Samuel Eckerlin (8 December 1703–by 14 March 1782), Dunkard settler, was born in Strasbourg, a largely German-speaking city then under French control. He signed his surname variously as Eckerlin, Eckerling, and Eckerle, and it also appears in public records as Ekerling and Ackerling. His father, Michael Eckerlin, was a tailor and member of the city council who attended meetings of Lutheran and other Protestant pietists. The city cracked down on the pietists in 1701, expelled their leader, Johann Krafft, and insisted that Eckerlin cease his association with them. Undeterred, he inherited the mantle of leadership from Krafft and married as his second wife Anna Grimann, Krafft's avidly pietist maid, who became the mother of Samuel, Israel, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Eckerlin, the last three born after their father was expelled from Strasbourg in 1705. The family wandered for several years north through the German states seeking toleration of their beliefs until Michael Eckerlin died about 1720.
In 1725 Eckerlin's mother arrived in Philadelphia with her four sons and within two years had settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They allied themselves with the radical pietist Conrad Beissel, who in 1732 established the Ephrata Cloister, a communal, monastic religious community. Members were known then as Dunkers or Dunkards and later as the Brethren. Eckerlin either practiced medicine or worked as an apothecary. He married a woman named Catharina (maiden name unknown), who died in 1733. No evidence suggests that they had any children. They resided near Ephrata and assumed vows of celibacy, as was common in the cloister. Following his mother's death in 1729, Eckerlin and his wife cared for his youngest brother. After Israel Eckerlin became prior, or second in command, of the men's convent at Ephrata in 1740, he and Samuel Eckerlin (known in the community as Brother Jephune) gradually transformed the cloister into a self-sustaining enterprise with an orchard, mill, and other household manufactories.
Conflict between the Eckerlins and Beissel, who accused the brothers of mammonism, forced the brothers to withdraw and move in 1745 to the New River Valley of Augusta County, Virginia, where they lived for five years in a mixed settlement of Ephrata and Germantown Brethren in a community of small houses and farms they named Mahanaim. As the leader of the group, Eckerlin purchased land for the community in the valley where the New River crosses from present-day Pulaski County into present-day Montgomery County. The site of the mill that they erected there became known as Dunkard's Mill and Dunkard Bottom. Eckerlin's report of a 1749 flood along the Roanoke River that destroyed several farms and drowned several people appeared in the Germantown Pennsylvanische Berichte of 16 January 1750.
During the spring of 1751 Eckerlin moved to Pennsylvania and placed himself and his family under the protection of the Delaware, who advised them to settle in the Cheat River Valley in northwestern Virginia (in what is now Preston County, West Virginia), which also became known as Dunkard's Bottom. About two years later he had five tracts encompassing 1,180 acres of land surveyed and later petitioned the governor for 5,000 acres for the settlement. Eckerlin reportedly shared his knowledge of medicine with the local Indians and the new settlers in the area and thereby endeared himself to both populations. After the British attempt to drive the French out of Fort Duquesne failed in the summer of 1755, the settlers in Eckerlin's vicinity became easy targets for raids by Indians allied with the French.
During the frontier unrest of the Seven Years' War, the Dunkers' monastic style of life made their new neighbors worry that they were spies for Catholic France. Because Eckerlin traveled widely to dispense medicine and trade furs and other goods, he was the best known and became the most suspect member of the family. While trading in 1756 and 1757, he was arrested at least twice and made probably three trips to Williamsburg to secure his liberty. In October 1757 the commander of the Virginia Regiment, George Washington, informed the lieutenant governor that he believed that the Eckerlins were all spies. Eckerlin then guided a party of militia to his settlement but arrived shortly after Indians allied with the French had abducted Israel Eckerlin and Gabriel Eckerlin, whom they handed over to the French. Both men were transported to France, where they died in captivity.
In May 1757 Eckerlin had purchased 150 acres of land along the North Fork of the Shenandoah River with Ezechiel Sangmeister, and several months later he had acquired another 140 acres in the same vicinity. After the abduction of his brothers, Eckerlin and other remnants of the group that had left Pennsylvania resettled at Sandy Hook in a Sabbatarian community across the river from what in 1761 became the town of Strasburg, in the part of Frederick County that later became Shenandoah County. Eckerlin opened an apothecary shop and also helped establish a pottery manufactory. Indian violence increased and again cast suspicion on them, and in 1764 the community left Sandy Hook and returned to Pennsylvania. Eckerlin joined them in November of the following year. He continued his medical practice and became reconciled with the residents of Ephrata Cloister. Samuel Eckerlin completed his will in German on 15 January 1781 and died, probably near Ephrata, on an unrecorded date between then and 14 March 1782, when his will was authenticated in the Lancaster County Court. Most likely he was buried in an unmarked grave in one of the two cemeteries at Ephrata.
Sources Consulted:
Klaus Wust, The Saint-Adventurers of the Virginia Frontier: Southern Outposts of Ephrata (1977), with birth date from Tauff-Buch der Neuen Kirche de Anno 1697 a 1706 (Strasbourg) on 107; Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), 5:450, 6:69, 695, 698; W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series (1983–1995), 2:302, 4:366, 5:4, 20, 29, 47, 59, 61; Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (1959– ), 11:443–444; Chronicon Ephratense: A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists at Ephrata, Lancaster County, Penn'a, by "Lamech and Agrippa," trans. J. Max Hark (1889); Julius F. Sachse, German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1742–1800 (1900); Wust, "German Mystics and Sabbatarians in Virginia, 1700–1764," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 72 (1964): 330–347; Wust, "The Great Flood of 1749," Journal of the Roanoke Historical Society 7 (1970): 1–4, with translation of Eckerlin's letter; Ezechiel Sangmeister, Das Leben und Wandel des in GOTT ruhenten und feligen Br. Ezechiel Sangmeisters; Weiland ein Einwohner von Ephrata . . . (1825), trans. Barbara Schindler, in Journal of the Historical Society of the Cocalico Valley 4–10 (1979–1985); Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, "Frontiers of Body and Soul: Ephrata's émigrés in Virginia," electronic journal Common-Place 7 (Jan. 2007), copy in Dictionary of Virginia Biography Files; Pardoe, "Ezechiel Sangmeister's Way of Life in Greater Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136 (2012): 488–491; will authenticated on 14 Mar. 1782 in Lancaster Co., Pa., Will Book, D:73–74; English transcription of will in Julius F. Sachse Deposit of Ephrata Cloister Materials, Manuscript Group 351, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe.
How to cite this page:
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, "Samuel Eckerlin (1703–1782)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eckerlin_Samuel, accessed [today's date]).
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