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Thom Faircloth will give a presentation on Thursday on the national significance of the two Germanna Colonies. |
HISTORIAN THOM FAIR-
His presentation will be made at the Locust Grove campus of Germanna Community College at 7 p.m. in Room 114. It is free, open to all and refreshments will be served by The Frenchman's Corner.
"American civilization as we know it began not at Jamestown or Williamsburg but at Germanna," Faircloth says. The settling of colonists on small farm plots, be believes, was both farsighted and controversial in 1714 when Gov. Alexander Spotswood brought the first group of 42 German settlers in 13 families to Virginia.
The settlers built Fort Germanna on the bank of the Rapidan River at the most extreme western point in English North America, in what is now Orange County. The fort was an unnecessary protection against the native American Indians, so the settlers used the blockhouse as their church and established the first German Reform church in America.
When the first German settlers ended their four-year contract with Spotswood, they moved to what is now Fauquier County, where they founded German Town, a settlement that is now called Midland.
Spotswood brought a second group of German settlers to Virginia in 1717. This group of nearly 100 colonists in more than 40 families was indentured for seven years. Spotswood gave them 400- to 500-acre farms on the western side of the Rapidan River, where they farmed, grew grapes for wine, made naval stores such as pitch and cotton for caulking ships and grew hemp they made into rope. The purpose of this far-western expansion was to protect the area from the French, whom Spotswood thought were on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This group of Germans moved on to what is now Madison County, where 70 percent of the present-day population traces its heritage back to the German settlers.
Faircloth is a descendant of Nicholas Yeager, who, with his wife and two children, was a member of the second group of German settlers.
"He took the Yeager name from Madison, Va., to the Pacific Ocean," Faircloth said recently.
The Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, more casually known as the Germanna Foundation, was founded in 1956 and has 2,300 members. Faircloth estimates that there are 25 million descendants of the Germanna settlers in the United States.
The foundation originally owned 270 acres of land between the Rapidan River and Flat Run Road (State Route 601), bisected by State Route 3. In 1968 the foundation gave the state 100 acres on which to build Germanna Community College. In 2000 it dedicated its visitors center, located between the college campus and the river.
The foundation will hold its 50th-anniversary reunion July 14-16 to celebrate Germanna history, the families descended from Germanna settlers, their genealogy and the history of the region.
The three-day reunion is open to the public on a pay-per-event basis and will include bus tours and a panel discussion among re-enactors portraying George Washington, Gov. Alexander Spotswood and Thomas Jefferson. Many social events are also planned.
For details, contact Rob Sherwood at Germanna Community College, 540/423-9851 or
Email: rksherwood@gcc.vccs.edu, or Thom Faircloth, 540/423-1636 or
Email: office@germanna.org
ROBIN KNEPPER is the Orange County correspondent for The Free Lance-Star.
