... we shouldn't underestimate the degree to which families misunderstand and misrepresent their own histories.
No doubt about it.
In September 1737 an immigrant ship full of Palatine Germans unloads in Philadelphia and through a translator the men all take an oath of allegiance to the King front of four English justices to obtain settlement rights on the frontier.
The court and later land office records note the three Neuhart men aboard as “brothers” from “Zweibruecken”, the old Lehigh County histories repeat what was recorded, and as a few of their children became famous and wealthy as gunmakers, politicians and landowners, every publication since has used those old histories…including the family in 1917 creating the monument above to their forbearer…and including some publications today.
Except the records are incorrect.
The Neuharts were part of a party of at least 17 members from the village of Rumbach, which is around 30 road miles from the city of Zweibruecken, but then part of the old Holy Roman Empire’s Duchy of Zweibruecken. There were four Neuhart men, not three, the senior being Frederick above. And they weren’t brothers, but a half-brother, a nephew whose age was hidden to obtain half fare, and a second cousin.
Just don’t expect me to believe Johannes Moll dropped out of the sky into Allentown in late 1763 as a trained, practicing gunsmith. Somebody trained him. And in the first generation hand-to-mouth subsistence farming economy of the 1730’s through early 1760’s, that person was most likely to have been his father trained in Germany, just like Frederick Neuhart trained his oldest son to be a cordwainer, and Michael trained his to be a weaver. There wasn’t much of a market on the frontier for guns, hence there weren’t many gunsmiths being developed, because there wasn’t the money to buy guns or the parts to make them. Which also makes the idea that youngsters then could have been self-taught implausible.
A rifle then cost more than a hundred acres of frontier land, almost as much as a full-fare passage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia, and almost as much as a draft horse. Early probate and sheriff inventories of household goods mention the snares and bird nets early settlers used for hunting, but few guns. Official correspondence after every Indian incident from 1755 to 1763 includes loud pleas for weapons and ammunition, because few settlers owned them. That situation would improve rapidly between 1763 and 1775-6 as the frontier economy improved and Pennsylvania easily fielded battalions of frontier riflemen for service in Boston and Long Island, but the actual evidence says the starting point for Moll in 1763 and Christian Springs in 1762 was near zero. That’s most likely why “John Moll, Gunsmith” moved from his Berks farm and shop to Allentown. After burying the 13 mutilated and scalped children killed in the Whitehall Township Massacre in October 1763, the provincial government finally approved substantial weapons and money for defense of the frontier, and families who didn’t own firearms were ready to spend what money they had to buy them. There was finally a market for servicing and making weapons, and for the first time that market was well-funded.