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Founding population

The Pennsylvania Germans (Pennsylvania Dutch) of Schuylkill County

The founding farming people of Schuylkill County’s southern valleys. Every claim is sourced; tradition is flagged; common errors are corrected. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview: the county’s first European culture

If the Lenape were the county’s first people, the Pennsylvania Germans were its first European culture — and the deepest-rooted one. They were not the coal-region’s later, Catholic German immigrants, but 18th-century German Protestants — Palatines and other Rhinelanders — who pushed north out of German-settled Berks County and the Tulpehocken Valley, crossing the Blue Mountain into the fertile limestone valleys of the southern county. They came as farmers and lumbermen, settled the land that was not underlain with coal, and built a self-contained world of German speech, union churches, and folk custom that persisted, in places, for a century and a half. ★

A single geographic fact organizes their whole story and still marks the county today: the divide between “south of the mountain” and “north of the mountain.” South of the Broad Mountain lie the agricultural valleys the Pennsylvania Germans made — Protestant, German-rooted, long-Republican. North lie the coal towns that a later, Catholic, polyglot immigration would build. The two “Germanies” — the 18th-century Protestant farmers and the 19th-century Catholic coal-labor Germans — were divided by religion, language register, economy, and geography, and never substantially merged. ✔

Sources: SAH Archipedia — Schuylkill County; PA Heritage — Schuylkill County: Built on Coal.

Settlement: township by township

The land could not be legally settled until the 1749 Six Nations purchase (see the Lenni-Lenape profile) — but Germans were already squatting across the Blue Mountain “two years before the land was purchased from the Indians in 1749.” ★ German-named townships cluster in the south; the founders’ names fill Munsell’s 1881 township histories.

Pine Grove Township & Borough — the richest primary record. First settlers “probably came between 1750 and 1760… Germans… mostly from Berks county,” locating at the base of the Blue Mountain; Indian danger prompted a blockhouse on the mountain. Pre-Revolutionary families named by Munsell: Schnoke, Hetrick, Swope, Schaeffer, Bressler, Boyer, Zimmerman, Fetty, Stine. The borough’s founder was Jacob Gunkel, “the first settler at Pine Grove,” who located on the site of the American Eagle Hotel in 1771, bought his tract from John and Richard Penn, ran a house of entertainment on the old Indian trail, opened a store in 1795, and died in 1813; a German Reformed log church and parochial school rose on his land in 1782. ★ A vivid dialect detail: before it was “Pine Grove,” the place was called “Schwallum Schtettle” (Swallowtown), then “Bear Schtettle” (Barrstown) — the founders’ own Deitsch names for it. ★

Orwigsburg & Brunswick — the first county seat. The earliest settler was William Deibert (1744), joined by John Hartman (~1745); Gottfried and Clara Orwig moved from Berks to Sculp’s Hill in 1747. Peter Orwig took the Commonwealth deed for 309 acres in 1795 and laid out Orwigsburg in 1796, naming it for himself. Orwigsburg served as county seat 1811–1851 (until the courts moved to Pottsville). A notable non-German thread runs through even here: the Quaker Francis Yarnall, first settler on the actual town site, had married Mary Lincoln, daughter of Mordecai Lincoln — great-grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. ★

North/South Manheim (Schuylkill Haven) — settled by “Germans, or their descendants who had crossed the Blue mountain subsequent to the French and Indian war.” ✎ A correction: the founder Martin Dreibelbis has long been dated “c. 1806,” but the documented dates are earlier and the 1806 figure is internally inconsistent. Dreibelbis was born 1751 and died 1799; he arrived in spring 1775, received the land by deed in 1778, and built up an estate of some 12,000 acres with sawmills, gristmills, a distillery, store, and blacksmith shop covering present Schuylkill Haven and Cressona. (The “1806” attached to a church/school/burial-ground donation cannot post-date his 1799 death and should be treated cautiously.) His sons Jacob, Daniel, and George divided the town. ★ ⚑

Wayne Township / Friedensburg — John Fidler laid out Friedensburg in 1818; the name means “fortress of peace.” ★

Sources: Munsell, History of Schuylkill County (1881) — Pine Grove township text; Munsell — full PDF; Orwigsburg Borough — history; Schuylkill Haven History; Find A Grave — Martin Dreibelbis (1751–1799); Friedens UCC — history.

Religion: the union church and the language fault line

Religion was the defining Pennsylvania German institution, and its characteristic county form was the Union church (Unionkirche) — a single building shared by a Lutheran and a German Reformed congregation, worshiping on alternating Sundays, each with its own pastor and officers. The textbook examples sit right across the southern county:

  • Jacob’s Lutheran, ~2 miles west of Pine Grove — organized 1780 with a hewn-log church the same year, “the first church established in this part of Schuylkill county.” ★
  • St. Peter’s, Pine Grove — a German Reformed church on the site by ~1782; the famous stone union church had its cornerstone laid Whit-Monday 1816 and was dedicated October 19, 1817. ★
  • Jerusalem (United German Lutheran & Reformed), Schuylkill Haven — worship in a consecrated log schoolhouse from November 11, 1821; the “Old White Church” built 1828. ★
  • St. John’s (Friedens), Friedensburg — cornerstone May 23, 1830; Lutheran and Reformed alternating, preached in German and English. ★

These congregations typically survive today split along their two lineages — the Reformed line as United Church of Christ (UCC), the Lutheran line as ELCA. ★

The single best-documented marker of acculturation is the language fault line. Again and again, congregations fractured over German versus English preaching. In Schuylkill Haven, St. Paul’s split from Jerusalem precisely because Jerusalem held to German only; St. Matthew’s then seceded as an English Lutheran church (1858). Munsell records the same transition everywhere — St. John’s Pine Grove preaching roughly five English sermons to every two German by 1881. ★ The slow defeat of the German tongue, congregation by congregation, is the measure of the community’s assimilation.

✎ A correction to a common assumption: the Schuylkill founders were overwhelmingly “Church People” — Lutheran and German Reformed — not “Plain” sectarians. No significant founding-era Moravian, Mennonite, Amish, or Brethren congregation appears in the Munsell township records for Pine Grove, Manheim, Brunswick, or Wayne. The Moravians were influential in the Berks/Tulpehocken corridor the settlers came from, but the surviving Schuylkill founding churches are Lutheran/Reformed union churches. Any “Moravian settler” claim for the county should be qualified.

Sources: Munsell — Pine Grove township; Jerusalem Lutheran Church — history; Friedens UCC — history.

”Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch”: language and folk culture

The people called their language Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch — a West-Central German variety rooted in the Palatine/Rhenish-Franconian dialects — and dialectologists place Schuylkill County within the broader “Lancaster Area” zone of Pennsylvania German. ★ Its persistence in the county is documented: a German-only school in Pine Grove “as late as 1820,” the borough’s own dialect place-names, and the borough of Yorkville keeping its official records in German by an 1865 resolution. ★

Two strands of folk culture deserve special notice because they are genuinely rooted in the county:

Braucherei (“powwowing”) — folk healing. This tradition of healing by prayer, charms, and laying-on of hands, carried by the first German Protestant settlers, has two strong Schuylkill County anchors. Rev. George Mennig (1773–1851) — the very pastor Munsell lists at St. Peter’s/Jacob’s Lutheran in Pine Grove (1811–1833) — also printed healing broadsides. And folklorist Don Yoder documented Sophia Bailer (1870–1954), “the Saint of the Coal Regions,” practicing in Schuylkill County in 1950 using Mennig’s cure. The genre’s foundational text is John George Hohman’s Der lange verborgene Freund / The Long Lost Friend (1820). ★

Mahantongo Valley folk art — a nationally significant, under-known county asset. The Mahantongo (Schwaben Creek) Valley straddles the Schuylkill–Northumberland line in the county’s far northwest. Settled by Lutheran and German Reformed families from the late 1700s, it produced some of the most distinctive paint-decorated furniture and fraktur in early America (c. 1798–1828) — bold birds, flowers, and figures on grounds of Prussian blue or chrome green, much of it credited to the decorator John Mayer (1794–1883). This is material culture of national museum rank physically rooted partly in Schuylkill County. ★

On architecture: the Pennsylvania bank barn is the standard farm form across the southern valleys, and Schuylkill is within the genuine hex-sign belt. ✎ An earlier caution can be refined: hex signs are most concentrated in Berks and Lehigh, but Schuylkill County is a real (southern/eastern) part of the tradition — far more authentically than tourist-branded Lancaster. Today the Schuylkill River Greenways “Hex Barn Art Tour” maps surviving examples.

Sources: PA German Cultural Heritage Center — Braucherei/Powwowing; Glencairn Museum — Powwowing in Pennsylvania; Chipstone — From Millbach to Mahantongo; PA Heritage — Mahantongo furniture; Glencairn — Hex Signs; PA Center for the Book — “Death of the Dutchy?”.

The German press

The German language had its own county press, centered first on the county seat at Orwigsburg and then on Pottsville:

  • Orwigsburg: Die Freyheits Presse, und Schuylkill Caunty Wöchentlicher Anzeiger (held by the Library of Congress) and Die Stimme des Volks (c. 1845–1852). ★
  • Pottsville: the Pottsville Adler (weekly, from December 7, 1847), the Demokratische Freiheits Presse (1848), and Civil-War-era papers including the Amerikanischer Republikaner and Jefferson Demokrat von Schuylkill County (both 1862). ★ ✎ Do not confuse the Pottsville Adler with the much larger and longer-lived Reading Adler (1796–1913) in Berks County.

The English-language counterpart and rival was Benjamin Bannan’s Miners’ Journal (bought 1829), the coal-capital paper of record — a neat contrast between the German/agrarian and English/industrial presses of the same county.

Sources: Library of Congress — Die Freyheits Presse (Orwigsburg); F&M German American Imprints — newspapers; State Library of PA — German-language newspapers.

Two Germanies: the farming south vs. the coal north

The most important interpretive point is that the founding Pennsylvania Germans stayed agricultural while coal transformed the north into someone else’s country. P. W. Sheafer wrote in Munsell (1881) of “a large farming area well cultivated by our industrious and frugal German farmers” — a distinct sector existing alongside the coal economy. ★ The later Catholic German immigrants of the 1820s and after attached to the coal-driven, urban, Catholic north (whose parishes trace to the missionary St. John Neumann), alongside the Irish and, later, the Slavs — not to the established Protestant farm valleys. ★

The result is a durable cultural-political cleavage that observers still describe today: in the south, “scenic agricultural valleys—untouched by coal—inhabited by German Protestants who have long trended Republican,” and in the north “poorer Catholic coal towns.” Two German populations, divided by the mountain, that did not merge. ✔

Sources: SAH Archipedia — Schuylkill County; PA Heritage — Built on Coal.

Legacy

The Pennsylvania German imprint is the most pervasive in the county’s everyday fabric. It survives in place-names (Orwigsburg, Schuylkill Haven, Friedensburg, Cressona, Auburn, Pine Grove); in dense founding surnames still common in the southern townships (Dreibelbis, Zimmerman, Stine, Schnoke/Snoke, Hetrick, Schaeffer, Bressler, Boyer, Kalbach, Heberling, Orwig, Deibert, Zerbe, Manbeck); in the union churches that became today’s UCC and Lutheran congregations; and in foodways — Pennsylvania Dutch potato filling (Fillsel) is specifically traced to German immigrants in “Schuylkill, Lebanon, Lehigh, and Berks Counties.” The dialect, German-only into the 1820s and preserved in church and borough records into the later 1800s, has faded among the non-sectarian “Fancy Dutch,” but heritage endures — including a present-day Pennsylvania Dutch Groundhog Day (Grundsau) gathering at Sweet Arrow Lake County Park in Pine Grove, held expressly “to celebrate their heritage, to preserve the language.” ★

Sources: SAH Archipedia; Munsell — Pine Grove; WVIA — PA Dutch heritage on Groundhog Day in Schuylkill County; Schuylkill River Greenways — Hex Barn Art Tour.

Open questions

  • Fuller founding-family genealogies from Munsell’s township texts and Ella Zerbey Elliott’s Old Schuylkill Tales / Blue Book of Schuylkill County.
  • Resolving the Dreibelbis “1806” donation date against deeds and church records.
  • Confirming (or ruling out) any named founding-era German singing society (Sängerbund/Liederkranz) in the county.
  • A dedicated treatment of the Mahantongo Valley as a folk-art region (furniture, fraktur, John Mayer), worthy of its own sub-profile.

Sources

Frequently asked

Who were the Pennsylvania Germans of Schuylkill County?
They were the county's first European culture — 18th-century German Protestants, Palatines and other Rhinelanders, who pushed north out of German-settled Berks County and the Tulpehocken Valley across the Blue Mountain into the fertile limestone valleys of the southern county. They came as farmers and lumbermen and settled the land that was not underlain with coal.
What is the 'south of the mountain / north of the mountain' divide?
South of the Broad Mountain lie the agricultural valleys the Pennsylvania Germans made — Protestant, German-rooted, long-Republican. North lie the coal towns a later, Catholic, polyglot immigration would build. The two 'Germanies' — 18th-century Protestant farmers and 19th-century Catholic coal-labor Germans — were divided by religion, language, economy, and geography, and never substantially merged.
What was a union church (Unionkirche)?
The characteristic county form of Pennsylvania German religion — a single building shared by a Lutheran and a German Reformed congregation, worshiping on alternating Sundays, each with its own pastor and officers. These congregations typically survive today split along their two lineages: the Reformed line as United Church of Christ (UCC), the Lutheran line as ELCA.

Towns: Orwigsburg, Pine Grove, Schuylkill Haven

Related peoples: Germans (coal era)

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