To repeat, in 1708, just one year after a merciless campaign by the French in the Palatinate, the Board of Trade in London noted that a group of "distressed Palatines had been driven out of the Palatinate by the cruelty of the French” and they made application to the Board for transportation to America. The Queen [Anne] and the Council were pleased to receive this petition graciously. The order was given to relieve the necessities of the poor people and to send them to New York in the same ship with Lord Lovelace, who was assigned to the government of that province. Arriving in the late summer of 1708, the Palatines were planted sixty miles up the Hudson River. Today, the city of Newburgh is on the site. (It is a fair presumption that the city took its name from the ruling house of the Palatinate.) Here the Palatines were given 2000 acres of land. By the end of thirty years, many had moved away, including to Pennsylvania.
The leader of this group was Rev. Joshua Kockerthal (Kocherthal) who, as soon as the group was settled on their lands, returned to Germany with the hope of organizing a much larger emigration of the people from along the Rhine. [To what degree his actions were responsible is unknown], but in the following year, 1709, thousands of Germans descended on England in the hope that the English would provide them with transportation and homes in the New World. This emigration began in the early spring of 1709 and five thousand had responded by the end of April. By October the number had swollen to fifteen thousand. They came from all the lands along the Rhine, not just from the Palatinate.
Housing and feeding this number of people was a problem. Cobb gave the cost to the English at 135,000 pounds sterling, a munificent act of charity. What to do with the people was a major question. Probably one-third of the Germans found a variety of solutions themselves in the English army and in a general distribution over England. Twenty-eight hundred of the Germans were transported to Ireland in August where they formed an enduring settlement marked by virtue, thrift, and prosperity. In September, the Lords of Trade received a proposition from the Swiss adventurers, de Graffenried and Michel [with the concurrence of the North Carolina proprietors] to settle seven hundred of the Palatines in North Carolina. For a variety of reasons, Graffenried as the leader in North Carolina went broke in this enterprise and returned to Switzerland.
Rev. Cobb errors seriously for he states that another detachment of the Palatines was sent to Virginia with Spotswood [1710]. He settled them on the upper reaches of the Rappahannock River giving the location the name of Germanna. Cobb thought the Board of Trade had suggested to Spotswood that the Germans might be useful in the manufacture of wine.
(12 Oct 06)
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.