In the paragraph which was quoted in the last note, reference was made to Tappahannock as the initial landing place in Virginia of the First Colony. I do not believe there is any good reference for this. The basis for this is that someone reported that a grandson of Alexander Spotswood said this was the case. Considering that the first son of Spotswood was born in 1725, and that Spotswood died in 1740, there was no opportunity for a grandson to hear this directly from Spotswood. The facts were never written down (to the best of my knowledge), and, so, the statement given in the Germanna Foundation web page is to be likened to A told B, who told C, who told D, but B hadn't been born before A's death. The statement that the Germans landed at Tappahannock ought to be qualified with a disclaimer, or, even better, omitted.
[If you are curious, Tappahannock is on the Rappahannock River, about half way from the Chesapeake Bay to Fredericksburg. It was not unusual for ships to call at ports other than Jamestown.]
The next paragraph on the Foundation web page, after the one I quoted yesterday, reads:
"Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood wrote to the Board of Trade in London, in May 1714, stating the Germans were invited to Virginia by Baron de Graffenried, who had Her Majesty's, Queen Anne's, letter to the Governor telling him to furnish them land after their arrival."
Graffenried first landed in America in 1710, in Virginia, and he paid a visit to the Lt. Gov. He had the letter from Queen Anne then. He told the Lt. Gov. of his plans to establish a colony in Virginia. Though he had told the Queen that he planned this colony for Swiss citizens, he had already changed his schedule so that the Swiss went to North Carolina, and the Germans from Siegen were intended to replace the Swiss as the colonizers in Virginia. The Germans were also to be used in mining silver. At this moment in time, 1710, Johann Justus Albrecht was in Siegen recruiting the miners.
So the recruiting effort was underway before Graffenried had even met Spotswood. And the "miners" were being recruited to mine silver, not iron. Their employer was to be George Ritter and Company, not Spotswood.
Willis Kemper had read the "biography" of Graffenried when he wrote his histories. Graffenried, while not the clearest writer there was, tells of these events. Yet, Kemper continually reports things as
facts
, which are contradictory to the original documents in the libraries in Switzerland, and in London. And, people have accepted what Kemper wrote as factual. By one path or another, much of the Foundation's history originates with Kemper.
(08 Jan 02)
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.