The First German Immigrants Arrived in America
On this day · 6 October 1683
A small band of weavers and farmers stepped off a ship in 1683 and seeded the largest ancestry group in the United States.
On October 6, 1683, the ship Concord docked at Philadelphia after a roughly 75-day Atlantic crossing from England. Aboard were thirteen families — about 33 people — mostly Quakers and Mennonites from Krefeld in the Rhineland, drawn by William Penn’s promise of religious tolerance and cheap land.
They founded Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, the first permanent German-speaking settlement in the American colonies. The venture had been organized by Francis Daniel Pastorius, a scholar and lawyer who reached Pennsylvania weeks earlier and secured the land before the families landed.
One ship’s manifest became the headwaters of German America.
The settlement’s influence ran deep. In 1688, Germantown residents drafted the first formal anti-slavery protest in the English colonies. Centuries later, Congress designated October 6 as German-American Day, honoring the arrival that today links roughly one in four Americans to German ancestry.
Sources & references
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