The Paxton Boys Visit Lititz

 

On the evening of December 27, 1763, the quiet streets of Lititz suddenly filled with men on horses. “God damn you, Moravians,” the riders shouted from one end of the small village to another. They fired off a “volley of shots” from their weapons before they left town. In 1763, twenty-three single sisters and twenty-nine single brethren lived in the Lititz choir houses, while many families lived on farms or in private homes. These families had been part of the Warwick country congregation, which the Lititz congregation incorporated soon after its founding in 1756. The congregation, which had consecrated its new Gemeinhaus a few months earlier, had 277 members in all. The shouts and shots must have frightened the men and women who had gathered for an evening Singstunde, a service in which the community sings hymns together. The residents of Lititz heard the riders’ curses and their gunfire, but they could not have known what had prompted these threats. They would have been terrified had they known that evening what they learned the next day: these riders had just slaughtered fourteen Conestoga Indians who had been placed in Lancaster’s workhouse for protection and had injured Lancaster’s sheriff, John Hay, in the process. Two weeks earlier, they had murdered six Conestoga Indians who lived on Conestoga Manor near the Susquehanna River. These were the frontiersmen known to historians as the Paxton Boys.

In the past decade or so, the Paxton riots have become a familiar topic for historians studying the changing relations between Indians and whites in colonial America. These riots, Daniel Richter wrote in 2002, “crystallized long-simmering hatred into explicit new doctrines of racial unity and racial antagonism”: the Paxton Boys “preached the novel idea that all Native people were ‘Indians,’ that all Euro-Americans were ‘Whites,’ and that all on one side must unite to destroy the other.” Dozens of articles and several books, including Peaceable Kingdom Lost (2009) by Kevin Kenny and Massacre of the Conestogas (2010) by Lancaster columnist Jack Brubaker, have been written on these events. But no historian has bothered to consult the materials left by Lancaster County’s Moravian ministers —Matthäus Hehl in Lititz and Albrecht Ludolph Russmeyer in Lancaster—who wrote about the massacres as they occurred.

The Moravian Star

In a town filled with its many Moravian traditions, none is more visual than the Advent Star. How and where did the beautiful "Moravian Star," displayed at so many Lititz homes during the Christmas season, begin?

 The earliest Moravian star reportedly was made of paper, possibly by a group of boarding school boys in Niesky, Germany, and hung outside the school during Advent in 1821. It was red and white, signifying the blood and purity of Christ. It was long assumed by historians that, because the stars were made in a boarding school, they were used as geometry lessons for the boys in the school.

          In the summer of 2011, however, a surprising discovery was made in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. The December issue of This Month in Moravian History reported that a recently translated diary entry, dated December 20^th, 1820, revealed: “In the afternoon we all drank and like yesterday, some of us went to see the star in the Brethren’s House of 110 points, made by Madsen.” This entry by a young Moravian provides us with two bits of previously unknown information: first, the star maker’s name, Christian Madsen, a single Brother who likely resided in the Brethren’s House; and second, that the original star was made specifically as a Christmas decoration for use at the Niesky Brethren’s House. Further study of the diary showed that the next month the multicolored, 110-point star was displayed for the 50th anniversary of the Moravian boarding school in Niesky. The school then adopted the star pattern as a geometry project.

Christmas Vigil Services at Lititz Moravian

Many readers here in the Lititz area have attended a Christmas Vigil service at Lititz Moravian. Many more will have heard of them but never attended one. Following is a detailed account of how that service came to be and arrived at its current form over the centuries.

      The History of the Lititz Moravian Congregation records that, just a few months after the village was named in 1756, the small group of Lititz brothers and sisters living in the Pilgerhaus celebrated Christmas Eve by holding a Lovefeast. From that humble beginning has evolved an elaborate worship service beloved by all who participate and attend. The congregation presents the service multiple times each year during the weeks before Christmas as a gift to the community.

Research into the history of the service, popularly termed the Christmas Vigil, yields fascinating results. More than thirty odes (the order of service with hymns, anthems, and scripture readings) designated for Christmas Eve can be found in the church archives. The earliest, dated 1765, is an eight-page printed folder detailing portions to be sung by two different choirs, soloists, children, and congregation. The congregation’s sections are quite short, with most of the music provided by choirs and soloists.

Rudolph S. Carpenter, Woodworker Extraordinaire

 

Included in the many priceless Lititz items displayed at The Lititz Historical Foundation are two beautiful, inlaid-wood grandfather clocks made by Lititz native Rudolph S. Carpenter. A stone mason by trade, Mr. Carpenter spent most of his free time in a workshop behind his home at 131 N. Cedar Street. His passion was inlaid wood furniture.

He made clocks, chests and tables using more than twenty different kinds of hard wood. Local oak, chestnut, walnut, holly, cherry, and maple were used as well as wood shipped to his workshop from a woodcutter in Germany. His main tool was a simple scroll saw. With his saw he cut as many as 50,000 pieces of wood, in small, intricate, symmetrical shapes to coincide with the finished design he had planned.

Albrecht Coffee Mill

 

        Recently (circa 2009) the Lititz Moravian Archives and Museum Committee received an inquiry from Dick Duez, an antique dealer from Bridgeport, WV, who has a special interest in early American coffee grinders. He wrote that there was a rumor of an 18^th-century grinder in a Lititz museum, and he wondered if it might be in the Moravian Museum? Dale Shelley, answering for the Committee, responded, “Yes, we have a coffee grinder on display that was brought to the Museum from the Church’s coffee kitchen in the 1990s. It is signed and dated: A. Albrecht, 1772.”

This was all Duez, a member of the Grinders Finders Club, needed to hear. Immediately he requested pictures and any information we had on the mill’s provenance. If possible, he wanted pictures showing the signature and date to print in the next Grinder Finder, a newsletter of the Association of Coffee Mill Enthusiasts. Here is what appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Grinder Finder, part of an article by Dick Duez and Don Drozdenko.

Pennsylvania Mills Pre-1800

 

From those early days to the present, there have been lots of box mills made to help quench America’s desire for brewed coffee. Since those early days in the United States seem to start in the 1820s, the design of the box mill has basically not changed. Pre-Civil War hand-made mills were over-built compared to the next generation that was mass-produced. Thus spelled the demise of those individuals who could not keep up with the demand and be cost effective for what had been a home cottage industry, which lasted around 40 years.

For many years of putting a sizable collection together, lingering questions were always out there. Where are the early mills, the prototypes? When did they start showing up here in the United States? Sure, there have been a few mills on occasion that appeared very early but never one dated before the 1820s.

We will attempt to show in this article a few mills that are familiar to most collectors and that have always been labeled 19th-century. Also, for several years a rumor persisted that a mill dating back to the 18th-century existed in a Lititz Museum in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. That museum turned out to be a very prestigious one, belonging to the Moravian Church that was organized in 1749. When contacted, museum authority Dale Shelley was very helpful in our request for information. That ‘rumored’ coffee mill turned out to be not only 18th-century, but dated 50 years earlier (1772) than the earliest known mills of the Pritz brothers, Daniel Small and Timothy Vogler of the 1830s. The mill maker, Andreas Albrecht (1718-1802), was a gunsmith and of German descent. He learned his trade while in the German army and in 1750 migrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and later to Lititz in 1771.

 

 

Much of Albrecht’s story is told in his own words, probably his Lebenslauf⁽¹⁾, published in the Biographical Entries for Lancaster County Gunsmiths. It’s hard to believe that a Moravian was such an important part of the Pennsylvania long-rifle story! Trained in Germany, he was the master gunsmith in Nazareth in the 1750s. Today there remain six known Albrecht rifles, and the Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth is home to one of them.

Albrecht came into contact with the Brethren during his service as gunstock maker in the German regiment garrisoned in Halle, Saxony, where Count Zinzendorf was educated. In 1743 he met and heard Zinzendorf preach and thought that he would one day join the Brethren. He continued to serve his regiment as gunsmith through the Silesian Wars. In 1748, he was dismissed from the regiment and that very next day he was on the road to the Moravian community of Herrnhaag. There he was quickly accepted into full communion; and in 1750, he left with 80 Brethren for America. He arrived in Bethlehem on June 27, 1750.

Shortly after his arrival in Bethlehem, he moved to nearby Christian Spring to live, teaching music at a boys’ school in Nazareth. All the time he continued to develop his skills as a gunsmith. In Europe, only the military and noblemen were permitted to have firearms, but in America the rifle was considered just another tool on the American frontier. It was not until after the massacre at Gnadenhutten that the Brethren would think of the rifle for self-defense.

In 1766 Albrecht married Elizabeth Ort in Bethlehem, and for five years they managed the Sun Inn at Bethlehem. In 1771 the Albrechts resettled in Lititz and there he established himself again as a gunsmith. The coffee mill was one of his first projects upon arriving in Lititz. The mill was long used in the old coffee kitchen of the church to make the Lovefeast beverage. It is reported that during the American Revolution, his rifles were included in shipments from Lancaster County gunsmiths to Revolutionary troops.

Albrecht died in 1802 and was buried in God’s Acre in Lititz.

 

by Robert A. Sandercox, CSJ, Fall 2009

 

Author's Note:

⁽¹⁾A life story written by one prior to one's death. It served as a self-assessment, a summary of one's spirituality, often one's admitted weaknesses.