In that region of the Rhine country known in those
days as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestants
were being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, then
engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in the
zealous effort to extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In
1708, by proclamation, Good Queen Anne offered protection to the
persecuted Palatines and invited them to her dominions. Twelve
thousand of them went to England, where they were warmly received
by the English. But it was no slight task to settle twelve
thousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable them
to become independent and self-supporting. A better solution of
their problem lay in the Western World: The Germans needed homes
and the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They were
settled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of them
took up lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.
For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants poured
into America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteen
hundred a year, and that colony became the distributing center
for the German race in America. By 1727, Adam Muller and his
little company had established the first white settlement in the
Valley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist Heydt went south from York,
Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan Creek at or near the
site of the present city of Winchester.
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