Jeanne B. Cox, a Germanna descendant, asked if I could pinpoint the location of Culpeper Classes 25 and 27. In general, I can't give the locality of the names. I can find some. In class 27, there was a name that I recognized immediately and that was Reuben Zimmerman. I also happened to know that he lived in Stevensburg, a small village along Virginia State Highway 3, the Germanna Highway, a few miles east of the town of Culpeper and not far from Mt. Pony.
Out of the people in the two classes, there is only the one German name, Zimmerman. Why they happened to be there is not entirely known. In the late 1720's and early 1730's there were a few German families living in the area southeast of Mt. Pony. But most of them moved away until only two families were left, the Zimmermans and the Kablers. Records indicate that both Christopher Zimmerman and Frederick Kabler were coopers. Also both families were known to each other in Germany, in particular around Sulzfeld.
Possibly, there were good stands of trees which would yield the material for building barrels. Christopher Zimmerman took out several land patents so that he ultimately owned several hundred acres of land. If it were for the purpose of having raw materials, he would have been a very busy cooper. Another reason for living apart from the main body of the Lutherans may have been a marketing decision. Being in the Robinson River community would have been at the extreme edge of the market as the Blue Ridge mountains to the west would not have had many customers for the barrels. Being located at Mt. Pony may have been closer to the center of things.
Other early residents of the Mt. Pony, such as Amberger (Amburgey) and Bloodworth moved closer to the Robinson River community.
One of the lessons of a very small ethnic community such as the Germanic Mt. Pony settlement is that the values of the larger community quickly become the values of the smaller community. The smaller the community is, the quicker the process. Large ethnic communities maintain their values (language and religion, for example) for longer periods of time. The Robinson River community was still holding church services in German nearly a hundred years after the founding of the church. The influx of new people who had not left Germany long before helped to maintain the old order.
The Zimmermans and the Kablers quickly adopted the English church and language and married the English. Before long they were not to be easily distinguished from their neighbors. Reuben Zimmerman was the grandson of the immigrant, Christopher Zimmerman. He kept an inn, or ordinary, in Stevensburg which was widely accepted as the place to meet. In fact the Church of England Vestry used to hold their meetings at Zimmerman's ordinary.
So we can say that Culpeper Class 27 is to be identified with Stevensburg. Near numbers to 27 were probably not far away. I have good ideas about the location of the "Madison Co." and the Little Fork classes. If any of you have ideas about the location of classes, I would like to know your thoughts.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.