The British general quartered nearby ordered Patriot
cottages plundered and targeted for cannon practice.
The British used the church for storage, a hospital, and
as a stable for their horses. They burned the pews and
Bibles, the library and the pastor's journals. One
soldier shot through the swan weathervane on the
church steeple and left a hole. In South Carolina in
1781, Georgia's first elected Governor, John Adam
Treutlen, a Patriot raised in Ebenezer, was murdered
by a gang of Tories. American Gen. Anthony Wayne
led Continental soldiers to drive the British from
Ebenezer in 1782  and the church was cleaned up.
Georgia's population shrank by 5,000 inhabitants in 1737 to barely 500 by 1742. While idealistic at
first, the trustees in charge allowed their ideals to be compromised later with the introduction of
slaves* and liquor, yet they blamed the colony’s poverty to the " intemperance and laziness" of the
settlers. Beginning in 1738, boatloads of other Germans had arrived in Savannah from the Palatinate
and Baden, some of them indentured for years of servitude in exchange for their passage.
In Germany, the plight of the Salzburg exiles gave fodder to imaginative story tellers for many
generations. At one time, even Goethe donned a wide brimmed Salzburg hat which was the craze,
left. He wrote his timeless tale of Hermann und Dorothea based on the Salzburg exiles' story, and
later, Schumann composed an overture to it. The basis of the story is the Salzburg exile, however
Goethe adapted it to more recent times and the poor maiden is represented as a German from the
west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution. Goethe kept some
of the characters original, but he invented others, while weaving historical accounts of the
Salzburgers journey into modern fable.
In 1864, Sherman's Union troops occupied the church, and again the pews, fences and old hymn
books were set afire. An 1886 earthquake damaged the church even more. Today, the church, a
cemetery, and one home are all that remain of the town. A museum is on the site today.  
* The Salzburgers were generally opposed to slavery and part of the community agreement they all signed bound
them to reject it. However, three years after their arrival, their minister Rev.Boltzius uncovered the fact that a
Mr. Kiefer was secretly housing slaves on his farm. By 1750, because of pressure from the trustees, Boltzius
himself decided, much against his personal convictions, in favor of slavery. By 1770, two slaves who were
Boltzius’ personal servants were listed as part of the church inventory.
Two other Lutheran pastors kept slaves as well. The Reverands Rabenhorst and Lemcke owned 12 of the 59
young slaves baptized between 1753 and 1781. Boltzius and the others seemed to justify slavery not only because
of political pressure, but from the thought that if one took slaves with the intent of leading them to Christianity, it
would not be a sin, but a blessing. There is some evidence of Lutheran-Muslim interaction found in the journals of
the Salzburger's pastors John Martin Boltzius and Israel Christian Gronau because of the presence of Muslim
slaves originally from West Africa who lived in the area around the Salzburger community.
German settlers gradually pushed north along the
Savannah River throughout the mid-18th century. At
length Parliament stopped its subsidy of the colony,
and in 1751, the trustees resigned their charter. By
1770, the entire German population of Georgia was
over 1,500, but they would not keep their ethnic
character for long in the new world. Sadly, the towns'
influence in Georgia politics waned by the time of the
Revolution and it changed hands several times. After
the British invasion in 1778, British forces left the
village in ruins from which it never recovered.
The Salzburgers played a prominent role in the affairs of Ebenezer throughout the colonial era
because of its strategic location in the defense of Savannah.
On the list of Settlers, you will see names from the disappointed Holland group who returned to Germany and
then left on the later boats for friends and family in Ebenezer.
In 1984 Albert Winter of Salzburg, Austria visited
Savannah and Ebenezer for the 250th anniversary
of the landing on October 12, 1734. Upon his return
home, he requested that Austrian officials donate a
monument to the Georgia Salzburgers. Anton
Thuswaldner was commissioned to sculpt the
monument of stone cut from the Austrian mountains
and it was brought to Savannah and dedicated in 1994.
The Salzburger Society petitioned the City Council in
June, 1996 to have a half acre area around the
monument named Salzburger Park. Monument, left
Note: In the area around Ebenezar, the few entities which had
"German sounding" names by the time of the First World War
took new identities because of anti-Germanism. The German
Mutual Fire Insurance Company became the Atlanta Mutual Fire
Insurance Company and the German-American Club was
renamed the Lexington Society.
Then there was Beer...Life in a Colony Continues
He urgently requested that "fifty or sixty tuns of beer from the brewery of Hucks at Southwark" be
sent him, and said: "cheap beer is the only means to keep rum out", apparently thinking he was
warding off one evil by substituting another less potent evil. Oglethorpe himself even accompanied
the fleet of beer-bringers in his scout boat and placed all the strong beer on board one boat where he
could personally keep an eye on it. The settlers also made sauerkraut out of collard greens, maybe as
an accompaniment to their horrid "near beer". An old Salzburger recipe dictates how one salts and
ferments the greens much in the same way as cabbage is prepared to make sauerkraut.
The Salzburgers were not the only people with drinking habits Oglethorpe had settled in his dry
colony. The virtuous Moravians were mostly beer drinking Germans who had embarked for
Georgia with Oglethorpe and John Wesley, who so impressed Wesley that he studied German in
order to converse with them. He said that they were "the only genuine Christians he had ever
met." Settler's cabin, left
Some descendants of the Salzburger settlers still worship at Jerusalem Church, shown above in old photos,
making it the longest continuing congregation in the nation.
The life of the Georgia Salzburgers was far from romantic. They had great challenges that needed
daily attention and problems of immediate urgency, one of the latter being a lack of beer. Oglethorpe
soon realized that he could not supply enough beer to guarantee the success in the settlement. The
thirsty settlers brewed a pitiful "desperation drink" made of molasses, sassafras and the tops of fir
trees and affectionately called it beer, but it was a poor substitute for the real suds so near and dear
to their old Germanic hearts. Although Georgia was designed to be a temperance colony, Oglethorpe
realized the gravity of the beer situation and expressed his desire to the trustees on October 7, 1738.
They built the first church building, first grist mill, first
rice mill, first saw mill and first silk business in the
colony. They opened the first schools in the colony at
Bethany and Eberezer, and the first orphanage. The
Salzburgers also brought the Austrian Pine, called Black
Pine, the seeds having allegedly been brought in their
baggage by the early settlers. Some even credit them for
the fiery Azalea. They also built the market squares in
Savannah to sell their wares.  Ebenezer sawmill, left
The Georgia Germans were pressured to assimilate after the Revolution, and many surnames were
Anglicized and no longer German. After an interval, Georgia was reorganized, whereupon some new
growth, already begun in response to the trustee’s relaxations, put the colony on a prosperous footing.
However, 2,000 residents had fled as Ebenezer steadily declined until 1855 when it almost vanished.
The Salzburgers had other German company in the deep south. Scoundrel stories abound in the early immigration sagas.
In October of 1763, British King George III offered land to officers and soldiers to settle Canada with Protestants. One
of those who responded was an opportunistic officer named Johann Heinrich Christian von Stümpel, who had served in
the army of Ferdinand of Brunswick. In 1763, he applied for a land grant in Nova Scotia and was granted a deed for
hundreds of acres of Canadian land for 4,000 "poor Palatine" settlers that he promised to organize into a militia within a
decade. He immediately found 400 eager would-be German colonists and took them to London, and then promptly
vanished with all of their money, stranding his helpless victims who lived miserably in tents in London on charity.
Finally, around the time Stümpel was finally caught and arrested in Ansbach, enough donations had been raised to
transport the settlers to the New World, and in the spring of 1764 two shiploads of the Germans arrived at Charleston,
South Carolina. They would be among the last German settlers there. They were guided up-country through dark forests
and damps swamps to the very edge of a white settlement named "Londonderry".  Once here, the haggard and worn out
Germans made a new life, had children and even built a church called "St. George on Hard Labor Creek" where the
gospel was preached in German. Somehow, during the American Revolution, the church and the settlers seemed to just
fade away from existence.
The Others