Schoenbrunn Village and the Gnadenhutten Massacre Site

At a glance

Overview

Schoenbrunn ('beautiful spring') was a Moravian mission town founded on May 3, 1772, by the missionary David Zeisberger and Christian Delaware (Lenape) families on land granted by the Delaware chief Netawatwes, about two miles southeast of present New Philadelphia. Within a year it had some sixty log houses, a chapel and a school, and its congregation adopted written rules that Ohio historians have called the state's first code of laws; a sister town, Gnadenhutten ('tents of grace'), was begun downriver by Mohican and Munsee converts that October. Caught between British-allied nations and the Americans during the Revolution, the converts gave up Schoenbrunn in 1777, and in September 1781 all the Tuscarawas mission towns were forcibly moved to the Sandusky. On March 8, 1782, Pennsylvania militia under David Williamson killed about ninety-six of the Christian Indians who had come back to Gnadenhutten to gather their corn, as they prayed and sang. Schoenbrunn was rebuilt from 1928 as a state memorial run by the Ohio History Connection, and the Gnadenhutten site holds the victims' burial mound, an 1872 monument and rebuilt mission buildings.

The name

Schoenbrunn (Schonbrunn) is German for 'beautiful spring,' after the large spring Zeisberger found on March 10, 1772, at the foot of a bluff east of the Tuscarawas. Gnadenhutten means 'tents' or 'huts of grace' and was taken from an earlier Moravian mission on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania. (source)

Native American history

These are Native sites in the fullest sense: both towns were built and lived in by Christian Lenape (Delaware), Munsee and Mohican (Mahican) people, and Gnadenhutten is where about ninety-six of them were killed. The Delawares had moved into the Tuscarawas and Muskingum valleys between about 1740 and 1750, on land obtained from the Wyandots. Their council town of Gekelemukpechunk, just east of present Newcomerstown, had about a hundred houses in 1771, and there chief Netawatwes invited the Moravians and granted the valley from the mouth of Stillwater Creek up to Tuscarawas (Bolivar) for the Christians' use; in 1775 the council widened the grant to more than thirty miles of river, and the capital moved to Goschachgunk (Coshocton). Older people had been here long before: when Zeisberger reached the spring in 1771-72 he found on the plain above it a circular earthwork and three mounds, and wrote that a fortified people had lived there 'more than a century' earlier, though the county history judges the works much older; another earthwork and a burial mound stood across the river from New Philadelphia. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville took Tuscarawas County from the Delawares and their allies. Congress granted three 4,000-acre tracts at Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten and Salem for the Christian Indians in 1787, a grant confirmed in 1796; Zeisberger brought a remnant back to Goshen in 1798, but the Christian Indians gave up the tracts in 1823, and the Delawares' last Ohio reservation, in present Marion County, was ceded on August 3, 1829.

• Schoenbrunn mission town: village, East bank of the Tuscarawas, about two miles southeast of New Philadelphia, 1772-1777
• Gnadenhutten mission town and massacre site: village, Southeastern part of present Gnadenhutten, Clay Township, 1772-1782
• Burial mound of the Gnadenhutten dead: burial, Gnadenhutten Historical Park, by the fence on the east side of the old town street, 1782; remains gathered and buried 1797, reburied in a cellar of the old town 1799
• Earthwork and three mounds above the spring: earthwork, Plain above the Schoenbrunn spring, Pre-contact; seen by Zeisberger 1771-72
• Semicircular earthwork and burial mound opposite New Philadelphia: mound, West bank of the Tuscarawas, less than a mile from the New Philadelphia courthouse, Pre-contact
• Gekelemukpechunk, Delaware council town: village, Just east of present Newcomerstown, c. 1760s-1775
• Netawatwes' land grant to the Christian Indians: treaty, Tuscarawas valley from Stillwater Creek to Bolivar, later extended to below Newcomerstown, 1772-1775
• Treaty of Greenville cession: treaty, All of present Tuscarawas County, 1795

Stories

The invitation

In 1770 a wampum belt reached the Moravian mission on the Beaver River in Pennsylvania from the Delaware council at Gekelemukpechunk: an epidemic had struck, some counselors blamed witchcraft and thought Christianity might end it, and the Pennsylvania converts were invited to come to the Tuscarawas and choose their land. Zeisberger rode out in March 1771 and preached in chief Netawatwes' shingle-roofed house on March 14. An Indian preacher denounced him as soon as he left, but the church authorities agreed to move three missions west. In the spring of 1772 Zeisberger found the spring below present New Philadelphia, Netawatwes granted the valley from Stillwater Creek to Tuscarawas, and on May 3 five families arrived. The county history records the spring as dried up and its mile-long lake a lily-choked marsh by 1884. (source)

Ohio's first code of laws

Soon after the main body of converts arrived in 1773, the rules of the congregation, drawn up by Zeisberger, Heckewelder and John Ettwein and approved by the Native assistants, were read to the whole town and accepted. The 1884 county history calls them 'the first act of Ohio legislation.' Among eighteen articles, members agreed to rest on Sundays, keep one spouse, pay for damage to a neighbor's cattle or goods, run no debts with traders without the assistants' consent, and let no rum into town; liquor brought by traders was to be held until they left. Two more rules were added during the Revolution: no one inclined to go to war could stay, and anyone buying goods known to be plundered had to leave. Ohio History Central, writing in the 2010s, stresses the other side: the missionaries required converts to give up most traditional beliefs and customs, which drove a wedge between Christian and non-Christian Lenape. (source)

Leaving Schoenbrunn

By the winter of 1776-77 a Munsee faction from the Walhonding had drawn some Schoenbrunn converts away, and Zeisberger admitted the missionaries were quarreling among themselves and the town was 'neglected.' When a false report came that Mingoes were coming to kill the missionaries, the resident missionary fled and the dissenters took over the town. Zeisberger returned, held a short service early on April 19, 1777, and had the chapel pulled down so it could not be misused, and the next day the faithful left for Lichtenau. Ohio History Central dates the abandonment to early 1778, with a brief reoccupation in late 1778 or early 1779. (source)

March 8, 1782

Hungry after a winter at Captives' Town on the Sandusky, more than 150 converts were allowed back in February 1782 to harvest the corn left standing in the Tuscarawas fields. Pennsylvania militia, about 160 men under David Williamson, were hunting the raiders who had struck their settlements weeks earlier. They killed Joseph Schebosh on the trail, then, promising the converts protection at Fort Pitt, took their guns and hatchets, brought in the people from Salem, bound them all at Gnadenhutten and voted to kill them; eighteen men voted no. The captives, men in one house and women and children in another, spent the night praying and singing hymns. The next morning they were killed with mallets and scalped, 28 men, 29 women and 39 children by the count Ohio History Central uses, and the town was burned; two boys, one of them scalped, survived. Converts at Schoenbrunn, warned by two men who found Schebosh's body, got away. In 1889 Theodore Roosevelt called it 'a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away.' (source)

Counting the dead: ninety or ninety-six

The number has never settled. The militia went home with 96 scalps, and the Gnadenhutten Monument Society's own constitution spoke of 'ninety-six Christian Indians.' But Bishop Edmund de Schweinitz, Zeisberger's biographer, counted 90 Moravian Indians, 29 men, 27 women and 34 children, and suggested the other six were visitors; the 1884 county history reconciles the figures as 92 killed at the houses plus four killed before. The monument dedicated in 1872 reads 'Here triumphed in death ninety Christian Indians,' and the state's 2003 marker says 'an estimated 90.' Ohio History Central and most modern accounts give 96. (source)

Remembering

A Gnadenhutten monument society collected money slowly, only $70 in its first four years, and by the fall of 1871 had enough to contract for a $2,000 monument. On June 5, 1872, before a crowd estimated at 8,000 to 12,000, four Native men standing at the corners pulled away the drapery from a 37-foot shaft of Indiana marble whose main stone alone weighs fourteen tons. The monument stands in the center of the street of the original town, with the remains entombed close by on the east side, and the county history noted that traces of the old cellar holes could still be seen in the grove. (source)

Timeline

• 1750: Delaware bands have been settling on the Tuscarawas and Muskingum since about 1740, on land obtained from the Wyandots. (source)
• 1762: Nineteen-year-old John Heckewelder goes with Moravian Christian Frederick Post to the Tuscarawas valley in a failed attempt at a mission, cut short by Pontiac's uprising. (source)
• 1771: On March 14 David Zeisberger preaches in chief Netawatwes' house at Gekelemukpechunk, the first Moravian sermon in what is now Ohio. (source)
• 1772: On March 10 Zeisberger finds the large spring about two miles below present New Philadelphia. (source)
• 1772: Zeisberger and five Christian Delaware families, 28 people, reach the spring at noon on May 3 and begin clearing and building Schoenbrunn. (source)
• 1772: The Schoenbrunn chapel, 30 by 40 feet with a cupola and bell, is dedicated on September 19. (source)
• 1772: The Mohican elder Joshua begins building Gnadenhutten on October 9, and Zeisberger holds its first service on October 17. (source)
• 1772: In December Zeisberger's people begin the Schoenbrunn schoolhouse, where Delaware children learn from books he prepared in Delaware and German. (source)
• 1773: John Lewis Roth, recorded as the first white child born in present Ohio, is born to missionaries John and Maria Agnes Roth at Gnadenhutten on July 4. (source)
• 1773: The main body of converts from the Susquehanna missions, 204 people (241 by Heckewelder's count), arrives at Schoenbrunn on August 23; the congregation adopts its written rules. (source)
• 1775: Traveler Nicholas Cresswell describes Schoenbrunn as a town of about sixty log houses on three streets meeting at the meetinghouse. (source)
• 1775: By year's end the Tuscarawas missions count 414 Christian Indians. (source)
• 1776: Lichtenau is founded on April 12 on the Muskingum near the new Delaware capital, Goschachgunk (Coshocton). (source)
• 1777: After a split with Munsee dissenters and war rumors, the converts hold a last service on April 19, raze the Schoenbrunn chapel, and leave for Lichtenau. (source)
• 1778: Delaware war chief White Eyes, the missions' protector, dies on November 10 while guiding General McIntosh's army to Fort Laurens. (source)
• 1779: On April 10 Zeisberger founds New Schoenbrunn, moving converts up the river from Lichtenau; a second state marker dates it to December 1779 and places it about a mile upriver from the old town. (source)
• 1780: John Heckewelder founds Salem on April 6, the last of five missions in the Tuscarawas valley. (source)
• 1781: American Colonel Daniel Brodhead destroys the Delaware capital at Coshocton on April 19 but restrains his militia from attacking the Moravian towns. (source)
• 1781: In September British-allied warriors, mainly Wyandot and Lenape, force the converts of the Moravian towns to Captive Town on the Sandusky; Zeisberger and Heckewelder are tried for treason at Detroit and acquitted. (source)
• 1782: Starving at Captives' Town, more than 150 converts are allowed back in February to harvest corn left in the fields. (source)
• 1782: On March 8 about 160 Pennsylvania militia under David Williamson kill about 96 unarmed Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten and burn the town; two boys escape. (source)
• 1787: The Continental Congress grants three 4,000-acre tracts in the Tuscarawas valley in trust for the Christian Indians, a grant confirmed by Congress in 1796. (source)
• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville line, later part of Tuscarawas County's northern boundary, puts the county on the side ceded by the Delawares and their allies. (source)
• 1798: Zeisberger returns and founds Goshen on October 4; Heckewelder founds the white settlement of Gnadenhutten. (source)
• 1799: John Heckewelder and David Peter rebury the massacre victims' remains, which Heckewelder had gathered and buried in 1797, in one of the cellars of the old town. (source)
• 1808: David Zeisberger dies at Goshen on November 17, aged 87, and is buried there. (source)
• 1872: A 37-foot marble monument to the Gnadenhutten dead is dedicated on June 5 before a crowd estimated at 8,000 to 12,000. (source)
• 1928: The reconstructed Schoenbrunn schoolhouse is dedicated on July 29 and the reconstructed church on October 21. (source)
• 1963: The village council and the Gnadenhutten Historical Society open a museum beside the massacre site. (source)
• 1970: The Gnadenhutten Massacre Site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10. (source)
• 1970s: Excavations locate the two buildings where the victims spent their last night, and the Mission House and Cooper Shop are rebuilt on their original sites. (source)
• 2003: The state places a marker at Gnadenhutten calling the killing 'A Day of Shame.' (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Gnadenhutten massacre
• en.wikipedia.org: Gnadenhutten, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: David Zeisberger
• en.wikipedia.org: New Philadelphia, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: Tuscarawas County, Ohio
• archive.org: oh tuscarawas 1881 warner djvu.txt
• ohiohistory.org: schoenbrunn village
• ohsweb.ohiohistory.org: index.shtml
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Schoenbrunn
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Gnadenhutten Massacre
• remarkableohio.org: 1 79 the new schoenbrunn mission david zeisberger 1721 1808
• remarkableohio.org: 2 79 the salem mission john gottlieb ernestus heckwelder 1743 1823
• remarkableohio.org: 15 79 gnadenhutten the gnadenhutten masacre a day of shame
• remarkableohio.org: 16 79 schoenbrunn schoolhouse 1772 schoenbrunn church 1772
• traveltusc.com: gnaden
• avalon.law.yale.edu: greenvil