European Moravian: I have chosen to use the terms “European” or “European Moravian” in recognition of the fact that the Moravian missions, and also Pennsylvania in general, were home to people from various parts of continental Europe and Britain. Since this study involves multiple ethnic groups, I have used terms such as English Moravian or German Moravian only where it applies to particular people or groups.
Moravian Church: In the eighteenth century, the Moravian Church had many names: Unitas Fratrum, Brüdergemeine, Ancient Unity, erneuerte Brüdergemeine, Herrnhuter, and the Brethren’s Congregation, among others. For the purposes of this study, I have adopted the common English language name, Moravian. It is also important to note that the term “Moravian” was a spiritual designation in the eighteenth century, and did not denote a particular race, class, or geographic origin.
Pennsylvania or Penn’s Woods: There is not a single Native word for the region of North America that would become the colony of Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century, so indigenous toponyms have been used when possible for local geographies, and the process of naming is discussed throughout the book and in the accompanying maps as a feature of colonization and decolonization.
Archival Sources
Primary source materials from the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the Unity Archives of the Moravian Church in Herrnhut, Germany, are the backbone of this study. It is my intention to present these sources as authentically as possible. Quotes preserve the original spelling, errors, and eighteenth-century conventions. I have avoided “sic,” due to the sheer number of anomalies deemed incorrect by modern English or German standards. For instance, the written form of German permitted capitalization of the first two letters of words such as HErrn or JEsu, or capitalization of entire words, to add emphasis. All translations were prepared specifically for this study, unless attribution is given.
All pictures and photographs of archival materials are printed with permission from the Unity Archives of the Moravian Church, Herrnhut, Germany; the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA; the Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, PA; and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The abbreviation “UA” refers to the Unity Archives of the Moravian Church in Herrnhut; “MAB” refers to the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem. The conclusions of this study apply principally to the American communities of the Moravian Church. For the purposes of this study, I did not review archival records from mission communities outside of North America and Germany.
Additionally, I have sometimes used newer versions of spelling and orthography for the Mohican language, where these differ from Moravian missionary transcriptions, according to current language revival guidelines being adopted by a descendant community on the Stockbridge–Munsee Reservation in Wisconsin.
MORAVIAN SOUNDSCAPES
IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1794, MY ANCESTOR, the German missionary Johann Jacob Eyerly Jr., walked across Pennsylvania via the Allegheny, Raystown, and Venango Trails.1 His journey took him from the Delaware and Mohican mission town of Bethlehem, founded by the Moravian Church along the eastern border of European settlements between the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, to Fort Pitt in the west. From there, he journeyed northward to survey Native lands granted to the Moravian Church by the United States government in the early 1790s along the shores of Lake Erie at Presqueisle. As he walked through the forest to Presqueisle and back, he kept a diary.2 He wrote about the massive trunks of chestnut trees, six or seven feet in diameter and of “an amazing height,” towering over the forest floor. Lower in the canopy he observed shellbark, hickory, black and white oak, beech, maple, poplar, sugar maple, and ash, spreading their tangled boughs in a dense cathedral-like ceiling that blocked the undergrowth. In the deep thickets near French Creek—in the Shawnee territory surrounding Fort Le Boeuf—he was struck by the richness of the soil, and the variety of trees and plants: “[this] is very good rich land, with many clearings where, from all appearances, the Indians used to dwell. Where these bottoms are not cleared, they are densely overgrown with White walnut, wild cherries, and the like. I have seen hawthorns here that were from 12 to 15 inches in diameter. There are all sorts of trees on the uplands.”3 He traveled through “woods and glades, wading through streams and through grass half as high as a man.”4 The path, he wrote, was difficult to locate, especially after a rainstorm. Often, he oriented himself by the sun or by sound: listening for the distant roar of the Susquehanna or the Juniata River, the lapping of waves on the shores of Lake Erie, or the silent spaces that signaled the densest parts of the forest. Along the way, he paused to study some of the unknown plants that grew along the trailside, noting the “sassaparill, ginseng, and nettles [that] grow here in abundance, large and juicy.”5 Most of all, he chronicled the sheer human endurance required for the journey—it was so wet that his clothing began to rot off of his back—and his joy at hearing again the sounds of his home community. As he made his return journey, he listened intently for the soundscapes of Bethlehem, heard but not seen through the forest.
It was this chronicle of how my ancestor experienced the landscapes and soundscapes of early Pennsylvania that first inspired me to write this book. I was fascinated by his detailed descriptions of plants and trees, and by the fact that he listened so carefully to the acoustic ecology of the forest that surrounded him. He wrote of Pennsylvania’s natural environment with such joy that I could not help but envision a man who walked through the forest with his eyes open and ears unstopped. Like my ancestor, I grew up in Pennsylvania, or Penn’s Woods. The farm where I spent my childhood was located in a sparsely inhabited part of the state known as “the Pennsylvania Wilds”—a two-million acre tract of forest that is home to numerous stands of Longfellow pines, the tallest trees in the eastern United States, and some of the only remaining areas of virgin forest in the mid-Atlantic. As a marketing website for the region proudly states, this is a place with night skies so dark that “the Milky Way casts a shadow,” and where travelers and residents alike can be rejuvenated by “crisp, mountain air,” “nature,” and “thousands of miles of forest trails.”6
The bookshelves of our house sported an array of Audubon field guides to Pennsylvania’s plants, trees, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. I spent many summer afternoons in the fields and forests near my house, trying to puzzle out the names of particular ferns or hardwoods, or looking vainly under logs for elusive salamanders with red, white, and brown spots. I clearly remember the day when I first heard the song of a male wood thrush in the marshes near the Moshannon Creek and Moravian Run.7 As it had Henry David Thoreau, the thrush’s song struck me as one of the most musical sounds I had ever heard: “Whenever a man hears it [the wood thrush] he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him. . . . The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest.”8 Listening to the vibrant songs of the wood thrush and the other birds that populated the nearby meadows and woods, I learned to orient myself by sound to the environment around my home. But, in the sparsely populated spaces of the Pennsylvania Wilds, it was also possible to hear and to respond to quieter sounds: wind, water, insects, and the rustling of trees and grasses mixed with the faraway sounds of vehicles and homes. These sounds oriented me to the structures of forest and farmland, imparting a sense of meaning, home, and place within what might otherwise have been a formidable tract of wild land. It was possible to get lost in these wild spaces, so my mother installed an iron bell on the corner of our house. Its ringing signaled dinnertime to me and to the horses and sheep who roamed on the pastures to the east of our house, out of sight of barns and buildings. Within the sound of the bell was home. Like my ancestor, I listened intently for those sounds of human place and geography heard but not seen
