Shenandoah Germans
Among them were German Palatines who had fled the Rhineland-Palatinate region of southwestern Germany due to religious and political persecution during repeated invasions by French troops.
From the colonial period to the early 1900s, people of Germanic heritage formed the social and economic backbone of the Shenandoah Valley.
They popularized Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine and adopted shape note singing from Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Great Awakening.
[2] Because the majority of white Southerners were often of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry, these German Americans gave the area some ethnic diversity, "a characteristic more Pennsylvanian then Virginian".
Miller was a Mennonite born in Schriesheim, Germany, who immigrated to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1724 and reached the Shenandoah Valley three years later.
[1] However, all white residents of the Shenandoah Valley were still economically connected to the institution in the state's slave society.
Enslaved labor at Belle Grove Plantation was used for farming, as well as for a blacksmith shop, gristmill, sawmill, distillery, lime kiln, and quarry.
[8] According to historian Nancy Sorrells, the "lower number of slaves in the Shenandoah Valley before the Civil War has fostered the idea that slavery there was different or more benevolent", a claim she regards as false.
Sorrells presented a program called "Slavery and its Aftermath in the Upper Valley" (2015) at the Augusta County Historical Society.
Jost Hite, a German leader, had been granted 100,000 acres by Virginia officials working to develop the region.
[1] The Pennsylvania German settlers of Shenandoah brought with them many staples of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, such as sauerkraut, apple butter, cabbage served with hot sauce, souse, ponhoss (scrapple), buckwheat pancakes, knödel, rivvels and ham bone pot pie.
[2][11] In 1809, Joseph Funk (a Mennonite of Bernese Swiss descent) and other descendants of the German Anabaptists, settled in what is now known as Singers Glen.
The Beachy Amish Mennonite community here attracted press attention due to a high-profile 2012 kidnapping case.
The woman, Lisa A. Miller (no relation to the minister), had renounced her lesbianism and had been blocking her ex-partner of many years from any contact with their daughter.
Kenneth Miller was found guilty and sentenced to 27 months in prison for abetting an international parental kidnapping.
During the Seven Years' War, these settlements were nearly destroyed by Native Americans allied with combatants and seeking to expel settlers from the valley.
Visiting Pennsylvania Dutch ministers would occasionally give German-language sermons to older Mennonite congregation members.
The Brethren first settled in southeastern Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, before moving to both Western Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley.
In accordance with their belief in simplicity, a cappella hymns were sung with no musical accompaniment and churches were built without stained glass windows, crosses, or steeples.
[19] Beginning in the 1950s, the Bridgewater Church of the Brethren took a leading role in the modern settlement of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley.
These Jews from Germany and Bohemia maintained a strong German identity and were highly active in German-American fraternal organizations, particularly in Harrisonburg.
