Loudy, Here is information from Gary Schreckengosts' Schreckengost Family Folder"
"On September 19, 1764, after two months at sea, the Polly docked in Philadelphia. What happened next is unclear (as with many of the details of this story). Jost's grandchildren claim that Jost indentured George, who was 7, to a Philadelphia artisan or merchant, possibly a blacksmith/gunsmith, for "nine years" (1764-73) to pay for the passage and other necessaries. And, as we shall see later, the Schreckengasts became, whether by necessity or choice, blacksmiths/gunsmiths during the 1770s. It is also possible that Jost himself was an itinerant blacksmith/gunsmith, although there is no record of this in Berleburg. Assuming that George was indentured (i.e., rented) to a Philadelphia artisan or merchant, Jost, Elisabeth, Henry, and baby Rothger (soon-to-be called Conrad) made their way up to their next destination: Spread Eagle Manor in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania-land that had only been recently secured by the British Crown (and the Penn Family) during the last war with the French, Spanish, and their Indian allies.
What we do know is that Johann Jost Schreckengast was the first and only tenant of the Penns' "Spread Eagle Manor" in the soon to be formed Northumberland County (separated from Berks County on March 21, 1772). As such, Jost became another Hausherr of sorts, as the Penns did not want to sell the ground outright as it was too valuable. Several manors dotted the province, the Penn's securing rents from them all, if only infrequently. The Spread Eagle Manor is on the north side of the Mahantango Mountain and in a gap-the Mahantango Gap-where the Mahantango Creek cuts through the mountain. It is called "Spread Eagle Manor" because it's at the strategic "Fork of the Mahantango" where "Station 141 of the King's Highway [i.e., Weiser's Tulpehocken Path]" was located. Many of the local Germans called it the manor the "Dopple Adler" or the "Double Eagle." The word "Mahantango" is a Lenape Indian word for "place of the deer."
The Mahantango Valley is, needless to say, extremely picturesque and well-watered. The valley itself is actually a giant bowl where the Mahantango Mountain in the south converges with Line Mountain in the north to form a "V" with the Susquehanna River forming its base about 10 miles to the west. Many of the local inhabitants call it a "Kessel" or "kettle." Today, Kingerstown is located just southeast of where Jost's first homestead was located and Troutman's Butcher Shop is located on Lot 3.
As was already stated, this was Pennsylvania's northern frontier in 1764-70. The British provincial outpost of Fort Augusta was located but 50 miles north of Jost's settlement where the east and west branches of the Susquehanna converge at present-day Sunbury. All around Jost were free holders, or people who outright purchased land from the Penns, and they were almost exclusively German-speaking immigrants, many from the Rhineland near Heidelberg. In fact, there were so many of these "Palatine Boors" in the province by the 1750s and 60s, about 30% of the general population, that Ben Franklin, a leading Pennsylvanian and proud English subject, openly questioned their loyalty and utility.
To get to Spread Eagle Manor, Jost was probably met by one of Penn's agents in the spring of 1765 or 1766 who offered him the rental property. Jost obviously accepted, more than likely took a boat up the Schuylkill River up to Reading, which also had a large number of Germans in this very English-sounding town (named after Lord John Penn's home town in England), and then took the Tulpehocken Path which connected Pennsylvania with the Mohawks and Onondagas of New York and northern Pennsylvania. This path, used by Iroquois Indian agent Conrad Weiser, went right through the strategic Mahantango Gap and that's where Jost dropped anchor-right along the road.
Another theme that bound the backcountry people together was the need for local defense. Granted, the British had defeated the French, Spanish, and their Indian allies in the last war, and had basically subdued Pontiac's uprising in 1763-64, but the British government still only placed the border of British settlement just north Fort Augusta. From this line to the Mississippi, a giant Indian reservation to keep the peace and to keep the lucrative Indian trade active was created. So by this time, most, but by no means all, of the farmsteads had a firearm. Those who did not own a firearm did so not because they were against them, but because they were so expensive. Cheap Indian trade muskets could be had up at Fort Augusta, to be true, and one of them was probably Jost's first firearm. Very expensive and well-made long rifles, crafted from gunsmiths in northern Lancaster (present Lebanon) or northern Berks (present Schuylkill) Counties could also be procured, although it is unlikely that Jost had the resource to acquire such a weapon. In Thomas Metzgar and James Whisker's work (1998), Gunsmiths of Western Pennsylvania, they note that "Yock was a gunsmith by trade, although nothing is known of his work." The authors seems to have gotten their information from the careful genealogist Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer, a person who was extremely helpful in helping the author of this work find primary documents. What we do know is that Jost's sons, Conrad, Henry, and George, especially, were itinerant gunsmiths/blacksmiths in Armstrong County not only because of family oral tradition, but because county tax records (infra) list "many tools of the gunsmith trade." It is most probable that George was in fact indentured to a blacksmith/gunsmith and that he taught Jost and his brothers some of the skills necessary to be a "blacksmith/gunsmith" by necessity rather than design while on the manor. They had to learn how to fix the cheap trade guns in order to survive and may have begun to assemble their own guns-which were probably ugly as sin but worked. Their sons, grandsons, and great grandsons, steeped in this tradition, apparently took it to the next level, William and Lincoln Schreckengosts, ancestors of Conrad, being the most well known. And although there is no record that Jost was a gunsmith/blacksmith in Wittgenstein-Berleburg, it is probable that he had at least some rudimentary knowledge of the black arts. "
This is a nice accounting of an early Susquehanna gunsmith family.
