Read more about the Conestoga massacres in a related story from ICT
Long before the Hersheys came to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, when the name was still spelled Hirschi, they resided in the Emmental Valley in the canton of Bern, Switzerland.
They were Mennonites, Anabaptists who strictly lived by Jesus’ teachings but suffered religious persecution starting in the 1500s for beliefs that conflicted with the government’s state-run church. They were burned alive, beheaded or imprisoned for beliefs including that only adults should be baptized when they could make a commitment to the faith. They were also pacifists who would not bear arms or swear allegiance to a king in a country with a conscripted Army.
They also understood the trauma of being forced from their homelands. When the government began confiscating their homes and farms, they joined a flood of Mennonites emigrating out of Switzerland in the mid- to late-1600s.
Christian Darig Hirschi was among approximately 700 Mennonites who left the canton of Bern in 1671 for the Palatinate region of southwest Germany. The Rev. Jacob Everling, a church elder in the Palatinate, described groups arriving “destitute with their bundles on their backs and their children in their arms.”
With the financial aid of Dutch Mennonites and the generosity of villagers, Hirschi and other Mennonites made a new start in Friedelsheim, Germany. Even there, however, they were granted only limited religious freedom. They could only worship in groups of 20 families or less, and were unable to proselytize their faith or own land. They also paid an annual fee, “Mennonite Recognition Money.”
No sooner did their efforts transform the land and rebuild the villages, however, than France invaded in 1688 in the War of the Grand Alliance, also known as the Nine Years War, torching the villages and farmland. With Roman Catholic electors coming to power and Louis XV less tolerant of their beliefs, many decided to relocate yet again.
In 1717, Hirschi and his wife, Adelheid (Oade) and their children, Benjamin, Andrew, and Anna, turned their sights westward. Following a boat ride of several weeks on the Rhine River to Rotterdam, Holland, and then a 7- to 12-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean, they relocated to what became known as the “Paradise of Pennsylvania.”
Hirschi was the forefather of the newly renamed Hersheys who followed in Pennsylvania. He was grandfather to Christian Rhodes Hershey, who became a Mennonite farmer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and who stepped in to save a Conestoga couple from a marauding White militia targeting Native people in the mid-1700s.
And Christian Hershey was the great-great-grandfather to Milton Hershey, who made his name in the candy business that still produces chocolate from Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania offered Hirschi the ability to purchase land, as well as religious freedom, and in November 1717 Hirschi and Hans Brubaker bought a land grant for 1,000 acres along the Little Conestoga Creek. They split the acreage equally, with the Hersheys taking the northern 500 acres. The land was in close proximity to an area known as Indian Town, where the Conestoga people annually planted their crops..
It is believed that the land next to the Indigenous people was reserved for Mennonites because James Logan, the Pennsylvania Land Office agent and provincial secretary, believed they could live peacefully with the Native community.
“The Hersheys and the other Mennonites were able to better relate to the Indigenous philosophies than the Calvin philosophies [of certain Protestant denominations],” Craig Hershey Stark, a descendant now living in the area, told ICT.
“Because in their view, coexisting with Mother Nature was the objective of their religion and life,” Stark said. “The Calvinist objective was to conquer. And so I think that they probably felt more akin and closer to the earth, so to speak, with the Indigenous people than they did the Calvinists.”
The Swiss Mennonites were bishops and educators, men of faith and peace, who held strongly to their convictions. Their actions and interactions were guided by the Beatitudes, the Christian manifesto highlighting living as humble, merciful peacemakers. They wanted to leave behind the violence and persecution they had experienced.
Christian D. Hirschi’s son, Benjamin, a Mennonite bishop like his father and brother, erected the first meetinghouse in Lancaster County and a public school on the southeast portion of their land, predating the city of Lancaster by about 13 years. In time, it would become known as Abbeyville.
In 1775, Benjamin Hershey, as presiding bishop of the Lancaster Conference of Mennonites, made a presentation to the Pennsylvania Assembly to allow for conscientious objectors during the American Revolution.
“We have dedicated ourselves to serve all Men in everything that can be helpful to the preservation of Men’s Lives,” he wrote. “But we find no freedom in giving, or doing, or assisting in anything by which men’s lives are destroyed or hurt.”
Christian Rhodes Hershey, son of Benjamin, was born in 1719. In 1739, as a 20-year-old nicknamed “Langen” because of his lanky build, he purchased his own farm in present day Penn Township near Manheim with his wife Barbara Hostetter, who died 13 years later.
When a militant group known as the Paxton Boys targeted the Conestoga people in 1763 in what became known as the Conestoga Massacres, Christian R. Hershey and his second wife Anna hid a Native couple known as Michael and Mary in the cellar of their farmhouse, putting their own family at risk.
