A Visit to George Washington's Army

Loretto was a small place.

Michael and Catherine’s son John Gibbons married Maria Anna Magdalen Conrad (1839) the daughter of John Conrad III and Mary Ellen Schmal. Yes, we’re back to the Conrads; John G. married his mother’s step-granddaughter.

Mary Ellen Schmal-Small had an interesting background: Her father Johannes Schmal, certainly sounds like a German immigrant. Her mother (brace yourself) was named Mary Margaret Storm and her father was the potter Joseph Storm, the brother of Maria Storm who married Jacob Adams of the Shropshire family.

Mercifully, Joseph Storm had the good sense to marry a non-relative, Margret Eck. Her father Johannes “Hannes” Eck was born in Switzerland in 1720, and immigrated with his father Jacob Eck, an Alsatian gunsmith, to establish a homestead on a heavily-wooded site west of Tylersport, PA. Once there, he constructed a stone barn that stood until the 1960’s.

Hannes, now officially known as John, in 1767 was appointed constable of Salford Township (in southeast Pennsylvania) by the Court of Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia. He objected strenuously to this time-consuming honor, but grudgingly fulfilled the duties of the office.

The Landis Homestead, built in Salford Township and dating to 1839.
Source: Wikipedia

Hannes/John was likely picked for appointment because he was a fairly prosperous man; when he died (1809) his estate was worth 1,601 pounds, 19 shillings and 8 pence ($8,000.00).

One of Margaret Eck’s sisters recalled the abundance of their childhood: woods alive with a plentitude of deer. Grapes, red plums, hazelnuts, shellbarks, huckleberries and crab apples all growing wild. Hannes raised hemp and flax for making cloth. Rye was grown for bread, as in Europe, and beans were ground into it to increase the yield. Sickles were used to harvest rye, corn and buckwheat, and the womenfolk helped with this and all the other farm chores.

At one point in the Revolutionary War, Hannes learned that George Washington and his army were encamped by the Skippack River, about seven miles from the farm. So he loaded some of his children into a wagon and they went to see the novel sight.

We know all this because sometime in the 1850’s the Eck sister, now an old woman, started reminiscing about the Good Old Days. Her granddaughter grabbed pen and paper and scribbled it all down. I recall a similar experience with my Beers grandparents, who were  puzzled as to why a young person would be interested in the past.

By the way, the Eck family was known in Switzerland and Alsace as Egg, only it was pronounced “Eck”; when they arrived in the colonies they changed the spelling to Eck.

So boggle your brains trying to figure the precise degree of consanguinity here. And just imagine what the appallingly inbred British royal family’s genealogists go through.

"Adams Choice," Conewago Township, Pennsylvania

Maria Storm married Jacob Adams, the son of an Englishman. His family had lived for generations in a lovely portion of the Midlands called Shropshire, but you can’t eat even the prettiest landscape. Today Shropshire is officially touted as having “hills of outstanding beauty,” but that’s just Chamber of Commerce-type poppycock. It’s still a rural, sparsely populated backwater. Its official flower is the round-leafed sundew, which grows in bogs and eats bugs.

Bogs. Carnivorous plants. Abysmal poverty. Whee.

Photo by Jan Raes

Jacob’s grandfather William had been born in 1700, and his grandmother Jane first saw light in a soggy bit of Shropshire called Waters Upton in 1708. His father Thomas (born 1735) crossed over to the colonies looking for a more prosperous life. He found it, and a German-born bride named Magdalena, in Pennsylvania. He was only nineteen, and she about thirteen years older when they wed. But Magdalena proved to be one tough cookie, and I’m proud to be her offshoot.

Thomas Ignatius Adams was no slouch himself. In 1756, when he was 21, he purchased 118 acres of prime Conewago Township land that became known as “Adams Choice.” First he built his family a log cabin, and eventually replaced it with a brick farmhouse. He and Magdalena provided their nine children with at least eight beds, cooked their meals on two five-plate iron stoves, and had a “Walnut Dyning Table” to sit their pewter dinnerware on. For special occasions, food was served in “Delf Bowls” (from the Netherlands); when not in use, the crockery was stored in a corner “cubart.” They also had a clock, a looking glass, and a few books.

The farm itself flourished: Fields waving with wheat, barley and rye, and pastures supporting 11 horses, 25 cows, two steers, three bulls, 28 sheep, four lambs and 10 shoats.

The new land was good to Thomas, and he loved it enough to fight for it. Old records credit him with both “Provincial and Revolutionary Service”. According to the National Archives, Captain Adams served in one of the ”Three Independent Companies and First Regiment of Maryland Regulars in the Service of the United Colonies commanded by Colonel Smallwood in September and October 1776.”

Alas, Thomas’s career as a Patriot was short. He died on 5 December 1776. Was he wounded in action? Did he die from a farm accident, or merely catch a bad cold? I can’t find his cause of death anywhere.

This Shropshire-born man’s slate tombstone was, oddly, inscribed in German. I suppose Magdalena wanted to remind her Germanic neighbors of her late husband’s piety. This is an English translation of his epitaph: Now my struggle has come to an end. My run is complete. I go to my Jesus and say to you all good night.

The Sturms, Members of the Reformed Church

My mother's first known ancestors are Sebastian Sturm and his wife, whose maiden name was Closs but given name has been lost in the sands of time. Sebastian was born about 1610 in the town of Schifferstadt, located in the area now called Rhineland-Palatinate. Photos show a charming place full of old half-timbered buildings, so quaint that one suspects its inhabitants still bustle about in dirndls and lederhosen. The entire state is one of West Germany’s jewels: “An authentic treasure-trove of romantic castles, friendly locals, and exquisite wines”. Rieslings, to be precise. In short, it’s postcard-worthy.

Eltz Castle in Rhineland-Palatinate
Source: erdekesvilog.hu

The Sturms initially enjoyed living there, and must have easily supported the many children each generation produced. Believe me, we are only a few among their thousands of descendants. It is unclear how many generations of Sturms lived in Schifferstadt before Sebastian, but I’ve mused they may have wandered in as the last ice sheet receded.

Sebastian’s son Johann Peter (1630) and his frau Anna Barbara remained in their pretty little burg, as did their grandson Christian and his bride Anna Barbara, daughter of Paulus Gah. Christian’s son Johann Jacob was born in Schifferstadt in 1722, but by that time religious strife was in the air and ended the German idyll for our branch of the Sturms.

The Reformed Church had started in Switzerland and spread into every corner of Europe, although opposed by Inquisition fiends and rabid Jesuits committing “awful atrocities” (according to an old Reformed document I stumbled across). Although the new sect appealed to the previously Catholic Sturms, for many years their peaceful existence in the Palatinate was spared because its Elector Frederick III was Reformed himself. But after his death, really nasty religious wars ravaged the land and finally a series of Catholic princes gained power in the area. Naturally they persecuted members of the Reformed Church in every possible way: forbade them to practice their faith, undermined them economically, and threatened them with imprisonment with a tad of torture thrown in for good measure. Schifferstadt was no longer the Garden of Eden.

A young German Reformed schoolmaster from the Rhineland Palatinate realized his homeland was a lost cause and journeyed to the Maryland colony, where in 1745 he founded “Frederick Town” as a haven for his beleaguered countrymen. Our several times great-grandfather Johann Jacob Sturm followed him in 1749 on a ship from Rotterdam via Cowes, changing his name to “John Storm” in the process. The ship’s log waspishly identifies him as illiterate.
Frederick, Maryland must have been an exciting place to live. Its primary language remained German until 1846, when a flood of starving Irish immigrants changed the town’s demographics. Numerous refugees from Deutschland’s various kingdoms and principalities paused there before they migrated westward and became “Pennsylvania Dutch”. It was also a stopping place along a route that led down into the “Great Valley”, which we now poetically call the Shenandoah.

Johann and his German-born wife Mary Elizabeth Tanner/Donner (this is uncertain) eventually joined many other ethnic Germans in following an old Indian trail into Pennsylvania. They settled around Conewago (an Indian word meaning (“place of the rapids”) township where they had a daughter Maria in 1765.