Washington, DC

June 24, 1961

Dear ...

At last I have solved to some extent the mystery surrounding the first Sibert immigrant ancestor. I'm sending you this in order that you may pass it on to H. P. Sibert in Birmingham whose address I no longer have at hand.

To go back a little; I've had several Saturdays in this town without your mother here and little else to do with the result that I've done some random research at the Library of Congress trying to locate the time of arrival and other circumstances connected with John David Sibert of South Carolina. Last fall I concentrated on the Hessian theory with no luck in spite of a mass of literature on the subject. I thought there might be something to such a theory because J.D.S. is known to have married a Virginian, a Miss Wilmore, because as you remember the great body of Hession PWs were eventually sent to near Charlottesville, Va where a number did marry local girls. However, I found no Sibert (or Sybert) on any of the regimental lists of which there are many extant.

Today I tried a new track. I went after the local histories of the area in and around the Abbeville District as well as a history of the Lutheran church in S. C. In the latter I found a short chapter on the Palantinate Colonists on "Hard Labor Creek". (Sounds like Bret Harte, doesn't it?) This led me to a small book by H.T. Cook, written in 1903, I think, called simply Hard Labor Creek and here's the story.

In 1763 after the end of the Seven Years War, a Prussion officer, one John Henry Christian de Stumpel, being no longer employed by Frederick the Great, applied to the appropriate British Ministry for a contract to supply German colonists for shipment to the American colonies. He was to get so much per head and the British government was to furnish the land. Stumpel went back to the Rhineland and recruited 500+ people from the Palatinate (the area from Mainz to Saarbrucken) who were willing to pay Stumple for transportation, land, etc. Stumple took them all to London, collected from emigrants and from the British government and absconded, leaving the group of Germans literally without food, shelter or any hope of escape from their predicament. Strangely enough, their plight caught the public and the royal sympathy to the extent that the Lords Proprietors of So. Carolina offered the transportation and the land and George III (a Hanoverian, you may remember) gave them £500 for subsistence, a stand of 150 muskets and his blessing. The result was that these 500 Palantines arrived in Charleston in two ships of 200 tons each on April 1764 and presented letters from the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations to Governor Boone. The So. Carolina Assembly voted an additional £500 settled on them in Londonderry Township on Hard Labor Creek in Abbeville County, about 12 miles south of Ninety-Six (a town). These people had to be helped once again the next year by the legislature but the community soon thereafter prospered and proved maybe too loyal to King George in that they were badly split between Tory and Whig. Much of the fighting engaged in by this group during the Revolution was against the Indians - although there were some Rebel v. Tory fights - bitter and bloody ones.

After the war, J.D.S. was discharged as a rebel soldier (never a Hessian) and became or resumed his role of Lutheran minister to the end that in Feb 1788, the first Lutheran church in the country was incorporated by the legislature with J.D.S. as pastor. This was St. George's church of Abbeville co. on Hard Labor Creek. We have testimony to the effect that he preached with a strong German accent so there seems no doubt that he was one of Stumpels importations.

Incidentally, 30,000 Hessians were sent to this country and all but 7,000 were sent home. Of those 7,000 there are fairly comprehensive lists, none of which include J.D.S. J.D.S. later became a Methodist and had a church for a while in Abbeville Co. before he died. The next time I am at liberty and in Charleston I intend to go to McCormick and find out what I can. I know that H.P. Sibert has done this, but perhaps with a new orientation I can find out something more about that group of Palantines, such as more precisely where they came from.

...

From a descendant of J.D.S.