The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-10-06
GERMAN AMERICANS CELEBRATE THE FOUND
 ING OF FIRST COLONY

Gerrnan-Americans will celebrate
 today the 232nd anniversary of the
 founding of the first colony Of leu
 tons in thelNew World. It was On Oct. 6, 1888, that the pioneer German inn
 migrants arrived at Philadelphia and laid the foundationsfor the future
 great exodus of Teutons who sought $ in the flospitable land beyond the
 seas a refuge from the prosecutions
 to which they had been subjected to in the Fatherland.
 It was William Penn, native of Lon don and a son of an English admiral,
 who inspired the first German migra- ton His sympathies aroused by the terrible social conditions prevailing in seventeenth century Gerrnany, he ytsi- ted that country and invited the vic- tins Of religious bigotry to settle in l Pennsylvania-s Penn enlisted the sup port Of Francis Daniel Pastorius,l a lawyer and a man Of education, who had travelled extensively in England. I Ireland,a France,l and Italy. sPastoruis gathered together a colony of fellow. reIgionists, adherents of sect skin to the Quakers in England, and sailed
 for Philadelphia. The coIonists mum
 bered thirty-three nearly all relatives,
 and mostly weavers from the town of Crefe1d. on the lower Rhine Pastorfus described by Penm as t.sober, upright, wise and pious'--unfted with the
 Friends, became the head and law
 gzver of the German settlement, plant
 ed north of Philade1phia. The town
 ship was divided into four hamlets, Gernantown Krisheim, Crefe1d, and Somme erhausen.
 l Under the wise direction of Pastor jus, the German settlement thrfved. and prospered. New settlers came all most every year from Crefeld and vi cinity, and others. from the upper el,e Germany. Most of those settled in Pennsylvania. but the first half of the eighteenth century the German inn migrants begin to occupy other col-
 onies. In 1894 3. settlement of Bav-
 arians was established in Georgia and the saxons planted a colony of NTennonites in the same State.
 Historians differ widely as to the part the Germans played, in the Revof Iutfon. It is certainly true that P&nn- : syIvania, the German stronS nSho1d, did not furnish as many troops to Wash Eington as several smaller and less po-
 pulous Colonies where the population 1 was almost whole of English decent.
 During the years following the Rev oIution there was mparatively lit-. tie emigration from Germany to the l United States, and during the period of 1921 to 1850 the total of German l immigrants numbered, 593s84Is The tide or Gernan 81lnIa1STdLlOn9@ Y WaXea strong after the revolution of 1848, when tens of thousands of exiIed
 from the FatherIand sought refuge un der the stars and stripes. Many of
 these pushed on to the west and gave to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and other cities their teutonic prepon- Ierance. During the decade ending in 1860 nearly a million Germans arriv ed in the United States, There was a slight falling off in the two following decades, but from 1881 to I 890 the. German tide reached it's high mark, nearly a million and 8 half. In the following decade it was only little
 more than a third that number. The 1910 census showed that there were 2,501,181 persons of German birth in the United States, while the Ger
 man born and their offspring number ed 8, 817,271. It is probably that the
 natives of Germany and their children in the United States now number TO, 900, 900 or about one-tenth of the to- tai population of the country.