I was going to do a note on Lester Cappon's account of the iron making history of Spotswood. First, I decided to see what Cappon's job position was. He had been appointed a University of Virginia archivist, and, in 1945, he published a short book entitled, " Iron Works at Tuball ". While I was on the Internet, I saw that I had written two other Notes about the man and his opinions, and I have decided that I need not repeat myself here. The two Notes in question are 926 and 927 . In short, Cappon made a start toward sorting the events out, but he was never successful. He was influenced by conflicting statements on the subject, including those by Willis Kemper. There is little that I can add to the two Notes and they are available on the web at the locations just above.
In the early 1950's, Brawdus Martin became interested in the history of Germanna and tried to raise the interest among the descendants. He recognized that the story that Willis Kemper had written was not logical, or even reasonable, with the iron furnace and iron mine 13 miles away from Germanna. If Spotswood had found iron before the Germans came, surely he would have settled the Germans closer to the iron. Martin tried to resolve the difficulties in Kemper's history.
His correction was to postulate there were two Germannas, one at the furnace and one in the horseshoe bend of the Rapidan River that we know today as Germanna. Martin said the Germans were first settled at the mine and that this was the first Germanna. It was at this Germanna that John Fontaine visited and the expedition over the mountains started. For some reason, they were relocated to the horseshoe bend of the Rapidan and this became the second Germanna. His listeners had difficulty accepted this theory, so Martin attempted to reinforce his position by claiming to have found the nine houses and the block house at the mine. Then he published his "finding" that the Germanna patent fitted the terrain at the mine. This was a complete fiction. In doing this, he alienated his readers even more. Charles Herbert Huffman, who was to become the first President of the Germanna Foundation, would not even talk to Brawdus Martin. Martin withdrew from the scene.
To give Martin some valid credit, he recognized the untenable hypothesis of Willis Kemper. Martin's attempt to provide an alternative was also unrealistic. It merely shows that both Kemper and Martin were both wrong.
After Martin withdrew, there was no organized activity by Germanna descendants. The real start of the present Germanna Foundation was the arrival of Ernst Flender, who worked with C. H. Huffman. The generosity of Flender enabled the Foundation to purchase a significant piece of property along Virginia State Highway 3. The Foundation gave a portion of this land to Virginia for siting Germanna Community College.
(10 Aug 04)
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.