On October 6, 1683, the ship Concord arrived in Philadelphia carrying thirteen immigrant families—about thirty-three people—from Krefeld in the Lower Rhine region of what is now Germany. Earlier that summer, the families had traveled from Krefeld to London, where Quaker merchant James Claypoole helped arrange their passage to William Penn’s new colony of Pennsylvania. Their arrival is widely regarded as the first organized migration of German-speaking settlers to Pennsylvania.
The immigrants were largely Mennonites and Quakers, religious minorities seeking greater freedom of worship and community life. They were joined by Francis Daniel Pastorius, a German-born scholar and land agent for the Frankfurt Company, which had acquired land in Pennsylvania. In late October, provincial surveyor Thomas Fairman laid out fourteen lots for the proposed settlement several miles northwest of Philadelphia. The settlers then drew lots for their holdings in Pastorius’s cave-like dugout on the Delaware waterfront before beginning the difficult work of clearing land and building homes ahead of winter.
That autumn settlement became Germantown, long recognized as the first enduring, organized German-speaking settlement in the English colonies of North America. By 1690, it included forty-four families, with residents supporting themselves through farming, weaving, and related trades. The Krefeld settlers’ arrival helped establish a lasting pattern of German migration to Pennsylvania and became an important early example of the colony’s unusually broad tradition of religious pluralism and cultural diversity.
I often wonder what it was like living in the 1600’s and 1700’s in a new country. Travel between cities in America was a lot different than now