The Second Colony’s first members, about 25 families, were imported by Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia as indentured servants in 1717 (under the modern calendar early in 1718). This was three years after Spotswood brought in a separate group of Germans, known as the 1714 First Colony, and this is the reason for the name “Second Colony.”
Other than their employer, Spotswood, the two groups seem to have had little in common. The First Colony families came voluntarily from the area of Siegen, Germany, in 1714. They were then housed in a five-sided palisade, Ft. Germanna, on the Rapidan River in what is now Orange County, Virginia. They were of the German Reform religion, they had their own pastor, and in 1719 they left Fort Germanna to settle at a site in what is now Fauquier County, Virginia, called Germantown. See our affiliated website, www.germannafirstcolony.org.
The Second Colony, in contrast, came from the Palatinate and the Kraichgau area of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Its members did not come voluntarily to Virginia. These families expected to go to Pennsylvania with other Germans, but their ship’s captain, Andrew Tarbett, had been incarcerated in London for debt, and their money was used up while they waited. Tarbett must have known that Governor Spotswood was willing to pay the passage for another group of Germans, for when he got out of debtor’s prison, he transported these Germans on his ship, the Scott, to Virginia, pretending to be blown off course in a storm. There, lost and penniless, they became indentured servants to Spotswood.
The Second Colony Germans were Lutherans, without a pastor. Nor did Spotswood settle this group at Fort Germanna but, according to contemporary accounts, he settled them about two miles west on the north bank of the Rapidan River between Potato Run and Fleishman’s Run.
Beginning in 1726, the Second Colony families began to take up free land to the west, in the Robinson River Valley of today’s Madison County, Virginia. Although Governor Spotswood sued several of the immigrants for sums he thought they owed him under their indenturehood, in some cases he did not prevail and in those where he did, he recovered less than he had sought. The Second Colony was joined by many other German families, many of them relatives, meaning that due to intermarriage, the later families are also considered members of the Second Colony. Because of their relatively isolated position among English neighbors, Second Colony children more often than not married other descendants, and most of today’s descendants have more than one Second Colony family in their bloodlines.
In 1740, the Second Colony Germans erected their own church in the Robinson River Valley. It is still there today, known as the Hebron Lutheran Church, the oldest continually operating Lutheran church in the United States. There they played an important role in the founding of the new nation and the adoption of the Bill of Rights amended to the Constitution of the United States.
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When they first arrived in Virginia in early 1717, the Second Colony lived for 7 or 8 years on the north bank of the Rapidan. In 1726, they moved west along the Rapidan and up the Robinson River, where they remained for generations.Click on map to enlarge.