Shoofly pie: The Two Jakes

The First Jake

Our son Jacob was named for two Jacobs from my history. The first Jacob was my fourth great-grandfather, Jacob Hertzler. This Jacob was born in Langnau im Emmental in Canton Berne, Switzerland around 1703. I don't know what his situation was in Langnau im Emmental aside from the fact that he was involved with the Amish. Just to be clear, the Amish were followers of Jacob Amman, who had split from other Swiss Anabaptist Brethren over issues of church discipline.

Because of the ongoing persecutions of the Anabaptists by the Swiss, Jacob Hertzler and his family left the Emme Valley and made their way first to the Palatinate in southwestern Germany, where there were others who shared their views on how to do church. Jacob may have been ordained a bishop in the Amish church while in the Palatinate. From thence, the family went on to Rotterdam, where they caught a ship, the Saint Andrew, for the New World.

The Hertzlers arrived in Philadelphia on September 9, 1749, as part of a veritable blitz of mostly German speaking immigrants that landed in Philadelphia in 1749—14 ships in September alone. The Saint Andrew, which brought the Hertzlers, carried 400 souls.

Jacob and his family (wife Catherine and their three children Jacob, Fannie, and Christian; and Jacob's son John by his first wife who had died before the family left Switzerland for the Palatinate) made their way to the Northkill Amish settlement in northwestern Berks County, near the present day towns of Shartlesville and Hamburg, PA, approximately 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

The original Hertzler land grant of one hundred acres was dated January 9, 1750 and was made by William Penn through his son Thomas Penn and was signed in Philadelphia to Jacob Hertzler by James Hamilton, who owned the land where the city of Lancaster, PA, would be built.

Jacob Hertzler is sometimes identified as the first Amish Mennonite bishop in the New World, but the records are too scarce to confirm the specific claim. What can reasonably be said of him was that he was the first widely-known Amish bishop in the New World.

In The Hertzler-Hartzler Family History, Silas Hertzler writes of Jacob:

"Tradition suggests that Jacob Hertzler was a man of almost limitless energy. He labored many hours regularly as a hard working farmer. Then, he walked and rode horseback many miles and many more hours weekly to reach his preaching appointments.

In his missionary and pastoral duties, he had charge of the Amish Mennonite settlement in Chester Valley near Malvern, Pennsylvania. One word of mouth account says he walked the sixty miles from Hamburg to Malvern, in two days, when he was eighty years of age. [C.Z.] Mast lists Hertzler as the man who organized the Conestoga Amish Mennonite Church after this settlement was begun in 1760. He was bishop of this group from 1760-1786 as well as of his home congregation..." [p. 11] 

The Conestoga Amish Mennonite Church is where my mother was baptised and my parents were married. My mother is buried in the Conestoga Amish Mennonite Cemetery behind the church.

The old patriarch Jacob Hertzler died in 1786 at his home near Hamburg. He's buried on the family farm, which is private property and not currently accessible to the public.

The Second Jake

The second Jacob was our Amish neighbor in Millwood when I was growing up, Jacob L. Fisher. We had Amish neighbors on all sides but Jake and his wife Annie Blank Fisher were special to all of us, whether Amish or not. Unlike most Amish couples, they were childless, but it seemed they nevertheless had a hand in parenting all of us neighbor kids. They had a small farm across the road and up the hill from our house. They had only one milk cow, which produced far more milk than the two of them could use, so we got our milk from them. I used to hang a milk pail over the handlebars of my tricycle and pedal up the hill to their house. Annie would fill the pail and I'd fly back down the hill again. And after our family moved away from Millwood to the mountains of northern PA, I'd sometimes stay with Jake and Annie when I came back to visit.

The second Jake built the toy barn pictured below for my older brother and me to play with. I don't quite know how I came to have it rather than my brother, but there it is. Anyway, the toy animals posed with it are some of the ones we played with. As you may be able to tell, the roof is hinged so that the front roof is a flap: underneath is a storage area for various toys and whatever else would fit.

The second Jake died in 1979. I was living in the DC area at the time but had lost touch with my Millwood connections and so didn't find out about his death until quite a while afterward. By the time our Jake was born in 1992, though, I was really beginning to grasp how deeply I was rooted in Amishness and in the specific Millwood landscape and the Amish who were our neighbors there.


Source:

Hertzler, Silas. The Hertzler-Hartzler Family History (Goshen, IN: 1952).

Next post: Excursus: Maryland's Eastern Shore: The Two Johns