Henry Tutwiler

• formal_name:
• first_date: 1815
• last_date: 1815
• function: Publisher
• locales: Harrisonburg
• precis: Publisher of a Presbyterian sermon in Harrisonburg in 1815.
• notes: Henry Tutwiler was not a print tradesman, but rather the patron for a work issued in 1815 from the Harrisonburg press of Lawrence Wartmann (431).
  
  The sermon Tutwiler published then – Gratitude to God, urged from a Review of the Late War; and the Restoration of National Peace. A discourse delivered in Harrisonburg; April 13, 1815 – had been given by Rev. George Bourne (043). Along with Rev. Andrew B. Davidson (116), Bourne had previously owned Wartmann's press; these Presbyterian evangelicals had induced the printer to relocate to Harrisonburg in early 1813 to conduct their Theological Printing Office, an office intended to produce titles for the Virginia Religious Tract Society they had founded in 1812. But Bourne and Davidson parted ways in mid-1814, riven by the growing anti-slavery focus of Bourne's ministry. The discord Bourne spawned eventually led to his removal from the nearby South River Church and his relocation to New York, where he fell into the orbit of the likes of the Tappan brothers and William Lloyd Garrison. Hence, this sermon proved the last of Bourne's tracts to issue from a Virginia press.
  
  Still, Tutwiler's association with this imprint evinces his standing in the community, as well as his interest in healing the wounds that had divided Rockingham County during the War of 1812. By 1815, his family had resided in the county for more than forty years. And he was now the town's postmaster, having been named to that post by Washington as a result of the expansion of the postal system enacted by Congress in May 1794, probably in 1796.
  
  The family of Leonard Tutwiler/Leonhart Duttweiler (1739-1804) had settled in the Valley of Virginia in about 1772; they were among the many German-speaking Pennsylvanians who came to the region once the borders of the Fairfax Grant were finally settled in 1745, after a century of litigation. Leonard's father, Heinrich Duttweiler (b. 1707), brought his family to Pennsylvania from Oberweningen in the Swiss Canton of Zurich in 1753, apparently settling in Lancaster County, where Henry's wife, Margaret, was born. All four of Heinrich's sons left Pennsylvania when they reached maturity, with Leonard's brothers choosing Elizabethtown (now Hagerstown) in Washington County, Maryland, as their new homes. But with a family that grew in due course to include 10 children, Leonard decided on the more open setting of Rockingham County, where land – and so a paternal legacy – was more-readily available. By 1780, he had acquired sizeable holdings southeast of Harrisonburg, evidently using, in part, land warrants he earned as soldier in the Virginia Line during the Revolutionary War. In Virginia, he also acquired an Anglicized surname.
  
  Henry Tutwiler was the eldest of Leonard's four sons, and so the first to set out to fashion an autonomous life. By 1792, when he was married, Henry had built a successful tannery business, one that came to specialize in buckskin, and clothing items made from those skins, particularly gloves. That business, advertised as one as a "Skindresser and Breeches Maker," sustained a family that also grew to include 10 children, even as he lost two in infancy.
  
  While Tutwiler was raised in family that followed the recently-formed (in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) Church of the United Brethren in Christ – as evinced by his parents' burials in the yard of the Friedens Church near Cross Keys – he was a pious Methodist in his personal religious practice; he was described as "a zealous class leader" in Harrisonburg's church in an account of the Brethren camp meetings in Rockingham in 1828. So it is surprising that he financed the publication of a sermon that had been delivered by a Presbyterian evangelical such as Bourne. Hence, his interest in the project was certainly not religiously motivated; rather its publication was both an act of civic responsibility and of friendship.
  
  Printer Laurence Wartmann was a native of Switzerland, who migrated to the United States in 1797. He had learned his trade in the Delaware River port town of Easton, Pennsylvania, and had worked his way down the Great Appalachian Valley from Easton to Hagerstown by 1810. Late that year, he signed a three-year contract with Solomon Henkel (218), conductor of his family's religious press office in New Market. The relocation brought him into contact with Bourne and Davidson, who engaged him to print a few of their religious tracts on the Henkel press when it was idle; that association then led to the offer for him to operate their Harrisonburg press. Wartmann's arrival in town in 1813 gave rise to a life-long friendship with Tutwiler, probably a result of their common cultural heritage. Wartmann soon left his well-known profligacy behind and joined Tutwiler as a Methodist adherent; consequently, the friends were buried within feet of each other in that church's cemetery when they died. Indeed, the two became so close that Wartmann named his youngest son after Tutwiler when he was born in 1823. Knowing of this prompt familiarity, it makes sense that Tutwiler would assist his new friend in publishing a potentially-lucrative sermon in the early days of his independency in Virginia. Wartmann would go on to specialize in religious tracts in his non-newspaper publications, half in German and half in English, suggesting that Tutwiler had helped set him on the path to commercial viability in Harrisonburg in 1815.
  
  Nevertheless, Tutwiler is largely known today from the accomplishments of two of his sons, being mentioned as an aside in their biographies. Eldest son Martin (1793-1864) removed to Fluvanna County after serving in the War of 1812; there he became the county's largest and wealthiest miller and merchant. But the more famous of the two was middle son Henry S. S. D. Tutwiler (1807-84), usually termed Henry Jr. He was a member of the first class that entered the new University of Virginia in 1825, and so was a friend to several well-known classmates: Alexander H. H. Stuart (1807-91), the state senator from Staunton who was one of the Virginia commissioners sent to meet Lincoln in April 1861 to seek a compromise over secession; Robert A. Toombs (1810-85), the Georgia senator who was the first secretary of state of the Confederacy; Robert M. T. Hunter (1809-87) the Virginia senator who succeed as Toombs as secretary of state; and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), the celebrated American poet. His performance there led to his being granted one of the university's first master's degree in 1835, six years graduation, alongside his hometown colleague, Gessner Harrison (1807-62), who subsequently taught at their alma mater. Henry Jr. moved to Alabama after graduating, and became an influential figure in shaping the educational system of that then ten-year-old state, employing the principles he had absorbed from Thomas Jefferson during the president's final months.
  The prominence Henry Jr. achieved in Alabama made his death an event worthy of lengthy obsequies. And it is in those memorials that his father's life is best recorded. Of particular note was the reminiscence Henry Tutwiler Wartmann (1823-1905) sent to the educator's daughter in 1899:
  
  "'I was named,' says Mr. Wartmann, 'for your grandfather, Henry Tutwiler, Sr., for many years the postmaster at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Although but a lad then, I remember distinctly his familiar face as he sat in his office giving out letters to the people. He was a contemporary of my father, of Dr. Harrison [Peachy Harrison, 1777-1848], Father Rohr [Rev. John Jacob Rohr, 1782-1866], Dr. Cravens [Joseph Cravens, 1769-1847], and a number of worthies of the town. He was an active member of the Methodist church, and a faithful and consistent Christian. I remember the kind, cheerful face of your grandmother, who was a 'crony' of my mother and other members of the band of mothers in the church. * * * Your father … was the pride of his native town, and my father, the editor of the Rockingham Register, was always delighted to give publicity to every event in your father's life.'"
  
  Wartmann's testimonial evinces Henry Sr.'s standing in Harrisonburg in the years before his death. When that event finally came, the morning after he had led a New Year's Eve "watch meeting" at his church, his place as postmaster was filled by his son Samuel. Unfortunately, he did not long survive his father, passing "in the 31st year of his age" just eleven months later. His body, along with those of his parents and two siblings, was removed from the Methodist Church yard in July 1853 by Tutwiler's three surviving sons in order to create a family plot in the town's prominent Woodbine Cemetery. That of friend Wartmann followed that same path in 2003.
  
  
  
  Personal Data
  
  Born:
  Oct. 10
  1768
  in Pennsylvania.
  
  Married:
  July 22
  1792
  Margaret Lushbaugh @ Rockingham County, VA.
  
  Died:
  Jan. 1
  1841
  Harrisonburg, Rockingham County, Virginia.
  
  Children:
  Martin (1793-1864); Catherine (1795-1817); Eli (1797-1859); Leonard (1799-1837); Allen (1801-17); Patience (1803); Allen (1804-47); Henry S. S. D. (1807-84); Samuel F. (1810-41 ); Peyton (1812-38); and Levi (1816-48); an infant son (Robert Henry) and a daughter (unnamed) did not survive a year.
  
  Sources: Imprint (not in Shoemaker; WorldCat entry for Indiana University copy); Wayland, History of Rockingham County; Wayland, Men of Mark; History of the Church of the United Brethren In Christ, Virginia Conference; Publications of the Alabama Historical Society, vol. V; and notices in Winchester Gazette (1810), [Winchester] Republican Constellation (1813), Richmond Whig (1841), and Alexandria Gazette (1841). Genealogical material drawn from family charts posted on Ancestry.com (May 2016), corrected by reference to record of grave markers in database built by the Harrisonburg-Rockingham County Historical Society.
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This version of the Index of Virginia Printing was a gift from the estate of the site's creator, David Rawson. The content contained herein will not be updated, as it is part of the Library of Virginia's personal papers collection. For more information, please see David Rawson Index of Virginia Printing website. Accession 53067. Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.