History of the Pilgerhaus

     George Klein’s farm encompassed most of what is now Lititz. Inspired by the Moravian settlements at Bethlehem and Nazareth, and by the preaching of Count Zinzendorf, George Klein offered the Moravian Church his 491-acre farm in 1753 for a settlement in Warwick Township. He was a member of the Lutheran church, but so strongly was he impressed by the preaching of Count Zinzendorf that he at once ceased his antagonism toward Moravian church activities. He ultimately became of the Moravian faith, and finally transferred to that church the whole of the land he owned in Lancaster county.

In 1754, he built a two-story stone house at 127 East Main Street, which became the “Pilgerhaus,” or “Pilgrim’s House.” This was the first house in Lititz.  This house was built by Mr. Klein before the transfer of land from him to the Moravian Church. He built it without having any definite purpose in mind for it.  This house afterwards gave the direction to the main street of the village, and accounts for the fact that it does not run due East and West. It was used as a dwelling for ministers, congregational meetings, and even as a house for refugees fleeing Indian raids. Bro. George Nixdorf, of Lancaster, was the first occupant.  It was in this building that the first settlers of Zinzendorf’s Congregation village, three families from Donegal and four from Bethel, found refuge when they fled here to escape Indian raids. A portion of the wall of this first house was left standing when the building was removed in 1866, and now forms part of the rear wall of the present three-story brick building which stands on its site at 125 to 129 East Main Street.

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.