Germanna History Notes

George Flohr was a communicant at Hebron Church from 1791 to 1798. Apparently he was a bachelor. He had two quite different careers, and the time he spent in the Robinson River Valley was a separation between the two. He was born on 27 August 1756 in the duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken. His father had been born in northern Bavaria in 1695. Because his father died when he was young he was raised by his mother, along with five children from his father’s first marriage. His mother’s father worked in the local paper mill, and his father had been a butcher and small farmer. The family was German Reformed and George Flohr attended their schools.

Before he was twenty, he volunteered for eight years of service in Regiment Royal Deux-Ponts, which consisted of Germans in the service of the French army. In 1780, the regiment was sent to America to help the rebellious Colonies. Unlike most of his fellow soldiers, Flohr, at 24 years of age, went very joyfully. He was also set off from his fellows by his keen mind and his interest in the world around him. He wrote an extensive journal of his four-year experience in America, which was a rare thing for an enlisted man to do.

After landing in Rhode Island, the regiment took the better part of a year to proceed south to Virginia. In the summer of 1782, the regiment marched back to New England. In the spring of 1783 the regiment sailed for Europe. By 1784, his enlistment was up and he moved to Strasbourg, where he worked on his journal, which was completed in June of 1788, when he was 32 years old.

He went to Paris to study medicine and found that he could not stand the sight of blood. He decided to return to the United States, where he went to the Robinson River Valley and studied theology under Rev. William Carpenter. Rev. Carpenter had only recently been ordained, though he had been studying theology for a few years. The teacher was younger than the pupil. Though the circumstances seem strange, Flohr spent at least seven years studying theology, and taught school in Culpeper County. It is a mystery why he chose this locality. (Perhaps he was acquainted with it since he did march through Virginia twice.)

Flohr was licensed in 1799 by the Lutherans to preach and perform religious services. His first church was among the German settlers of New River Valley, in southwestern Virginia around Wytheville. Both Lutheran and German Reformed church goers lived there. A few letters and documents show the problems and reveal the man himself in his efforts, which lasted until his death in 1826.
(This subject will be continued.)

(The information on Georg Daniel Flohr comes from Robert Selig, who wrote an article in Beyond Germanna in November 1998. Dr. Selig has made an extensive study of the Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment of German soldiers, being paid by the French, and fighting for the Americans.)

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.

John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1257