In those villages they had contact with friends, relatives, and neighbors on a daily basis. Social contact was not limited to within the village, but included others nearby ones. Aaron Fogelman in Hopeful Journeys noted in the Northern Kraichgau, settlements were extremely close to one another they were so close that one could normally stand on the periphery of one village and see the next village just down the road or across some open fields the distance between the adjacent communities of Schwaigern and Massenbach is only about two miles. The situation in Germany stood in marked contrast to life in some sections of rural Pennsylvania, where only a few tiny villages existed. Most early settlers were lucky if they had a single neighbor living two miles away let alone a whole village.
Tract size provides a method of measuring relative isolation in rural Pennsylvania.
If an early settler purchased a tract of land containing 500 acres, the distance from the center of that tract to the edge of the property to the edge was about a mile and one half. If the tract size was larger, then the distance between neighbors was greater. One Moravian minister, Augustus Spangenberg, referred to this isolation in a letter he wrote in 1753. He noted that if a husband had to leave his wife for some reason, and the woman was home alone and became ill, she had a real problem. The wife of the nearest neighbor may be one to three miles away, but she had her own responsibilities.