John Fishback (12 July 1691–between 11 and 19 March 1735), colonist, was born in the village of Trupbach in the mining region of the Germany duchy of Westphalia and was the son of Philip Fischbach and Elsbeth (or Elisabeth) Heimbach Fischbach. He was christened Johannes Fischbach in the Nikolaikirche, a German Reformed church, in nearby Siegen ten days later. In the autumn of 1713, he was in London with about forty other members of Westphalian mining families en route to Virginia under the sponsorship of Swiss baron Christoph de Graffenried. By then he may have already married Agnes Häger, daughter of Reformed clergyman Henry Häger, who with his family accompanied the miners to Virginia. After arriving, Fischbach Anglicized his name to John Fishback.
Because the miners had insufficient money to pay for their trip to America, Nathaniel Blackiston, a Virginia agent then in London, promised them that Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood would pay the balance. Blackiston had not consulted Spotswood, who obtained permission from the Council to settle the Germans on property he owned in the upper regions of the Rapidan River that had deposits of iron ore. The mining settlement would in effect be a buffer between English settlers to the east and Indians to the west as well as provide him with inexpensive and presumably experienced laborers.
Fishback and the other Germans arrived in Virginia by April 1714 and almost immediately traveled to the settlement that Spotswood called Germanna. Descriptions of the original settlement indicate that they lived in rude, frontier cabins but not whether they constructed them or simply occupied dwellings that Spotswood or some other person had constructed. The miners worked for Spotswood until the end of 1718 to compensate him for paying part of their travel expenses. Their work laid the basis for Spotswood's important iron-making enterprise. The General Assembly exempted them from payment of taxes for a decade. When the time expired that Spotswood had required them to labor for him, Fishback and most of the others moved about ten miles away and established Germantown in the part of Stafford County that became Prince William County in 1730.
Documents do not survive to indicate when, but sometime before the summer of 1724, Fishback and two other German men obtained letters of naturalization, probably from Spotswood or his successor, Hugh Drysdale, that allowed them to acquire, own, and bequeath land the same as if they had been natural-born subjects of the king. On 2 June 1724, Fishback and several other immigrants successfully petitioned the Spotsylvania County Court to grant them headrights, the right to patent fifty acres of land for each of the original immigrants as if they had paid the full costs of transportation to Virginia as the law required—in Fishback's case, for himself and his wife.
On 22 August 1724 Fishback and the two other naturalized immigrants, John Hoffman and Jacob Holtzclaw, received grants on behalf of the German community from the Northern Neck Proprietary for more than 1,800 acres of land on Licking Run in Stafford County. On his own, Fishback on 20 August 1725 obtained a grant for 592 acres between the branches of Broad Run and Bull Run in Stafford County, but he never settled or improved the land as required, and it later reverted to the proprietor. He obtained grants for 280 acres of land in King George County early in 1729 and for 1028 acres in Prince William County three years later. On 10 June 1731, Fishback and several other Germans petitioned the governor and Council for permission to take up 50,000 acres of land west of the mountains on condition that they settle fifty immigrant families there within two years. They were apparently unsuccessful in attracting enough settlers.
Fishback and his first wife had at least two sons and two daughters. Following her death on an unrecorded date, he married a woman named Mary, whose name as copied from his will into the Prince William County will book was rendered as Meary Doarterty and Meary Doherty (the county clerk likely misread Fishback’s German handwriting). They had three or four sons. The will that Fishback signed on 11 March 1735 (dated 1734 in the Old Style Julian calendar then in use) indicates that he had been a successful man, more successful than most immigrants who arrived to labor for other people. In addition to his house, which he left to his wife, he bequeathed more than 1500 acres of land to his children and owned personal property worth £56 13s. 7d., including an indentured servant, household furnishings (including a feather bed), and livestock. John Fishback died on an unrecorded date during the week after he signed his will, which was proved in Prince William County Court 19 March 1735. The place of his burial is not recorded.
Sources Consulted:
Birth and christening dates and identities of parents in Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Seigen, Geburtsregister, 1690–1702; family history, biographical data, and most of the important extant documents in Willis Miller Kemper, Genealogy of the Fishback Family in America: The Descendants of John Fishback, the Emigrant with an Historical Sketch of his Family … (1914); Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), 4:250, 253; headright applications in Spotsylvania Co. Will Book A, 73–74; Northern Neck Grants A, fols. 63 (noting naturalization), 160, B, fols. 84, 190, C, fol. 158, E, fol. 445, Virginia State Land Office, Record Group 4, Library of Virginia; will and estate inventory in Prince William Co. Will Book C, 23–24 (with Old Style date of 1734), 42–43.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Suzanne Collins Matson.
How to cite this page:
Suzanne Collins Matson, "John Fishback (1691–1735)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fishback_John, accessed [today's date]).
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