Life in Mid-Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania

By John T. Humphrey

Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Tax Lists Show Land Usage

Tax assessments for several eastern Pennsylvania counties list the quantity of land owned, and many of those assessments specify or list the number of wooded acres.  Those tax records provide a means of tracking rates of deforestation; that is, historians can follow the progress of early settlers in clearing farms of trees.  John Heil, an early resident in Moore Township, Northampton County is a useful example. In 1768 he was enumerated as the owner of fifteen acres of cleared land and one hundred sixty-five acres of woodland.  In 1776 he was assessed on fifty cleared acres and one hundred thirty wooded acres.  In eight years time, from 1768 to 1776, John Heil cleared trees from thirty-five acres on his one hundred eighty acre farm. [47] On average, he cleared four acres of land each year without the help of any mechanical equipment.

The actual process of clearing trees from the land began on land located near the stream or spring for a number of reasons.  Because the cabin was located near the water source land generally was cleared near the cabin for a vegetable garden.  The farmer also had to consider his livestock—he needed an area on the farm that was suitable for a meadow.  If he already had purchased a cow and perhaps a horse, major investments in Colonial America, then their needs would have been given considerable priority.  Early settlers typically started clearing land at the bottom of a hill as opposed to the top:  A dell tended to be the more productive land.  Also, bottom land could be irrigated to produce hay. [48]

Thus, eighteenth-century Pennsylvania farms emerged gradually from the wilderness in a set pattern.  Land was cleared first near the house located along the stream or near a spring.  Work began here and progressed slowly up the hill towards the top.  The last land to be cleared would have been wooded area at the tops of hills.

Details on life and its associated difficulties as experienced by early German immigrants can be found in Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Account of his Journey to Pennsylvania.  In 1752 or 1753 Mittelberger interviewed Germans who had immigrated to Pennsylvania in the earlier decades.  They reported that life was very hard; they lived in constant fear of the Indians and lacked tools, equipment, horses, and cattle. Meat was available, but salt and gunpowder were in short supply.  Reports noted large fires, a by-product of deforestation, continually burned around their cabins. [49]

Tract Sizes Show Life in Isolation

One of the most difficult adjustments many immigrants made was learning to deal with isolation. Most came from small farming villages. In the case of the Germans whose origins were in the Palatinate; they did not live out on the land.  In those villages they had contact with friends, relatives, and neighbors on a daily basis.  Social contact was not limited to within the village, but included others nearby ones.  Aaron Fogelman in Hopeful Journeys noted in the Northern Kraichgau, “…settlements were extremely close to one another…they were so close that one could normally stand on the periphery of one village and see the next village just down the road or across some open fields…the distance between the adjacent communities of Schwaigern and Massenbach is only about two miles.” [50] The situation in Germany stood in marked contrast to life in some sections of rural Pennsylvania, where only a few tiny villages existed.  Most early settlers were lucky if they had a single neighbor living two miles away—let alone a whole village.

Tract size provides a method of measuring relative isolation in rural Pennsylvania. If an early settler purchased a tract of land containing 500 acres, the distance from the center of that tract to the edge of the property to the edge was about a mile and one half. [51] If someone lived on an adjacent tract of land, then the distance between neighbors could be approximately three miles. If the tract size was larger, then the distance between neighbors was greater.

One Moravian minister, Augustus Spangenberg, referred to this isolation in a letter he wrote in 1753.  He noted that if a husband had to leave his wife for some reason, and the woman was home alone and became ill, she had a real problem.  How and where could she get help?  The wife of the nearest neighbor may be one to three miles away, but she had her own responsibilities.  She had her children, her cattle, and her household to tend.  At the most, all that neighbor could offer was perhaps a few hours, or at the most, a full day. [52]

Given this set of circumstances and the isolation these families experienced, the reactions Moravian ministers received when they visited people living in the wilderness should not be too surprising.  In 1754, a Moravian missionary traveling in Northampton County, reported Peter Hoffman’s wife was incredulous upon hearing that the missionary would soon pay a visit.  He went on to write, “The joy this occasion brought can hardly be described.  We found them all in childlike, blessed disposition, just about as one would find children on Christmas Eve.” [53]

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