European Background of the Ohio Mennonites and Amish / 39 Migrations to Pennsylvania

It was soon after the Amish schism that both Mennonites and Amish migrated to the New World. In the background of the migration was the Thirty Years' War of 1618-48. The war had depopulated southern Germany and rulers invited Mennonites from Switzerland to occupy parts of the devastated countryside. In the late 1600's a number of Mennonites moved to southern Germany from Switzerland. Here they found, however, only a limited freedom. They could not legally own land; worship was limited to private homes; and children could not he taught a trade in the guilds. After some years in the Palatinate of southern Germany, many welcomed the prospect of coming to the New World, to Penn's colony in particular.'' The first Mennonites to conic to Penn's colony were, however, a small number of Dutch Mennonites from the lower Rhineland and their migration \%as in 1683 to Germantown, Pennsylvania.

From 1709 to the end of the eighteenth century thousands of Germans came to Pennsylvania and among them were hundreds of Mennonites and Amish who settled in southeastern Pennsylvania along the Skippack and Pequea streams. The volume of migration reached its high point between 1749 and 1754 when more than 30,000 Germans came to the port in Philadelphia.-" As early as 1727 the Provincial Assembly of PennsyIvania had passed a law requiring all immigrants to take an oath of allegiance to the British crown and to sign the register of the ship. On the ship lists can be found the names of Mennonites and Amish.''

The uniqueness of this migration has been noted by historians. Whereas most Europeans came to the New World under the aegis of a mother country to form a New Spain, a New France, a New England, a New Sweden, or a New Netherlands, it is noteworthy that there was no New Germany_ . No mother country's assurance vouchsafed the pioneer Germans who came

to create for themselves a new life under a sovereignty upon which they had no claim; among neighbors who regarded them with envy and suspicion: under laws which most of them could not read, and a language which most of them could not comprehend; under social customs which ere unlike their own... . At no time in the world's history do we have an immigration of a people which quite parallels the story of the German migrations to the New World.'"

The Mennonites and Amish settled on farms alongside or close