Preface

Early in the history of our country, when men breathed freely, and women breathed, if at all, by the divine permission of men, and those only their husbands, the crowded cities and hamlets of the eastern seaboard were known far and wide as dens of iniquity to Godfearing folk.
There were roisterers who gloried in a freedom which may have been denied them in the old countries, except in the back allies and slums of European cess-pool cities, but there were others to whom the sin of “woman” was the most heinous in the eyes of their God and their consciences.

These God-loving creatures sought not these new Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the coast, but together, with their wives and numerous progeny, they went early into the Hinterland of Pennsylvania, away from the sins of worldly men and from the temptations of the teeming metropolises.

They came from the old-world towns of Germany, where their strange customs, akin to the Quakers, were laughed at and jeered, and where shame and contumely were heaped upon them by those who considered it good sport to ridicule beings who had consecrated their souls to God. Their costumes too, their flat, wide-brimmed hats and long capotes were something to hold up to scorn and they found themselves social pariah and outcasts, despite their peaceful pursuits and their fair dealings with their neighbors.

It was therefore, with no sighs of regret, nor with even a backward look, that the brave, hardy souls set out to find a haven of security in the new and untried wilderness of what is now the United States.

They were a thrifty band and their customs were not any queere to the hones Indians of the locale than those of any of the other white men who came over in hungry swarms, except that they did not attempt to oust the natives by chicanery or theft. They set about buying the land for the modest colony they established and immediately made friends with their wild neighbors.
Theirs was a most primitive settlement and stranger yet was the fact that they found it beautiful and made no effort in the many years after their first advent, to change any part of it.
The first thing they did after their arrival was to build a homely church. They did this even before they began to erect shelters for themselves and families. They had come here to worship God in their own way and the sign of their blessed freedom was the little block of their blessed freedom was the little block of their blessed freedom was the little block kirche they hewed out of the giant trees with their own hands.

They obeyed strictly the injunction of the Mosaic Bible, “Thou shalt make no graven image for thyself” and thus their little meeting house for prayer and worship was as bare as a poor woman’s pantry. The plain oak pews were hard as a miser’s heart, and no glittering reredos adorned the apse of the church. There was no ceremony, no pageants such as were found in the Romish churches of Europe and no censers to dispel the resinous pine-boards odor of pine floors. Nothing was there but the plainness of poor, hard-working, God-fearing people who were banded together for mutual protection under the guidance of an All-loving and stern Father, who rewarded virtue and punished sin.

Of all that God-fearing band of zealots, no sterner or stricter observer was there than Johann Hussfels. He had been an Elder in the old-world town from whence they all sprung and when he reached the New World it was natural for him to take his accustomed place in the community.
With him, too, was his plump little dumpling of a frau. Mathilda, or Tilly as she was known by her intimate friends, had been a companion that would have warmed the heart of a Casanova. There was nothing demure in her early bearing, but the great, big mule of a husband, Johann, had tamed her spirit and kept it reined as with bridle and bit. There may have been a time when she rebelled in mind, if not in body, but Johann had that, which in spite of all his dourness and miserliness, attracted her to him, and after a while she yielded her body gracefully and her spirit finally, if not willingly.

Strangely, for the time in which she lived, she kept a diary, and it is from her that we learn the depths of her early misery and her final emergence as a fine, patient hausfrau, content in her way to bear her husband big, bouncing, blond children, year after year.

She was a prolific writer, and it is to her that we are indebted for a chapter in the life of a human of those times, showing that even in the hearts of those, who supposedly kept to all the virtues, the flesh and the devil were not exactly strangers.

It was with intense curiosity that having recently came across this diary, we perused its purple pages and at pain of being considered peeping Toms, we must divulge some of its contents. We cannot of course, give this annal in the picturesque language of the Pennsylvania Dutch woman, for some of her idioms are almost untranslatable to our modern ears. Yet the world ought to know that the course of history has not changed human nature and that woman will always remain the Eternal Eve, no matter what age and clime she may live in.

We shall endeavor, where possible, to give excerpts in tot from some of the pages in her diary, and at other times to piece together seemingly disconnected events in order to make a coherent and running account of her loves and life.