Lutheran History in Virginia
From: The Lutheran Church in Virginia 1717-1962 by William Edward Eisenberg
LUTHERANS COME TO VIRGINIA
(1717)
Lutheran settlers came to Virginia in 1717. Their arrival was, as a matter of fact, an accident rather than an act of deliberate choice. Their decision to leave their German homes along the Rhine-in the Palatinate, in Alsace, and other adjacent districts-had been occasioned both by the beckoning allurements of America and by the hardships of religious wars and antagonisms at home. Their eager desire was to accept William Penn’s invitation to share the religious liberty promised by his colony, an invitation to freedom which had been advertised widely throughout their native communities. But circumstances beyond their control intervened and they were led to Virginia instead. As newcomers they came with plans frustrated and dreams blown away by fateful ocean winds.
Like thousands of their fellow countrymen they had sailed down the Rhine to Holland and there had taken ship for England and America. While in England, however, their ship’s captain had been arrested and thrown into debtor’s prison. Forced to wait out an extensive delay, their travel funds and supplies were soon exhausted. They experienced the successive march of privation, hunger, illness and death in their midst. As climax to their ill fortune, the Atlantic voyage proved so rough and storm tossed that their vessel, bound for Philadelphia, was blown off its course. Dismayed in heart, they disembarked reluctantly upon a shore both strange to them and one they did not seek.
Virginia’s original Lutheran colonists arrived penniless. If they had not known impoverishment at home, they soon learned its pangs en route to the new world. Whatever money they had taken with them when they left the Rhineland had been expended during the earlier stages of their journey. In order to pay for the Atlantic passage they had to sign themselves over as indentured servants. Thereby they fell into the hands not only of their ship’s captain, but of the captain of Virginia’s ship-of-state. For it was Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of the colony, who advanced payment for their passage upon their arrival and who settled them on his own lands along the Rapidan river. He bound them to eight years of indentured labor in exchange for transportation costs.
In the perspective of time it can readily be seen that the first Lutherans arrived in Virginia at a significant turn of events in the life of the colony. Westward expansion was about to begin. Already the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, Spotswood’s exploring coterie of gentlemen, had pressed to the top of the Blue Ridge and on to the Valley beyond.
The existing status of Tidewater predominance still prevailed, however, for Piedmont had not yet been occupied. Virginia was Tidewater, and Tidewater must be protected from possible Indian, or French and Indian, attack. At Williamsburg the policy permitting settlement at the eastern base of the mountains, as well as in the Shenandoah Valley itself, as a defense for Tidewater plantations, was taking definite shape.
In view of this state of affairs, the Lutherans, on completion of their indentured service, were granted lands near the headwaters of the Rapidan at the foot of the mountains. Their permanent homes at the time were farther west and more deeply remote than those of any other colonists. Homes and lives, admittedly, were pawns on the continental chessboard of events, wholly expendable if need be.
Besides being the first of their faith in Virginia, this 1717 colony became the first permanent Lutheran settlement in the entire South. Small groups of Lutherans, it is true, had settled at earlier dates at Elk River, Maryland, and at New Bern, North Carolina, but they had left no lasting deposit of their faith. South of Pennsylvania these Virginia Pioneers were the earliest group to proclaim and to cling to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. Their faith was very precious to them. Though they were destitute, still they possessed something money could not buy. Religious freedom cast is spell over them to a high degree because they deemed their faith their dearest treasure from the best of their past.
Undaunted by adversity the first Lutherans in Virginia faced their future with resolution. Neither the disappointment in coming to a region they did not choose, nor the necessity to endure eight years of servitude, nor two unsuccessful attempts to obtain a minister from Europe, nor sixteen years of waiting for a pastor of their own, could dull their purpose or diminish their determination to foster their faith, the safekeeping of which they regarded as a sacred trust that had been committed to their faith to their descendants in their new homeland. Let it be said of them, therefore, in simple tribute and gratitude: they brought, they kept, they left a goodly heritage.
