, 1756, the savages sacked New Gnadenhuetten, were laying waste' the farms north of the Blue Mountains, and murdering the settlers in revenge for the loss of their land, the tavern was sold to private parties in 1772. It was taken down in 1858, A granite marker bearing the inscription, "Site of the Rose Inn, 17,'52-1772," stands in the front yard of a modern farm- house on a retired country road. AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 2i) invaded the plains adjacent to the Barony, and overran the foot of the mountain between the Lehigh and the Delaware. Ascending columns of smoke marked the progress of the destroyers. "The winter of 1755-'56 was not only the darkest in the history of the Province, but also in the annals of American Moravian history. A flourishing mission had been irreparably ruined, involving a heavy pe- cuniary loss, and it seemed at this crisis, now that their plantations were become frontier posts, as though the seal of doom had been set upon all their hopes and aspirations." On December 21st a fugitive brought the report to Friedensthal that the following night had been fixed upon by the Indians for a simultane- ous attack on all the plantations of the Barony. The presence of a military guard, however, foiled their intention. From November, 1755, to the end of February, 1756, companies of soldiers were posted at Naza- reth and the adjacent settlements for their protection from the savages. For these soldiers quarters had to be provided and supplies of bread were baked statedly in the large family oven. There were frequent alarms and repetitions of outrages during the following years, and it was necessary to be on the watch constantly against a possible sur- prise. "On the twenty-fourth of March, 1757, David Heckewelder, father of John Heckewelder, the missionary to the Delawares, who was re- siding in an apartment in Nazareth Hall (then not fully completed) re- ported that he had found, not a stone's throw from the house, sus- pended from a sapling in the woods, an Indian token wrought of swan's feathers — a token such as served to mark the chosen site of a rendez- vous for warriors, when about to strike a blow." Two of our ministers narrowly escaped death at their hands. "Bishop Seidel, on his way from Christianspring to Bethlehem in September, 1756, espied two Indians watching for him behind a tree. Turning abruptly into the forest, he ran for his life, hotly pursued by the sav- ages. He ran from side to side for a long time, in order to prevent their finding his trail, and then lay down beneath a tree, utterly ex- hausted. The Indians failed to discover him, and he got back to Chris- tianspring in safety." At the base of the limestone ridge which bounds the Long Meadows at Nazareth on the south ran a trail between Old Nazareth and Frie- densthal, often traversed by the brethren on their missions of cheer and comfort to men whose hearts were failing them among the harrowing uncertainties in "which they lived. As one of the brethren was passing along this trail in November, 1756, a lurking savage on the ridge thrice raised his rifle, but hesitated to take the life of the man whom he had once heard speaking words of peace in the little chapel on the Ma- honing. But the fourth time he was determined to perpetrate the deed and obtain the twelfth scalp needed to make him a captain of his tribe, and calling upon the Evil Spirit to smite him a paralytic if he should quail again, he drew a deadly bead upon his intended victim, when his rifle fell to the earth from a nerveless grasp and he became an impotent. Later, it is said, he became a convert and a helper at the mission. 30 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEPIELD HOUSE And now the Whitefield House must undergo another transformation, the saddest in its varied history. Brother Graff, the Superintendent, dreams in the night of November 30, that his bees are swarming though it is winter. The next morning a sudden order oomes from Bethlehem to take thither the young children of the Nursery and the girls of the school that had been held since December, 1753, in the log house nearest to it. Five wagons are drawn up on the lawn before the house, and in them the seventy-eight little ones of the Nursery and the girls of the school with fifteen tutoresses, nurses and attendants, and the curator and his wife, all under the charge of the Rev. John M. Graff and his wife, are hastily placed, and then the procession sets out on the road to Bethlehem, fortunately now a good one, the children manifesting innocent delight at this sudden visit to Bethlehem and reveling in the new sights along the way. The travelers arrive safely at their destina- tion, and the children eagerly enjoy the meal ready for them on their arrival, for all knowledge of the danger that is threatening is prudently kept from them. The next day two wagons are sent to Salisbury with an escort, to con- vey the boys of that school and those who had charge of them to Beth- lehem, the population of the place being thus increased by two hundred and eight souls in eight days. At the same time the widows who had been occupying one of the log houses at Nazareth — still standing and known as "the gray cottage" — ^^are transferred to Gnadenthal for safety. Refugees in the Whitefield House. In November, 1755, the half frantic refugees from their desolate farms began to pour into Bethlehem and Nazareth, and their condition was most pitiable. At the end of January, 1756, there were over two hun- dred at Bethlehem and at the Crown Inn on the south side of the Le- high, and at the end of the month there were four hundred and forty- nine at the settlements on the Nazareth tract, two hundrea and fifty- three being housed at Nazareth, seventy-five at Friedensthal on the Bushkill, fifty-two at Gnadenthal, forty-eight at Christianspring, and twenty-one at the Rose Inn. Of this unmber two hundred and twenty- six were children. The Whitefield House and the two log houses ad- jacent were entirely occupied by those at Nazareth during the next six months. "They came," says one writer, "like hound-driven sheep; Pala- tines, most of them, with uncouth names; some, as we read, with clothes not fit to be seen of mankind, and some with scarce a sufficiency of rags to cover their nakedness." "It was as promiscuous an assem- blage as ever had been gathered in so short a time," writes another, "embracing men of diverse nationalities, and creeds, and women of di- verse tongues. Many of them had escaped with their lives only, from the tomahawk and torch of the infuriated savages. Several of these unfortunates came here to die. There were orphan children, too, and mothers with new-born babes; men and women half clad, cold and famishing." AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 31 Think of this tremendous accummulation of misery and distress fill- ing all the apartments of the Whitefield House, that had just been the peaceful and happy abode of innocent childhood. There were children also in this wretched multitude, but how different is their condition from that of those who had so shortly before occupied the house! Feeble, frightened children, clinging timorously to the poor garments of weeping mothers; orphan children, bereft of father and mother by the cruel tomahawk and with no one to care for them; bold children, it may be, hardy as frontier children generally are, but heedless of the peace and comfort of others, and prying into all the strange places of their new and wonderful abode. The apartments of the house on all three floors resound with the feeble, pitiful cries of infants almost perishing from the lack of nourishment and from exposure to the inclemency of winter; with the sighs and groans of their sorrowful elders, some of them sick unto death; with the conversations of others in strange and uncouth accents; with the prayers of some, the imprecations of others, eager for an impossible revenge upon the red-skins who had brought such desolation and ruin upon them — it was enough to make the very stones in the solid walls cry out in mingled horror and sympathetic pity for the unfortunate creatures who had sought their shelter and pro- tection. Truly, a different kind of school from those that had preceded it in this self-same building, and from that which Whitefield had planned ; for this is the school of adversity, a stern teacher, whose lessons are so hard to learn, and whose discipline is so severe. Yet here these un- happy victims of this discipline, whether patient or the reverse, have found that mercy with which a kind Providence tempers the rude blasts that have beaten upon their devoted heads. What a blessing is the old stone house in which they have found refuge to the homeless and house- less in that dreadful winter of 1755-'56! For not only are their tem- poral wants provided for during their sojourn at Nazareth, by the brethren of the settlement, but they are also spiritually fed with the Bread of Life. The buildings of the settlements were stockaded with stout palisades, ten feet in height, with sentry-boxes, eight men constituting the watch. For the Indians had come south of the mountains and were lurking and committing depredations in the vicinity, as they continued to do at in- tervals for several years. But the constant vigilance maintained, and the measures adopted to let skulking Indians know that there was no unguarded spot, defeated their thrice-made plans to destroy the settle- ments on the Nazareth and Bethlehem land. The refugees having gradually returned to their homes — forts having been constructed on the frontiers by the national government— in June, 1757, doubtless after a complete and thorough house-cleaning, the Nursery and girls' school of Nazareth were returned to the Whitefield House and log house adjacent. But two years later the little girls of the Nursery were taken back to Bethlehem, and only boys were ad- 32 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEOFIELD HOUSE mitted until 1764, when those remaining were transferred to Nazareth Hall, where a school for boys had been founded in 1759, and the institu- tion in the Whitefield House was closed. It is an interesting fact that the Rev. John Michael Graff, who had been the general superintendent of the Nursery in the Whitefield House, a graduate of the University of Jena in Germany, was the first Princi- pal of Nazareth Hall, and that "towards the close of the year the same Francke who sixteen years previously had begun the first boys' school on the Nazareth tract, took charge of the renewed and prosperous insti- tution." In the year 1763, while the little boys were still kept in the White- field House, the Indians east of the Alleghenies, stirred up by the great conspiracy of Pontiac in the west, unburied the hatchet and resumed their savage onslaughts upon the white settlers along the frontiers. After the appalling Wyoming massacre they came south of the Blue Mountains, invading Northampton County, and causing another influx of fugitives into the Moravian settlements. But on the twelfth of October of the above year Indian fugitives came to Nazareth. The mission at Wechquetank, commenced only three years earlier about six miles north of the Blue Mountains, near the site of the present village of Gilbert, in Polk Township, Monroe County, was threatened not only by hostile Indians — who had attacked a company of militia, drunken murderers of some Christian Indians on their way to a village on the Susquehanna — but by another body of militia also, who were going to Wechquetank to massacre the whole congregation, suspected of having made the assault. Hence the converts, no longer safe there, were brought by Bro. Grube, the missionary in charge, to Nazareth, where "the Grube's" (for Mrs. Grube was with her husband) "and their dear brown flock were lodged in the Widows' house" — the present "gray cottage" — "the old mothers having vacated the same day before yesterday and moved into the Nursery. The single sisters also moved into the Nursery for the sake of greater security." "Monday, October 24. Our Indians built themselves a hut behind the former Widows' house, to be occupied by a couple of families." On the following Saturday, "the little Indian congregation had a very blessed celebration of the Lord's Supper." And on the next Monday David Zeis- berger and the Christian Indians replaced the palisades around Naza- reth. A week later, however, accompanied by Bro. and Sr. Grube, the Indians were removed to Philadelphia, by order of the government. An Apartment House. For ninety long years, after the closing of the Nursery, in striking contrast with the previous twenty-one, during which the Whitefield House had been the scene of such multifarious activity, a spirit of silent repose seemed to have settled down upon it, in so far as its prominent usefulness in connection with the work of the Church or momentous crises in the life of the settlement was concerned. During all those AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 33 years it was the quiet abode of families and individuals in the common walks of life, or of those whose services the Church had recognized by granting them a home in their declining years. Doubtless there were occasional happenings of an interesting character, and possibly among the inmates there were those whose life-story was tinged with more or less of the romance of the latter part of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, and who could tell many an interesting tale of personal experiences and of times very different from those in which our lot is cast. It is not improbable that some of the tenants of the Whitefield House after the Nursery had been closed had been among the young married couples who were its first occupants in 1743, and afterwards moved into the dwelling houses of Old Nazareth, then first erected; and they had many interesting reminiscences of their voyage from Europe and arrival in America, of the clearing of the land and all the farming operations; and they had very vivid recollections of the terrible years when the Indians swooped down upon the frontier settlements, and refugees filled the Whitefield House and the two log houses, and palisades were erected, and guards had to be on duty day and night. Some of them, peradventure, saw and conversed with civil and mili- tary visitors before and during the War of the Revolution, as such visi- tors "generally went through the 'Hall' and the 'Nursery,' and extended their visits to the 'Rose' and to Priedensthal on the Bushkill." Some of these peaceful dwellers in the Whitefield House might refer to the visits of the Provincial Governors, William Denny and Richard and John Penn, as well as to the later visits of Lord Montague, the Governor of South Carolina, the French Minister, Chevalier Gerard, and others, courteously escorted by the Rev. John Etwein, of Bethlehem. Generals Sullivan, Gates and Schuyler, Baron De Kalb and possibly other mili- tary officers, they had also seen, and they could speak of the companies of soldiers destined for the Continental army, or of prisoners taken in some battle, who were brought to Nazareth and had quarters assigned them in the large barn at Old Nazareth or in the woods near by. They could tell tales of the foragers, mostly cavalry, who were encamped at Christianspring and Friedensthal for two months, to the alarm of the inhabitants, who were, however, not greatly molested by them, and they remembered how a part of Count Pulaski's division were lodged in the Old Nazareth barn, and how Bro. Lembke, the pastor, preached a ser- mon for them at their request, in the chapel at Nazareth Hall, at which they and other members of the congregation were also present, that being then their usual place of worship. "The conduct of these soldiers while staying at Nazareth was unex- ceptionable, and the brethren parted with them on friendly terms. But that this warlike array was no very agreeable interruption may be in- ferred from the words of the diary, 'On the following day we got rid of these guests.' " For the inhabitants of the village "were often called upon to vacate their houses for the accommodation of these rather un- 34 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE welcome intruders, unwelcome especially when their presence in the village happened to interfere with a church festival or some special service that could not but be seriously marred by the terrors and cir- cumstances of war." The militia tax, the hard times and high prices, the poor wages and all the privations of the time, those who had lived through them could not forget, and even the sisters could tell how they collected various herbs to serve as a substitute for tea, the genuine article being unat- tainable. Some of the old men, while they drank their "vesper" coffee and smoked their pipes afterwards on the lawn on summer afternoons, or by the hearth-fire- in winter, could tell how, as messengers to the brethren of Hope, N. J., they had been obliged to take a circuitous route by the ferries and fords of the upper portion of the Delaware River, ex- ercising great vigilance to elude the guards stationed there, and some- times narrowly escaping capture and imprisonment. For many years, doubtless, the stories these early tenants of the Whitefleld House could tell were repeated by their successors, thankful for the peace and tran- quility that it was their privilege to enjoy, until the war of 1812 again harrassed the country and for a few years brought upon it a repetition of the disquiet and alarm of the days of the Revolution. With these unassuming denizens of the Whitefleld House we must admit that this period of inconspicuousness was but another interesting phase of the manifold utility of the house originally planned by the charitable spirit of George Whitefleld. The young and the old, the glad and the sad, the sturdy and the feeble, might come and go, but the solid walls still stood ready to receive generation after generation as each sought shelter within them. "It was always," writes one, "to most persons a house of an unde- flned or undeflnable interest, whether this interest centered in its unique architecture, or its dingy walls, or its mysterious presence, or its hipped roof that was all of it that looked out over the tree-tops upon the world around, or in the curious historical associations that cling to it and carry us far back, even to the days of old William Penn. There was a time within our memory when it stood back from the dusty street, and when its approach from the highway was by a stile, which being crossed, led you under the shade of embowering trees, to the carpet of green that spread out invitingly on the sunny side of its gray limestone walls." A Theological Seminaey. In this long, historic slumber did the venerable domicile at last dream of an awakening such as came to it in the year 1854, when it once more temporarily housed a scholastic institution, and that one of the greatest importance to the Church? For in that year it became the home of the Moravian Theological Seminary, and young men pursued their classical and theological studies in the same apartments, or at least within the same walls, that had in bygone years heard the voices of youthful maidens reciting their lessons, and of little children struggling with AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 35 the letters of the alphabet. Whitefield had designed the edifice to be a school, and was glad to find one established here in his day. Was his house predestined to have a scholastic spirit enshrined within its sturdy frame, ever and anon to exercise a potent spell upon its inmates or up- on those who had control of it, and remind them of the use for which he first intended it? What says the record? "When the Synod of 1855 determined upon the establishment of a College in connection with the Theological Seminary, it was at the same time decided to effect, if pos- sible, an exchange of the Seminary building"— at that time the former Sisters' House of the Nazareth congregation — "for the Whitefield prop- erty, and to locate both the College and Seminary there." And when the exchange had been effected the Synod "Resolved, That we strongly recommend the continuance of the College on the Ephrata * property at Nazareth, as being a most suitable site for the same." The Synod of 1858, however, after a careful and thorough consideration of the circum- stances, uninfluenced by the scholastic spell, resolved that the Theologi- cal Seminary should be transferred to Bethlehem, which transfer bar- ing been made the same year, the Whitefield House on the Ephrata property relapsed into the historic trance of ninety years that had preceded the brief revival of the scholastic spell, and was to continue now for thirteen years more. The Moravian Historical Society. Meanwhile another institution of importance had been organized on the thirtieth of March, 1857, the object of which was stated by its cour stitution to be "the elucidation of the history of the Moravian Church in America; not, however, to the exclusion of the general history of the Moravian Church," and the name, style and title of this institution was, and is, "The Moravian Historical Society." The charter members having been active in securing other members, and in gathering books of suitable character, and also relics of past Mo- ravian days as the nucleus of a museum, this collection, after being for one year stored elsewhere, was drawn by the potent attraction of the scholastic spell— for is not History one of the greatest teachers?— to the Whitefield House, where it was securely housed; and where, on the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, 1858, the first social Vesper II and lit- erary symposium of tlie Society was held, the precursor of similar annual gatherings until the present day. Happy presage of the dawning of a new epoch in the unique life-story of the Whitefield House. * The Whitefield House is also sometimes called the Ephrata House, this name having been given to it either by Whitefield or by some one of later date, but the Ephrata property included also the two log houses and the entire premises. ^ The "Vesper" is an institution of German origin ; a collation which obtains its name from the fact that it is served in the afternoon, generally about 2 o'clock. It consists of light refreshments with coffee. The "V" has the soft German sound, life the English "F." 36 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE A Missionary Home. "The title of the property which, from the date of Whitefield's trans- fer to the Brethren, in July, 1741, had been vested in the governing board of the entire Moravian Church or its representatives, was con- veyed to the Moravian congregation at Nazareth in 1853, in whose pos- session it remained until 1871, when, through the generosity of John Jordan, Jr., it became the seat of a Missionary Home and, at the same time, the home of the Moravian Historical Society. This kind friend purchased the house and the lot, 160x275 feet, of the Trustees of the Nazareth congregation early in that year, and a Deed was by him exe- cuted to the 'Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen,' providing that that association should hold the property in trust, first, for the use of the Moravian Historical Society, which should be permitted to occupy the second floor, and secondly, to hold all of the rest of the building as a home for visiting and retired or pensioned ministers and missionaries of the Moravian Church, sub- ject to such rules and regulations as the Provincial Board may from time to time establish. At the same time he endowed it with a fund, the annual income of which was amply sufficient to pay for the proper care and preservation of the house and premises. In the spring of the year the work of renovation, or more properly rebuilding, to adapt it to the uses for which it was designed, was commenced under the direction of a joint committee of the said Society for the Propagation of the Gos- pel and of the Moravian Historical Society, and was completed in the month of October following. The annual meeting of the Historical So- ciety having been appointed for the 18th of October, that day was chosen for the dedication of the building. On this occasion a handsome cane cut from an oaken beam of the building was presented to the friend who had made the purchase of the property and devoted it to its pres- ent uses. "Since that time the building has served its purpose well as a Mission- ary Home and as the home of the Historical Society. A number of re- tired orvisiting missionaries and ministers have, from time to time, found here a comfortable and quiet resting place, and the annual meet- ings of the Historical Society, each with its characteristic 'Vesper,' have been regularly held here, with but one exception. "Since 1871, when the property was first purchased, endowed and adapted to its present uses, the grounds have been beautified and en- larged, and the endowment increased by the original donor. In 1888 he purchased and added to the grounds the tract immediately adjoining on the east, measuring 140x275 feet. In 1875 and 1889 he added the lot 125x140 feet in extent, on which the second log house, erected in 1740, is still standing, in a good state of preservation. His original en- dowment to provide for the maintenance of the property has been in- creased partly by his own generous gifts, and partly by a bequest se- cured entirely by his influence, so that the present income is more than enough for the simple expenses of maintenance and repairs. The WILLIAM HENRY JORDAN JAMES HENRY JOHN JORDAN, JR. AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 37 cost of grading the grounds and sidewalks, and of their adornment with trees and shrubs and flowering plants has all been defrayed by him, and in its beauty as well as in its usefulness the Ephrata Missionary Home stands as a monument to his unostentatious but nobly considerate and generous nature. "In the summer of 1892, another friend, incited thereto by his ex- ample and by intimate association with the many instances of his thoughtful benevolence, purchased the house and lot at the southeast corner of Whitefield and Centre Streets, and conveyed it to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, also in trust for the Missionary Home. This foundation therefore now possesses, with the exception of one lot, 70x 150 feet, the whole block bounded by Whitefield, Centre and New Streets, and the alley to the south." * The interior of the building being in need of repairs after a continu- ous occupancy of more than a century and a quarter, it was entirely renovated, or more properly rebuilt, to adapt it to the uses for which it was designed. The three floors were connected in the northwest gable by a wide and easy stairway, with a fine, heavy balustrade made of old oaken timbers torn away during rebuilding. On the first fioor suites of comfortable apartments were arranged, with additional rooms on the third floor. On the second floor was the Hall of the Society, a spacious apartment containing the historical museum and library, with valuable paintings and portraits. A door opened upon a porch of suitable style at the northwestern gable, and a similar porch was erected at the door on the south side of the house. An Extension Built. Thus rejuvenated, the Whitefield House seemed well fitted to serve the new purpose to which it had been dedicated, for many years to come. But the end of its metamorphosis was not yet. Thirty-five years passed away, during which the library and the museum of the His- torical Society increased and multiplied to such an extent that there was scarcely room sufficient for them in the large Hall on the second floor. Once more the hand of benevolent interest is extended, for in the year 1906 Mr. William H. Jordan, of Philadelphia, offered to give the sum of $6000 for the purpose of building an addition to the house, so as to increase the size of the Hall of the Historical Society and afford more space for the apartments of visiting or retired ministers and mis- sionaries, the new extension to stand as a memorial to his honored father, the late Brother Francis Jordan, of Philadelphia, who through- out his long and eminently useful life was an earnest and active mem- ber and benefactor of the Society and of the Church he loved. This generous offer being thankfully accepted, the busy scenes of architectural activity first witnessed on the Ephrata property before * Adapted from a paper written for the Sesquicentennial of the Whitefield House, in 1893, by the Rev. Eugene Leibert. 38 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE the middle of the eighteenth century are repeated soon after the begin- ning of the twentieth, and the walls of the new structure at the eastern end of the house, increasing its length from fifty-six to eighty-six feet, rise to the music of the Amphionic lyre of fraternal benevolence and filial affection, and are constructed in strictest harmony with the char- acter of the older portion, so that the two parts form one homogeneous structure. A door with a porch like the one at the western gable is placed in the eastern gable, adding to the symmetry of the enlarged edifice. The interior of the entire building is supplied with steam heat- ing from a furnace in the cellar, and is furnished with electric lighting on the three floors and with other conveniences undreamed of by its early occupants, and is thus completely modernized. The enlarged Hall on the second floor, which is set apart for the use of the Historical Society as long as it shall exist, now affords ample space for the book-cases of the library and the collection of relics of all kinds, as also for the entertainment of the members and guests, up- wards of two hundred in number, who attend the annual meetings of the Society. The walls are adorned with old oil paintings by the great Moravian artist of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Valentine Haidt, representing scenes in the life of Christ, and with portraits of Moravian clergymen and of other eminent men of the Ancient and of the Re- newed Brethren's Church, together with views of Moravian places and churches, and a variety of other subjects. A marble tablet on the south wall of the room bears the inscription : This building was enlarged as a MEMORIAL to FRANCISJORDAN 1815—1885 by his son WILLIAM H. JORDAN 1907. While the interior of the building has been thus improved, the ex- terior walls, still as solid as when they were erected in 1740, and the gambrel roof with its perfectly sound timbers, have with great propriety been allowed to remain unchanged. The gray stone walls are now in great part covered with a graceful veil of climbing vines, adding with their perennial green to the picturesque aspect of the building, and sug- gestively emblematic of its renewed historic life; especially the ivy which mantles part of the western gable, as it was brought from one of which mantles part of the western gable, as it was brought from Zauchtenthal, one of the seats of the Ancient Brethren's Church in Bo- hemia and Moravia, by the Rev. William Henry Rice, when he returned from the General Synod of 1869. The ivy which he brought with him he planted at the M^oravian church in Yoi'k, Pa., and a cutting from this AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 39 plant he planted at the northwest gable of the Whitefield House in the year 1876. . The emerald turf of the spacious lawn surrounding the house, decked with blooming rose-bushes and other ornamental plants and flower-beds, contributes to the simple and restful, yet with- al impressive beauty of the tout ensemble. On a bronze tablet set in the wall at the porch on the western gable appears the inscription: THE WHITEFIELD HOUSE 1740 FOUNDATION BUILT BY GEORGE WHITEFIELD BOUGHT BY THE MORAVIANS' IN 1741 AND COMPLETED IN 1743 FIRST PLACE OF WORSHIP AND HOME OF THE CLERGY 1749 NURSERY FOR THE CHILDREN OP THE COLONISTS 1855—1858 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 1868 MISSIONARY HOME AND MORAVIAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. The location of the building is a most appropriate one, in a beautiful and retired residential section of the town that has grown up in its vicinity since the days and years when the only other buildings nearby were the two small log houses built by the pioneers of 1740. From its upper windows the eye can still take in the extended landscape east- ward, not, as at the time of the erection of this historic mansion, cov- ered with the original forest, but presenting to the view the cultivated fields and substantial residences that have resulted from its occupancy by the white race. All through the years when this change in the sur- rounding landscape was gradually taking place, the Whitefield House stood, and still stands, as a silent but enduring memorial to the char- itable spirit of the man who first designed it, and to the loyal faith and courage of its builders. Long may it bear witness to the loyalty of those who have built and of those who are still building on the his- toric foundation of their predecessors! FiNIS. ..^' 3477-250 lot 29 s«»\W ^^ ■ ^*'% 0* 'bV'^ ■J."'' . ^ "' -IT -^ -n-o^ ^o^. .-^ ■^^ 0^ : <^, 4 O tS> r\^ o « o . "O-i .-iq. L'* ^ .^J ^-'^^