CHAPTER 10
COLONIAL LIFE IN PENNSYLVANIA

The children of Wilhelm and Catherina were:
Johannes – born in 1734
Christian - born in 1736
Magdalena — born 1738
?James — born in 1743 -1804 (Iredell Co.
Catherina — born 1750
?Robert — born 1752

The above data is not all verified. Baptismal dates for all but James and Robert are recorded in the Falkner Swamp church records. We are not even certain that James and Robert belong to our family in that the Ancestry and My Heritage trees on line offer no verification. There was another family in Piedmont North Carolina with the name Lepper with sons James and Robert. In the mid 1700's when the Lippard boys would have been in their late teens, a James and Robert Leper/Leaper/Lepeer were buying up several thousand acres of land in Anson County, NC, and York County, SC. I have my doubts that these young men were our missing James and Robert Lippard. My first hesitation is that I am not familiar with the names James and Robert being German names rather than English or Scots Irish. Additionally, I cannot imagine how our young relatives at that time could have afforded such purchases even if on credit. However, James possibly is a Lippard in that a young man named James Lepard did purchase in 1753 and 1754 around 700 acres in Anson County on the south side of the Catawba River into which flowed what today is known as Lippard Creek, near Lincolnton.

Also, much to our dismay, we are unable to find any additional information concerning Magdalena or Catherina, the daughters of Wilhelm and Catherina Lippard. Christian we will discuss a little later.

Wilhelm's only sibling, at least the only one to emigrate with her parents and brother Wilhelm was Anna Martha Liphard. For more information concerning Anna Martha, refer to the upcoming sections on Conrad's Will and the Heinrich Neiman/Neuman family.

We do not know the extent of the hardships the Conrad and Wilhelm Lippard families encountered, nor do we know whether all the family members arrived safely in Pennsylvania. We have no evidence as to whether or not they were able to pay the passage charge of 40 shillings per head or whether they became indentured servants. However, in the Philadelphia City Archives in City Hall, there are stored some records of Indentures. The Lippards are not listed among them. Additionally, the Lippards probably were not indentured in that those who were indentured were held aboard ship until someone "bought" them. All other of the men were marched almost immediately to a government office at the Court House where they, as did Conrad and Wilhelm on the same day as their arrival in Philadelphia, took the required oath of allegiance to England. Marion and Jack Kaminkow edited the Original Lists of Emigrants in Bondage from London to the American Colonies, 1719-1744, and none of our Lippard family are listed.

However, for a long time I could find no documented evidence of what happened to our Lippards during the 19 years between September 1738 when Conrad and Wilhelm, with the other men aboard the Queen Elizabeth, marched to the Philadelphia Court House to sign the customary oath of allegiance, and 19 years later in 1757 in North Carolina when a court case was filed against Wilhelm. (Wilhelm was exonerated). This 19-year period in our family's life was to us a complete blank. However, in The Pennsylvania Census and Voters' List, 1700's and Pennsylvania Early Census Index, I found that in 1738, their year of arrival in Pennsylvania, Conrad, Wilhelm, and Christian Nighthart are all listed separately as living in the Perkiomen Valley, Philadelphia (later Montgomery) County, Philadelphia. Thus, I feel we can be certain that after their September arrival they traveled very quickly to the place they settled.

We assume that the Lippards were economically unable to purchase land in Pennsylvania or were unable to find any that was suitable in that there is no record of land deeds to Conrad or Wilhelm in Pennsylvania. Gary and I (Harriet) traveled to the Pennsylvania Archives in Harrisburg where the old deeds are stored just to be sure. They evidently rented farms. Whether there were already dwelling places on these farms or whether the Lippards had to clear the land and construct their log cabins and out buildings we do not know.

I discussed this problem long ago of learning more about our Lippards in Pennsylvania with my great uncle Hoyt Lippard, who had provided me with some facts about the Lippards' early days in North Carolina. He asked me if I had ever met our cousin Seth Lippard, who is also a descendant of my Civil War era ancestor Henry Lippard. Uncle Hoyt pointed out that Seth was very interested in family history and lived "on the scene" near Philadelphia. To tell the truth, I had never even heard of Seth, but Uncle Hoyt had so many nice things to say about him that I promptly sat down and wrote him a letter. I received a very enthusiastic response from Seth, and he asked me for any hints I might have as to places to search. I suggested looking at court houses and historical societies and gave him a list of both German Reformed and Lutheran churches in existence in the Philadelphia area during colonial times. Then I sat back and waited for a miracle.

We do not know what exactly happened first. They may have lived in the city for a while and worked off their passage. They may have had some employment agent step upon the gangplank and buy their labor for some farmer out in the countryside, in all likelihood another German. We have only two clues: 1) where they are found more than a decade later, and 2) what Conrad ended his life doing to make a living for himself and others.

The fact that the story of our line of Lippards begins at "Falkner Schwamm"—the original spelling on deeds—puts our family in the heart of one of the earliest German settlements. Faulkner Swamp—its Anglification; "schwamm" actually means meadow in that era's German—was home to more than 100 farms and families, in a landscape that probably produced enough traffic and truck to hire skilled folks like the Lippards. Neither Seth nor Harriet ever found a deed for a Lippard farm in the area because, possibly, they were still paying off the redemption, and two, life worked pretty well for a time as "renters" of both their homes and their labor. Since quite often Germans came over as groups—they often called the small migrations "colonies"—then it could be that the Lippards already knew where to go once they arrived.

The clues from Conrad's will also support such a supposition. He was a potash maker in Pennsylvania, as his inventory of worldly goods attests. (We cannot tell if he came to America as one; there was no guild or apprenticeship involved.) He seemed to own the means of a small production shop, with his "3 furnaces" and other tools. Potash was in great demand—Massachusetts even set up a subsidy for its manufacture—for everything from soap to gunpowder to glass to cooking, and Pennsylvania became the early center of production. Market conditions were such, in the 1740s, that Conrad would not have had a problem with selling his production to someone on the wharves. He might have even ventured into the Franklin print shop occasionally; Debbie Franklin sold soap that she herself made in the print shop, so who knows?

Had Conrad lived a bit longer he would likely have done business at a large facility that stored the potassium carbonate in a Dock Street warehouse. It was opened with great fanfare and expectation in 1754, the same year that Conrad's will is probated.

There is a second clue from the family that suggests how well they were doing in the Falkner Swamp area. There were lots of trees there, many of which was being girdled, left to die, then cut down to make way for farm fields. Conrad's son and grandsons might easily have started life in the New World as wood cutters in the various neighborhoods of their communities. Wood cutting was essential to providing both food and fuel for the new settlers, and often debts were worked out by such day labor. (We will see below a clue that William was a woodcutter!) And, Conrad might have had the surplus wood—at least the branches to char and render the ashes needed for the leaching of the alkaline that make potash. They may even have travelled about like other itinerant artisans like cobblers, since potash was in such demand.

Conrad clearly was renting a small plot of land when he died, about 1754, as testified by the listing of twelve acres of turnips in his inventory. These tubers took no work once the seeds were successfully germinated, and they could stay in the ground most of the winter, even in the little Ice Age of the time. Turnips were often fed to hogs, another way to work off debt in the neighborhood, or they made good truck to have in the market cart taken to Philadelphia.

So, although Conrad was not wealthy, he did not do poorly in his new environment. And, we can speculate, given what little we know about the early adulthood of William, that he also prospered in that rich area. First, William will acquire a goodly amount of land to farm once he moves south (as will John), and there had to be some kind of credit system at work here, where there was enough realizable capital to fund such ventures. (Rarely did most families just head south with not much of anything; John Knox, for example, the great grandfather of the United States President James Knox Polk, was noted as a horse trader along the Great Wagon Road. He literally was like a service station attendant to keep people heading down the road. The Adam Sherrill family had the nickname Conestoga, an indication that they could repair and restore the covered wagons that made the road south so "great".)

That William in his middle age may have had some means is one of the clues about a puzzle in Conrad's will: that William "got five shillings and nothing more". That could mean any of several conditions, from the extreme that William was a poor son who did not take care of his elder to the other idea that William's work to end the possible redemption led to enough savings to venture out on his own, in a better location for someone who did not have a good Faulkner Swamp property. That would have meant that Conrad had succeeded in one of the most important components of life in early America: "setting up" one's children to go have their own lives.

So, we have to speculate that given Conrad did as well as he did—coming to America in what was then his old age—that the American dream was at work, at least in the second and third generations of immigrants: The son did better than the father, and the next son did even better, as we shall see.

Before venturing south, we need to place the Lippards a little more precisely within Pennsylvania Dutch culture. This involves understanding the clear link to the Faulkner Swamp community, since William and Catherine had some of their children baptized and confirmed there. John, etc. This was done in the German Reformed congregation connected to the neighborhood. Since we cannot place the Lippards within the "old order" of the Reformed church in Germany—at least not yet—we can only speculate that they chose such a congregation because of their background. Given that John will be a trustee for a church in North Carolina that imitated in style the nearby Goshenhopper Reformed Church, we can be fairly confident of some kind of choice was made and stuck to.

They clearly seem to have respectable members of the congregation. Bear in mind, with all the sectarians running about, and even self-proclaimed men of God saying they can preach or just go hide in caves, this was a decision that was conservative and proper. Being in the Reformed Church meant that the Lippards had chosen to be "Church People", a reference to the old parish identity back in Germany. This proprietary stance often resulted, said one observer of the scene, that "the Sectarians often made the Reformed people the object of their ridicule." Even Faulkner Swamp itself could be vulnerable at times in the period. It was said a few years before the Lippards arrived that "our own free will was best" in shaping the faith journey, an anathema to a real Calvinist "holding to the old confession," as the Faulkner Swamp pastor, Johannes Jacob Boehm, explained to church officials back in Europe.

The respectability factor is evident from the marriage and subsequent settlement of Conrad's daughter Anna Martha to Johan Heinrich Neiman, a cobbler and a member of a large respectable Neiman family in the Faulkner Swamp community.