Note 39 — SWISS EXILES.
Reading edition
Traditionary stories exist in our county concerning the Swiss origin, etc., of certain families. I have heard one concerning the Engles and one of the Stauffers. A member of the Johns family has also told me of their Swiss origin, and of their name being formerly written Tschantz.
It is probable that other traditionary stories concerning Swiss families could now be collected, if some one would exert himself to do it before their custodians “fall asleep.” But let those who gather these stories beware of the “fine writer,” lest he add what he considers embellishments, and make the narratives improbable.
The Stauffer traditions were mentioned to me by a venerable member of the family, one who has kindly lent me his aid and sympathy in some of my records of the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” John Stauffer is now a great-grandfather, and he calculates that it was, at the nearest, his own great-great-grandfather who, with his mother and his three brothers, came to this country, his ancestors being of Swiss origin. “The mother,” says my neighbor (in substance), “weighed three hundred, and the sons made a wagon, all of wood, and drawed her to the Rhine. When they got to Philadelphia, they put their mother into the wagon and drawed her up here to Warwick township. There they settled on a pretty spring; that is what our people like.”
The reader of this little story may remember the “pious Æneas,” who “from the flames of Troy, upon his shoulders,” the old Anchises bore. [John Stauffer is now dead, 1882.]
The tradition of the Engle family was narrated to me by two of its members. Mr. Henry M. Engle has felt some difficulty in reconciling the tradition with the fact of the family’s having been in this country only about one hundred years, and with his idea that the Swiss persecution must have ceased before that period. But we have seen that some Baptist families tarried in the Palatinate, etc., before coming here, and a circumstance like the imprisonment of one of their women would be remembered among them for a long time.
Tradition says that it was the grandmother’s mother or grandmother of Henry M. Engle and Jacob M. Engle, who was a prisoner in Switzerland for her faith. The turnkey’s wife sympathized with the prisoner, because she knew that Annie had children at home. So she said to her, in the Swiss dialect, “Annie, if I were you, I would go away once.” (“Annie, wann i die wär, i det mohl geh.”—“Annie, wenn ich dich wäre, ich thut einmal gehen.”)
She therefore set Annie to washing clothes, and, turning her back upon her, gave her opportunity to escape.
Annie’s husband was not a Baptist; nevertheless, he was so friendly as to prepare a hiding-place for her, into which she could go down, if the persecutors came, by means of a trap-door; and she was never taken prisoner again.