Johann Simon Dreisbach

Life

1. 1698Born · Oberndorf, Westfalia, Germany
2. 1720Married Maria Katharina Keller
3. 1785Died · Kreidersville, Lehigh Twp., Northampton Co., PA

Their story

Simon Dreisbach Sr. lived in Oberndorf, West Germany in the district of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was a feudal district in the middle of the 18th century and the name does not appear on German maps today. However, when I visited there in 1986, the name is still prominent. The main town in this area is Bad Laasphe. Oberndorf is a few miles distant as is Feudingen where an Evangelical (Lutheran) Church still stands. This was the church where the Simon Dreisbach family attended and where the records still show the baptismal dates of the children. Simon, Sr. was formally known as Johan Simon Dreisbach. He was born in Oberndorf 7 August 1698 and was married to Maria Cathrin Keller on 7 November 1720. Simon, Sr. and his family came to the United States on the ship Lydia which departed Rotterdam. They arrived in Philadelphia on 20 September 1743. The family settled in Lehigh township, Northampton County. Source: Fr. Charles Dreisbach We know that Simon and his family spent four full months traveling from Wittgenstein to Philadelphia, and we can only surmise their expectancy as the "Lydia" made her way up through the Delaware Bay in mid September of 1743. The ship's manifest contains two unexplained age figures. Simon appears with his correct age, 45, but sons Jost and Adam are recorded as being 19 and 20 respectively, though we know from the Feudingen church records that Jost recently turned 22 and Adam was approaching 21. Simon must have had some good reason for registering his sons under 21. We have no information on how Simon financed his family's passage, nor on their first years in Pennsylvania. However, in June of 1747, only three years and nine months after their arrival, eldest son Jost was already applying for the obligatory survey of 25 acres of land in what is now Northampton County. Six months later, his brother Adam filed for a survey of 25 acres along Indian Creek. In 1749 John (Johannes), a younger brother, also applied for a survey of 25 acres. In May 1749 and March 1750 father Simon applied for a total of 75 acres to be surveyed. Thus began the Dreisbach settlements in upper Northampton County. Their land was originally purchased, says a family tradition, from the Indians. The Dreisbach settlements lay a few miles from Blue Mountain and the Lehigh Gap, which was the gateway to the still largely unsettled regions north of the mountain. Jost soon built a gristmill along Indian Creek. A small German-language Reformed congregation came into being, meeting in Jost Dreisbach's. However, ministers could rarely be induced to come this far to preach, to marry and to baptize. Apart from the land records, there are other documents that speak of births, marriages and taxes. From the church books of Trinity Lutheran Church in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is rather far from Northampton County, we learn of second son Adam's marriage there to Susanna Coerber (Corber-Koerber-Kirber) on 16 July 1749. Adam is described as coming from "Bucks County", a large territory which at the time included all of what would later be Berks, Northampton and other counties. Three months later, elder son Jost married Elizabeth Rachenberger (Rachenbager-Rauschenberg). The next recorded Dreisbach marriage is that of Simon Jr. to Maria Dorothea Dies (Does-Toss-Taes, etc.) at Philadelphia in April of 1752. Simon was 22, his bride not quite 18. He seems to have taken her immediately to Alsace Township near Reading, where their first child was born. (See Simon Jr's own account of the births and deaths in his family, still in the possession of a descendant, a copy of which has been deposited at the Library of the Lehigh County Historical Society in Allentown, Pennsylvania.) Berks and Northampton Counties were both formed in 1752, and in about that year the first tax list of the inhabitants of Alsace Township, Berks County, was drawn up. Here we find "Simon Drisebogh" (that is, Simon, Jr.) and also "Adam Swasbogh". If this is a scribe's misspelling of Dreisbach, then young Adam appears to have had one foot in each of the two neighboring counties -- in central Berks and northern Northampton. In May of 1754, when Simon Jr. recorded another birth in his family, he was still living near Reading. Soon, however, he would move closer to other members of his family in upper Northampton County. There some unexpected trouble awaited them all. Twelve years after their disembarkation in Philadelphia, 1755 was a significant year in the history of Simon Dreisbach and his family. 1755 was the year in which land patents were filed by Simon Sr. and his sons Adam, Jost and George, for land in Minisink Indian territory, south of the Blue Mountain, in newly established Northampton County. The Dreisbachs had already purchased land from the local Indians, says one family tradition, and had already applied for patents on the land where they had established their settlements. However, not all their transactions were recognized by the descendants of William Penn, the Penn Proprietors, and therefore the Dreisbachs had to repurchase their land. 1755 also saw a marriage within the family. On 29 October, Simon's daughter Anna Catharina was married to Henry Ulrich. She was 17. The couple settled on land adjoining that of Simon Sr. In 1755 the existence of Jost Dreisbach's grist mill is documented for the first time. It is mentioned in a letter written by Benjamin Franklin on 12 December 1755 (see below). By now the congregation which met sporadically at Jost's house was functioning as the local church, though without a regular minister. On the hill above Jost's house a burial ground was laid out. 1755 was a year that ended in uncertainty. In September, October and November, Indians, incited by the French, began attacking settlers farther west in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, at the end of November, Indians attacked the peaceable Moravian mission at Gnadenhütten on the other side of the Blue Mountains, not so many miles north of the Dreisbach settlements. This was the reason for Franklin's December 12th letter, which ordered Captain Van Etten to station a sergeant and six men at "Treisbach's Mill." In January 1756, Franklin and 100 men actually spent some time in the area, and established Fort Allen at what is now Weissport, north of Blue Mountain, in Carbon County. Following the Gnadenhütten attack, a number of the settlers near the Blue Mountain fled to safer areas farther south. Some Dreisbachs are said to have fled to Easton, and others may have gone as far as Upper Bucks County, where baptism and marriages are recorded at the Tohickon Reformed Church in the late 1750's. However, since this was the church where travelling preacher Johan Egidius Hecker (for many years the Dreisbachs' preferred minister) kept his records, it is not certain that the baptisms were actually performed at this church which lay many miles to the south. On 26 May 1757 inhabitants of Northampton County sent a petition to the governor of Pennsylvania, requesting protection from Indian raids. Seven houses and other buildings had been burned down, one man was killed, another was shot five times and one girl had been taken captive. The signers included Simon "Driesbach" and his son-in-law Henry Ulrich. In 1759, when the Indian danger had passed, but when roads in upper Northampton County were still few and rudimentary, Simon Dreisbach and Johannes Dieter, church elders representing three small Reformed congregations (including the Indian Creek congregation at Jost Dreisbach's), undertook a long and difficult journey to Easton, Plainfield and Greenwich in the eastern part of the county, to ask the Reformed Church's governing body, the Coetus, to appoint a joint minister for their churches. They had little success, for their congregations were hard to reach and too small to support a clergyman. In 1768 Simon's wife, Maria Katharina, died and was buried in the cemetery above her son Jost's house. Simon outlived her by almost seventeen years. Simon Dreisbach lived through the Revolutionary War, but was too old to take an active part. By the time he died in 1785, the church at Jost's had been abandoned and a new church had been built a few miles to the south. Here, in the cemetery of recently constructed Zion Stone Church, Simon Sr. was buried. The old cemetery at Jost's was later put under cultivation, and the remaining head-stones were propped against the fence along the field. In the 1920's Maria Katharina Dreisbach's grave-marker and a few other surviving stones were moved to the Zion Stone Church cemetery, where they were inserted into a white commemorative monument.

Family