The German glass makers at Jamestown have been mentioned. These unnamed individuals arrived on the ship "Mary and Margaret" around the first of October in 1608. Besides the glass makers, there were three German carpenters, Adam, Franz, and Samuel. Altogether the ship brought about 70 new settlers, including several Polish makers of pitch and tar, soap ashes, and potash. The other new settlers were English, but there was a Swiss German mineral prospector called William Volday by the English. Probably his German name was Wilhelm Waldi. He accompanied Captain Newport, of the ship, on a search for precious metals shortly after their arrival.
The organizers of the Colony, the Virginia Company of London, emphasized products that could be shipped back to England such as the naval stores, glass, and minerals, without putting enough emphasis on the growth of food to sustain the settlers. The other major fault of the plans was not including people who were used to labor. Captain John Smith, President of the Jamestown Colony, complained that most of the settlers were unaccustomed to hard labor. They "never did know what a day's work was, except the Dutchmen and Poles, and some dozen other." Unfortunately, history has been set back by the habit of the English to refer to Germans as Dutchmen which obscures the true role of the Germans in the founding of America.
The interest in minerals was focused on silver. They believed that there was a vein of this mineral beyond the falls of the James River (that is, in the vicinity of today's Richmond). This thought is echoed more than one hundred years later when Christopher Graffenried recruited German miners to develop silver mines beyond the falls of the Potomac River. There never was an active pursuit of silver on the Potomac. The Germans, instead, were diverted to a search for silver beyond the falls of the Rappahannock River near to Germanna. So the thought of silver runs deeply through the history of Virginia.
But, in both the Jamestown period and in the Germanna period, the Germans were willing, skilled, and hard workers. It was not the German's fault that better use wasn't made of their talents.
At Jamestown, the Germans and Poles went to work immediately and produced samples of their products for Captain Newport to take back to England about December 1. The Germans produced clapboards, wainscot, and "a trial of glass" to send. The glass was made before the glass house and the furnaces were built. The work was done in James Fort, where the recent excavations have found Hessian (not Dutch in the sense of the Netherlands) crucibles with adhering glass on them. Thus, these artifacts establish the existence of the Germans and one type of early work done by them.
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.