Glattfelder Gazette

In November 1912 several directors of our association went out to a grove on a hill in Springfield township, York county, and started clearing it. They didn’t own it yet. For seven summers the reunion had met on other people’s land, and the board had just agreed to pay Martin Glatfelter $200 for a little under three acres. The deed came on January 21, 1913.

That August the Rev. Adam Stump dedicated a 44-by-64-foot pavilion with a dirt floor. Then the bill came due. Seventy-eight relatives gave $412, the land and pavilion cost $915 that first year, and the last of t...

On January 14, 2004, the municipal council of a small town near Zurich voted to send four hundred dollars to a family reunion in Pennsylvania. The town was Glattfelden, the place Casper had left in 1743. The family was his. The money went toward getting Heimwald Park ready for the hundredth reunion. “We entirely appreciate,” the council wrote, “all the efforts people and society undertake to make traditions stay and survive.”

The amount was small. What it crossed was not: the same ocean Casper crossed, in the opposite direction, and two hundred and sixty-one years. When he sailed in 1743, the leaving...

When Casper Glattfelder died in the early spring of 1775, he had fifty-five grandchildren. He had met five or six of them. The rest arrived after he was gone. The man who started this entire American family never got to see the family he started.

Six sons who lived to raise families became fifty-five grandchildren the record can name, and the line has not stopped multiplying since. His last surviving grandchild, Catharine, died in Ohio in 1887 at ninety-two — a hundred and twelve years after Casper was in the ground, in a state that was wilderness when he died. To...

When a surveyor finally measured Casper Glattfelder’s farm in 1770, he noted it had been improved for about twenty years — cleared, fenced, built on, worked hard. And in all that time Casper had never legally owned a foot of it. He and Henry Walter were, in the family historian’s blunt phrase, pure-and-simple squatters.

It was not carelessness or poverty. Penn land was cheap, and plenty of honest families lived the same way, working unclaimed ground for years before bothering with the paperwork. Casper died in 1775 without ever holding a clear deed to the farm he had worked...

When Casper Glattfelder sold his first American farm in 1746, he did not sell it because it had failed. He sold it, the family has always said, because it did not look like home. So he went looking for ground that did.

He and Henry Walter moved south, turned down one tract over timber too heavy to clear, and kept going up the south branch of the Codorus until they reached a valley that seemed just right. Casper took the west side of the creek, Henry the east, their kinsman Hildebrand just beyond. Three families from Glattfelden rebuilt...

About noon on March 21, 1976, a tornado skipped across York County and found the family’s 63-year-old pavilion at Heimwald. The York Daily Record said the winds picked it up and dropped it into destruction. The phrase turned out to be precise. A 1934 repair had left the roof resting on its posts, held down by nothing but its own weight. For forty-two years that was good enough. It took a tornado to find the shortcut.

Then the directors faced the question every wrecked thing forces: rebuild at what size? Grief and pride both said put it back full si...

In 1966 a new president opened his term with a question almost no leader will ask out loud: if the reunion was dying, would it not be decent to give it a proper burial? It was a fair question. Attendance had fallen from more than 300 in the early 1950s to about 120 a decade later, and the two veterans carrying the association had told a reporter they were not sure it could last.

The board took the question seriously. One director suggested handing Heimwald Park over to the county. Instead, early in 1967, they chose to keep going — and backed th...

On October 3, 1910, a York County court granted a charter to the Casper Glattfelder Association of America, and a family became a corporation — a legal person that could own property, sign contracts, and outlive everyone who created it. That was close to unheard of. The newspapers called them one of the first families in the country to do it.

They did it to solve a plain problem. Two reunions in, the family was meeting every August on land it did not own, and when the borrowed grove was sold out from under them, they decided to stop depending on...

Before Casper ever set out for America, his older brother tried to go first. John Peter Glattfelder decided in 1742 to take his wife and six children to Pennsylvania. He died that spring, before the party had even crossed the Swiss border. His family carried his body home and buried him in the town he had been trying to leave.

His widow, Salomea, crossed anyway. A year later she gathered the six children, the youngest not quite two, and sailed with Casper’s group. What became of her, the record will not say. But her children left clear tr...

Most immigrants spent months, even years, drifting before they settled. Casper Glattfelder bought a farm before he had been in America two weeks. On September 13, 1743, still sick and freshly bereaved, he and his brother-in-law Henry Walter signed a mortgage for 224 acres along the Conewago creek. They did not have the money. Almost nobody did.

Then he found out what he had bought. The land carried a heavy debt to a powerful Philadelphia official, too few German neighbors, and, in the family’s telling, hills that never looked like home. Three years later Casper sold it for 67 pounds, a...

Family tradition says it was Elizabeth, not Casper, who pushed to leave Switzerland — and it says why. She did not want her sons conscripted and sold into foreign wars. Eighteenth-century Switzerland rented out its young men by the regiment, France above all. The pay came home. The men often did not.

She had reason to guard the sons she had left. Over eleven years Elizabeth bore seven children and buried three of them as infants, including a first Salomon whose name she gave again to the next boy. By the time she packed for America she had st...

On August 30, 1743, a Philadelphia clerk worked down a list of newly arrived foreigners, taking each man’s oath. Beside the name he wrote as “Gasper Gladfelter,” he added one small notation: the man was sick that day. That is the first written record of Casper Glattfelder in America. Nearly everyone reading this descends from him.

He had earned that misery. Casper left Glattfelden, near Zurich, in the spring of 1743 with his wife Elizabeth, her seventy-year-old father, and four children — part of a convoy of six families from one small parish. The crossing on the Francis and Elizabeth took the...

In 1901 a retired Army surgeon in St. Louis, Dr. Noah M. Glatfelter, published the first full genealogy of the family — 861 households traced back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. He did it on his own time, and it did something he never planned. It made scattered cousins curious about each other.

This episode is about what they did with that curiosity. A York county pastor named Adam Stump decided the family ought to gather, for no occasion in particular, and pulled in two cousins to help. They called themselves a...

In 1901, a retired Army surgeon in St. Louis published a book nobody had asked him to write.

Noah Miller Glatfelter spent forty years as a doctor and decades of his spare time writing letters to relatives he’d never met, digging through church records, wills, and land deeds. What he produced was the first full account of this family: eight hundred and sixty-one families, traced all the way back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. Nobody paid him. He did it because he knew that if he didn’t, the thread would brea...