John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1937

We have commented already on one mistake of Alexander Spotswood.  Actually, in view of the large amount which he wrote, he did not do all that badly, but his writings were self-serving and filled with deviations from the strict truth.  His writings should only be accepted as a guide with a "buyer beware" clause.  In the 2003 Germanna Seminar, I discussed Spotswood's letter to Col. Harrison.  In this, he says,

"...during the six years they [ First Colony ] remained on the land I never offered to plant one foot of ground thereon."

Of course, we have to struggle with the strange terminology, but it seems to say that he never was at Germanna [in 1714, 1715, 1716, 1717, 1718, or 1719?].  We know clearly, though, that he was there in 1716, en route to the mountains, as John Fontaine tells us.

William Byrd left all too few words that apply to the Germans, which is unfortunate, as he was the best writer of that time.  In 1732, while visiting Spotswood at Germanna, he wrote,

". . where so many German Familys had dwelt some Years ago; but [are] now remov'd ten miles higher, in the Fork of the Rappahannock, to Land of their Own."

It was typical of writers in the early Eighteenth Century to confuse the different groups of Germans, and Byrd has done it here.  He was referring to the First Colony, but they lived outside of the Fork of the Rappahannock [the Great Fork], both while at Germanna, and later in their new homes at Germantown.  The Second Colony lived always in the Great Fork, both as tenants of Spotswood and later on their own land.

The first of the German writers to be called out here is Rev. John Caspar Stoever.  He wrote several short notes for publication while he was on the fund raising trip in Germany.  He described the members of the Second Colony as Lutherans from Alsace, the Palatinate, and neighboring places.  This statement was been widely quoted, but it is not the best that could be made.  It would have been much better had he written Wuerttemberg, Baden, and neighboring places, as we now know from the church records.  We must bear in mind that boundaries do shift, and many of the Second Colony came from places which defied classification.  Still, it hard to understand how Alsace was in the number one position in his statement.

For another hundred years, few civil historians wrote about Germanna or the Germans.  When they did reappear, the emphasis was on Germanna and not on the Germans.  In the 1800's [I have seen different dates], Dr. Caruthers wrote a story of the expedition over the mountains by Spotswood.  It was fiction all the way, as Fontaine's diary had not yet been published [and we have seen inaccuracies in Rev. Jones' book].  This was the first time that the phrase, " The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe ", was used, and it eventually crept into the history books, without a warning that it was fiction, not history.
(03 Aug 04)