The Military Hospital at Lititz - 1778

 

Editor’s Note: Bishop Matthäus Hehl served the Lititz congregation and surrounding areas from 1756 to 1784. During that time he maintained a personal history of the congregation, separate from the official congregational diary, which narrated events of the time. This history is preserved in two bound volumes, now held securely in the Provincial Archives in Bethlehem. In 2014 the entire manuscript was translated into English from the original German by Pastor Roy Ledbetter. What follows here are excerpts drawn from Hehl’s history for the year 1778, when the Brothers’ House was turned into a hospital for Revolutionary War soldiers. They have been selected and edited to focus on physical conditions in Lititz and the impact the hospital had on the externals of community life. Another story which remains to be told is of the deep spiritual struggles the congregation endured during this time.

 

Summary of the most Notable Occurrences in the Congregation in Litiz for the Year 1778.

This year that was distinguished by so many oppressive circumstances and threatening dangers but also by the gracious daily help and many unnoticed shieldings by our Dear Lord was also a year of special grace.

From the 19^th December of last year until the 28^th August of this year there was a hospital of ill and wounded soldiers, up and down [in number], in the Single Brethren’s House – [inserted at the foot of the page:] Of these more than 100 men died here and were buried in a corner of our acre field set apart for this – and also various officers and doctors quartered here and there in the family houses here. The Single Brethren and Boys with their shops were housed in the School and Store House and other places in the meantime, only the out buildings and the kitchen of the Brethren’s House remained accessible to them. The weaving and the smithy and their common table were able to be continued.

Soon after the field hospital moved in, an infectious illness tore through the little settlement, continuing from January until the Spring and leaving few houses untouched. The Single Brethren were affected the hardest, as in 8 different places 15 Brethren and Boys lay very ill, and this made nursing them very difficult. Especially this illness carried off 5 of our Brethren and Sisters, namely on the 23^rd January Br. Johann Jacob Schmick, on the 27^th of the same month the Married Sister Catharina Blickensdoerfer, the 31^st of the same month the Single Br. Heinrich Oerter, the 7^th February Single Br. Christoph, and on the 9^th February the Married Br. Peter Ricksecker, Senior, also the Society Member, the Married Man Jacob Blickensdoerfer on the 20^th January.

A Rediscovered Unique Revolutionary War Broadside

 

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.”