Heinrich Roesch (Henry Rhoads). He and Jacob Roesch, probably brothers, signed the register of Capt. Hall's English boat at Rotterdam in good German handwriting. The ship was the Restauration which docked at Philadelphia Oct. 9, 1747.¹ When the two brothers landed, an English officer changed their names to Henry and Jacob Rhoads, requiring them to swear allegiance to King George II and to the Province of Penna. Henry and his wife Catherine Rheinhardt Rhoads, were married in 1736 in the German Palatinate.² Henry Rhoads had received some education in the Palatinate, and he soon made a place for himself among the settlers on the frontier of the Province. He was a surveyor and therefore in demand in the opening of new lands and roads. Even before the French and Indian War, he had pushed out into the wilderness to settle on lands to which the Indian title had not yet been quieted and which had probably not yet been purchased by the Penns. He was among the early settlers at Turkey Foot in Brothers' Valley, still several miles west of Ft. Bedford.³ Fort Bedford, first known as Raystown, was established as early as 1750. Sometime during the French and Indian War, the government began converting the old Indian trail into a wagon road from Carlisle to the Fort, but the western half of the trail was passable for pack horses only until long after the Revolution. Fort Bedford this last out-post of civilization, actually had stone houses and log cabins sealed within. But the Rhoadses living several miles from the Fort had nothing so good as a log cabin for their first home in the wilderness.⁴

¹ The Comp. of Am. Geneology claims that our ancestor was Heindreek Rhodt, who came to Philadelphia on the William in 1737. Several biographies of Henry Rhoads II, a fairly prominent man of Pennsylvania. and Kentucky., state that he was born in Germany in 1739 and that he died in Ky. in 1815. He says himself that he was a rather large boy when the family crossed the ocean. His parents could not, of course, have settled permanently in Am. two years before their oldest child was born in Germany. A careful scrutiny of all the lists in ships' registers from the date of Henry II's birth to the time of the Revolution shows many German names that could be transliterated as Rhoads: Rhodt, Rodt, Roodt, Roess, etc. A very tempting discovery is in the list of the Ship Samuel of London arriving via Rotterdam at Philadelphia 8-17-1733. This register happens to contain the names not only of all males over sixteen but also the names and ages of all the women and children. It contains a Heinrich Roth, (age not given) and a Henry Roodt, 4 years old, with wife Catrina 40, Anna Eva 13, Wm. 12 and Catrina 10. These are very common first names among our Rhoadses. Heinrich and Catarina, the parents, were too old in 1733 to have become the parents of Gt-Gt-Grandfather Daniel Rhoads, born in Penna. in 1755. The variant spelling of the names looks more like Holland Dutch than German because, without doubt, of the efforts of the Dutch clerk at Rotterdam to spell the names as they sounded to his ear. These Rhoadses coming over on the Samuel were probably Palatine relatives of our family.

² The Palatinate was a part of Bavaria, Western Germany, and the Swiss lands about Zurich. The Palatine Lutherans suffered both from religious persecution and from economic distress after the Thirty Years War. Penn visited the Palatinate three times to invite its oppressed people to his new colony. The first of them arrived on the Concord in 1685. thousands of them landed in the next hundred years to make up no small part of our colonial population. These people, by no means unimportant in the development of our country, were particularly strong in Philadelphia and S.W. of that city, where they became known as Pennsylvania Dutch. They were not Dutch nor Hollanders in any sense of those terms. Ethnically, they were Swiss, Alemanni, Franks, and Bavarians; geographically, they were a part of Western Germany. Their only contact with Holland was a long and tiresome wait at Rotterdam while they awaited the coming of a British ship long overdue. Unquestionably, many of them worked out their passage in the new country. We do not know whether Henry Rhoads had to do this or not. We can readily assume that crossing the ocean was not pleasant. References to exposure of the body to the elements as well as to the gaze of one's fellows, to filthy and vermin-infested quarters, to meager rations at the best, to moldy grain supplemented or replace entirely by rats and mice, selling at an English shilling apiece, should the crossing be too long and too rough, are shockingly frequent in the records of the day.

³ An early author writes, 'The site of Bedford is, is in the estimation of all who love the sublime and the romantic, one of the most beautiful and picturesque in the state....the spot on which it stands seems to have been scooped out of the mountains by the hand of God." Though famous for its healing springs, this veritable oasis was in the midst of mountains, difficult to surmount. Though the only fort between Carlisle and Fort Pitt, even up to the Revolution, Bedford itself had few more than twenty families, largely the natives of North Ireland or their descendants and a few Germans. Those inhabitants had their out-lots, on which they raised crops and stock and manufactured whiskey while someone was constantly on the alert for Indians. Whenever the alarm was spread everyone rushed into the fort for protection, perhaps even from Brothers Valley. At times, they were unmolested for months in succession; at other times, they had to live in the fort for days, often to find their homes in ashes and whatever property they had been unable to fetch to the fort carried off. Such a catastrophe had befallen the Rhoadses at least once. Not far from there at a place known later as Bloody Crossing, the Indians burned the home and tomahawked nearly all the family of the Rev. John Rhoads. He was probably of our family, but we have no definite proof that he was.

Mother had forebears among both strains of these pioneer settlers in this region of Penna., the Scotch Irish and the Pennsylvania Dutch. Both were a proud and capable folk. The fact that the former were stubborn as Gibraltar and that the latter claimed to be first in about everything in America may explain, if explanation be necessary, why some of her descendants are as they are. The Pennsylvania Dutch claimed that they were the first to protest against slavery in this country (1686); the first to oppose the English tax on tea (Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 1773); the first Revolutionary troops west of the Hudson River, etc. More than half of the first 34,000 ragged Continental troops were Penna. Dutch. Washington's bodyguard was almost entirely made up of them. They made the first Conestoga wagons in Lancaster Co., Penna.: they made the first Penna. rifles-which invention, some say, won the Revolution for us. It was two of these (and perhaps a few Penna. Dutchmen along with the rifles) that Boone took to Ky. The rifles served as a pattern for the Kentucky weapons so effective against the Indians. Penna. Dutch were the first in this country to dry corn, to make pretzels, to fashion sausages, and to concoct liver pudding.

⁴It was merely a half-faced, three sided lodging, made of light poles with brush interwoven. It was located at the foot of a hill over a spring to insure a supply of drinking water in spite of unfriendly Indians. Although this life had its tragedies from Indian depredations, wild animals, unconquered forest and mountain, it also had its recompenses and pleasures. The Germans, like the Scotch Presbyterians, lived in groups and had their own school teacher. By the time of the Revolution, they had organized their own church. They had no minister, but some traveler on the way to Fort Pitt would bring sermons from the older churches for the teacher to read to the group. They had their religions feasts, their husking bees, their swingling frolics, and above all else, their weddings. The latter degenerated into great hilarity.