The long display case in the center of the Lititz Moravian Church Museum’s front room contains rare items: a letter from Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, the ledger from Lititz’s community store in the 1760s and 1770s, architectural drawings of the community’s earliest buildings. But an equally rare treasure hid there in plain sight: a yellowed broadside (a single- sheet announcement, typically printed on one side) circulated by Lancaster County’s Committee of Correspondence and Observation on July 11, 1775. Over 235 years old, the broadside’s age lends it distinction enough. But the real importance of this document has only just been discovered: no other copy of this 1775 broadside exists in any other collection in the world. It is unique, the only copy to have survived.
Lancaster County’s Committee of Correspondence and Observation, the ad-hoc group of local leaders who gathered in 1774 by request of the first Continental Congress, was responsible for many matters. The Committee needed to convince or compel men to join in militia companies; it also needed to figure out how to deal with those who would not bear arms. Part of this effort, the Lititz broadside asks those whose “religious Scruples” prevent them from joining the militia to “contribute” funds toward the “unavoidable Expenses of the Public.” The broadside reminds those individuals who refuse to bear arms that, if they “keep their Money in their Pockets,” they in effect “throw those Burthens upon a Part of the Community, which, in a Cause that affects all, should be borne by all.”
