Interesting. Thanks for the clarification.
All that means is I want human interest readable by laymen…incorporating faces and names to otherwise dry archives…it doesn’t mean I’m willing to take flights of fancy with facts. But “who begat who” tells us that the Rupps arrived with relative wealth, the Newhards with less, and the Molls with probably none at all, which is extremely important to deduce their behavior in the absence of formal records. And like my other articles on how their more recent tradesmen forbearers made their living primarily with hand tools (shipwrights and boatbuilders), publishing this in your venue provides me the advantage of excellent, expert commentary so I can tweak these pieces to improve both accuracy and clarity.
…I do take issue with Kastens' note concerning the earlier 1760s
Me too….but Kasten’s 1988 work didn’t have the advantage of incorporating Fogelman’s 1996 work on the paths to land ownership under the Penns, and the details of Quaker-Penn-Settler political conflicts:
That John Moll I had as much or more gun work as he could handle from 1776 to 1781 remains a logical deduction.
1) He had one of the few full-time gunmaking shops dating from 1764, and the fact that it still existed in 1776 meant that it was making ends meet or better. Moll probably had two or more apprentices and workmen, one of whom as you have deduced from surviving artifacts may have been 20-year-old Herman Rupp. Real military threats and Indian terror dated from 1755, and prewar militia provided their own firelocks as the Quaker hierarchy safe in Philadelphia were reluctant to encourage or fund frontier militias.
2) In a previous life I had some experience with prepositioned armory stocks and can quote manpower space requirements for modern weapons. If I were dealing with farmer-owned flintlocks of mixed vintage, make and condition…and later lowest-bidder acquisitions of mixed make and quality instead of interchangeable-part M16-types, I’d probably at least triple those requirements. Moreover, “800 muskets on hand” and “12,000 stands of arms” aren’t unimpressive quantities when Allentown had a mere 50 buildings and 300 inhabitants (two-thirds of them children), even to a guy who used to build brigade-sized equipment sets….regardless of how many workers were imported from Philadelphia or joiners recruited locally.
3) The Molls were poor then, and needed the work. While John’s father William died possessing more than he owed in 1780, that fact doesn’t mean much. He and his son owned no land except the one lot with their shop in Allentown, and the adjacent lot with barn they leased. They owned a cow to feed John’s three young sons born between 1773 and 1779, but didn’t even own a horse for transportation. And with only the cow and his wife’s kitchen garden, John needed (then-scarce) cash for even the basics of family support.
4) William and John’s pre-1764 arrival in Allentown coincides nicely with the Penn’s campaign to evict squatters from vacant lands. Thomas Penn had closed his mortgage office in 1755, demanding cash yet refusing paper money, which drove many second-generation Pennsylvanians whose families had originally homesteaded closer in to Philadelphia to squat on land further out on the frontier. By the late 1750’s Penn increased evictions but came to realize his high land prices and strict policies were the cause of the decline in his revenues. In 1765 he reversed those policies, but by then William and John Moll had already committed themselves to a shop in Allentown. I strongly suspect why so little is recorded on gunmaker (Who else but a gunmaker would leave a rifling machine marked “WM 1747” to his descendents?) William Moll was by Moll’s own design. He was probably a squatter.
Last, I also support your assessments of Allentown joiner Jacob Neuhardt also making guns and the unlikelihood of any formal relationships between the Molls or Newhards and the Moravians. I would only add the cash equation to your rationale. The Moravian “pay schools” open to non-Moravians weren’t formally established until 1783, and if they did make earlier exceptions they would want cash for them, something neither the Newhards or the Molls had in the late 1750’s.
