German Founders: Art Everywhere

18th century teacup excavated from the Shifferstadt, the oldest house in Frederick City, built in 1756. This beautifully designed house was powerfully and ingeniously built and is perhaps the premier example in America of early German-Colonial architecture. 1

German was the dominant language of Frederick and environs for many years, due to the influx of German settlers, many of them devout Lutherans, who had fled the upheavals, religious wars, intolerance and famine of the 17th century in the Palatine region along the Rhine in the beautiful and fertile southwest of what is now Germany. The landscape of Frederick strongly resembled thee homeland of the early settlers. German craftsmen, artisans, masons, weavers, and farmers poured into America. So numerous were the Germans and so influential in the building of this country that Jefferson remarked that Germany was “the second fatherland” of America, the first being England.

Hand written music book decorated by German settler John Thomas Schley, the first European to build a home in Fredericktown in 1745. This decorative style is known as "fraktur;" this document is nearly priceless today. 2

Many of Frederick’s most famous early citizens were German in heritage, including founder John Thomas Schley, Johann Friedrich Amelung (later Anglicized to John Frederick Amelung) Barbara Fritchie, Jacob Englebrecht, and others. German artistry is sometimes called "folk art" today, but in an age of mass culture, this is a misunderstanding imposed on the rich cultural expression of a people who considered art an integral part of life.

“(German immigrants) used art; it was not some esoteric thing apart from them. . . you worked in a colorful barn, lived in a stone house built for the ages with a motto carved under the eaves, ate pie out of an etched pie dish, and other foods cooked in a stove which had artistic original design, kept your linens in a museum-piece chest, dipped sugar out of a museum-piece sugar bowl, skimmed milk from lovely red-ware made on the potter's wheel, walked on rainbow-like rag rugs, slept under artistic bedspreads of original design, drank wine from museum-piece . . . .glass or spatter-ware, had a birth and marriage certificate of hand-illumined fractur [hand decorated manuscripts], sang out of hymn books illumined with fractur and worshipped with bibles similarly illumined. You rode in wagons gaily colored, watched the wind sway originally designed weather-vanes atop the barn, and saw even the barnyard made resplendent by peacocks.
- Excerpted from Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery, J.George Frederick, 1936:

“Though many Germans were farmers, their numbers also included many skilled “mechanics” or craftsmen, including carpenters, potters, clock makers, tinsmiths, cabinet makers, iron workers, weavers, designers, lithographers, cart and wagon makers, wheelwrights, shoemakers, and more. They brought with them a strong heritage of and a love for art, literature and music. Americans have learned that wherever the Germans settle, prosperity and culture are pretty sure to follow. “what the Germans do, they do well,” has become a common saying among their neighbors.”
- Catholic Encyclopedia

Another wave of Germans – some 30,000, a huge number given the population of America at that time – came to this country under coercion as mercenaries, having been kidnapped by the petty princes of Germany and sold to England. To this day there is a curse sometimes heard in this highly modernized region of Germany: "Abnach kassel!" Translated, the curse means "To Kassel with you!", This expression harkens to a time when men were kidnapped in the fields, taken to the town of Kassel and sold to England to become forced mercenaries in the American Revolution.

Decorative "Treasure Stove" installed at the Schifferstadt in Frederick and still in situ. The inscription reads, "Where your treasure is, there is also your heart." 3

Many ended up in Frederick as prisoners of war, since as a crossroads of its day, Frederick was one of the centers where these Hessians were held, much as the city would later become one of the nation's main centers for the treatment of Civil War wounded. Many of these Hessians stayed on after the war to work for German farmers, marry their German daughters, and farm in a landscape that resembled their homeland, among a people who still spoke German and upheld the familiar traditions. Jacob Engelbrecht descended from one such former prisoner of war.

1.Teacup photo courtesy Maryland Historical Trust's Archaeological Conservation Laboratory at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum
2.Courtesy the Historical Society of Frederick County, Inc.

3. Images of Schifferstadt artifacts used with the kind permission of the Schifferstadt Architectural Museum.