The hartsfield family

Das Härtsfeld in the Seventeenth Century

“This land is rough, hard, threatening and unfriendly; has no wine production and little water, so much so that one must collect rain and snow in cisterns. But it produces much corn and other fruit, oxen, horses, sheep. It has much timber.” So Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia of 1628 described “das Hertenfeld,” the name with which the humanist teacher Ladislaus Suntheim had replaced the Latin name Campidurus in recognition of the hardness (stony character) of its natural condition; for to him also this most easterly region of the Swabian Alb between the Kocher, Brenz, Reis and Albtrauf was viewed as a “rough, treacherous, rocky, threatening ground.” Its name is its omen—there it remains; even though some doubt whether the name Hartsfeld was derived from “hart” [stony].⁸

This physical description of the Hartsfeld, which was written a generation or two before the time of Görg Hartsfelder, suggests that physical conditions made it a tough place for survival. This threatening character of the place is reflected in an old German proverb: “He who does not obey father and mother must go to the Hartsfeld.”⁹

Human events, notably the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, made it even tougher, prompting its inhabitants to move out to other parts of Europe and to America. This war, in which Lutherans led by the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus were pitted against the Roman Catholic Emperor, devastated the Härtsfeld. In 1629, the Emperor’s troops moved through the Härtsfeld seizing food, horses, wagons—anything and everything they wanted. They moved out before Protestant forces under Gustavus Adolphus took over the area and did the same thing. Both sides impressed men into their armies and attracted camp followers—men, women, and children, who followed the armies as they moved through victory and defeat into other areas. Through death in battle, starvation, disease, and flight the Härtsfeld lost more than half of its population. Engelhardt’s Neresheim und das Härtsfeld vividly portrays these conditions:

The Thirty Years War dealt roughly with the Härtsfeld. Already at the beginning of the War the Kaiser’s troops had exacted heavy payments. Gold lost its value and the inn-keeper took down his sign. With it came misery, distress, hunger. Everywhere one sought for the blame for this misfortune. They found it, in accord with the fancies of the time, in witchcraft. 1629 brought to Neresheim a true witch hunt. From February to October twenty-four persons were brought to Wallerstein, there painfully examined, found guilty and tortured. The wife of a master potter and their eighteen year old daughter were the first. “One must be put to rubble, otherwise the entire state may go there,” so wrote the chronicler.

In 1633/34 Swedish troops terrorized the territory. People were so upset from hunger that they no longer appeared to be men. Like carrion they tore away at everything they could find and eat; they took away dogs and cats, and they searched for grass and roots. The summer of 1634, however, brought passion to its highest point. This occurred in the annihilating fire of the battle of Nördlingen. The Swedes fled through the Härtsfeld woods and overran the villages. Following close behind were the Croatians to Neresheim, Elchingen, Ohmenheim, Auernheim, Dischingen and the most distant parts of Härtsfeld. In the general confusion all were destroyed who stood in the way. The “Bloody Night of Neresheim” on 29 September, 1634, cost the lives of more than 200 burgers (citizens). The entire area was wrecked, Eschenbaut and Talheim would arise no more. In others there now lived only a few frightened, crazed people. Their destitution was indescribable. In mouseholes they grubbed for grain. The Härtsfeld being “ground to dust and clay, armed men came no more.” Violence and immorality were universal. Many a one had only a dungeon for a home after he had sold his possessions for a ridiculously small sum. At the end of the War the Härtsfeld looked like the scene of a fire. After this terror life returned only gradually.

During part of this time King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was in the area with 26,000 Swedish troops supported by various German contingents. Commemorating this, there is in Nördlingen today an inscription on a very old building that now houses the city library which reads:

König Gustav Adolf von Schweden nahm hier Quartier an 24/25 Sept. 1632.¹⁰

King Gustavus Adolphus, however, was not there when the emperor’s troops massacred the citizens of Nördlingen, as they did those of the Härtsfeld, in 1634. Shortly after his stay in Nördlingen in 1632, he was killed in the battle of Lutzen. A few days before his death in this battle he issued his first call for German settlers to emigrate to the colony he intended to establish on the Delaware River in America.

Of course, there are no documents showing any connection of Görg Hartsfelder of the Delaware River, or of his parents, with any of these events, but in view of Görg Hartsfelder’s deep rootage in the Swedish community on the Delaware River (described in The Hartsfield Story which follows) one wonders if these events were somehow connected with his, or perhaps one or both of his parents’ migration to America?

II.The Hartsfield Story^

Four years before William Penn received his grant of Pennsylvania, Jurian Hartsfielder settled on a tract of land bordering the Delaware River situated immediately above the area that was subsequently laid out as the city of Philadelphia. The tract, later included in the Northern Liberties, is today a thriving part of the city.

Of Jurian Hartsfielder’s life during the next twelve years only fragmentary bits of information remain, but these bits have not previously been pieced together into a connected account of his activities and hitherto the question as to whether or not he left any descendants has been unresolved. As late as 1790 there were very few people in the United States who bore the name Hartsfield. In the First Census of the United States taken in 1790 there was one household in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, headed by George Heartsfield, and there were ten Hartsfield households in North Carolina: five in Dobbs County, four in Wake County, and one in Franklin County.¹

At the dawn of the twentieth century descendants of these North Carolina Hartsfields suddenly became self-conscious of their identity as Hartsfields, and they all reckoned themselves (in part erroneously) to be descendants of an Andrew Hartsfield who died in Johnston County, North Carolina, in 1761.² The reason for this sudden upsurge of interest in Hartsfield family lore is provided by news stories which appeared in the New York Times of August 1905, The Brooklyn Eagle of 22 August 1905, and in various other newspapers. The stories reported that Joseph Thomas Cowan, himself a Hartsfield descendant, and at the time a resident of Dallas, Texas, had appeared in New York to file suit for 160 acres of land in the heart of Manhattan Island, the land valued by Cowan’s estimate at three billion dollars.

Cowan was doubtless familiar with newspaper accounts of litigation over title to property on Manhattan Island similar to that for which he filed claim. This earlier litigation had been in the courts for years and involved many of the oldest Dutch families of New York. He was probably also operating with faded memories of ancestral lands believed to have been wrongfully appropriated by a colonial government, and he was familiar with family traditions that the Hartsfields had come to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. Whether there were any substantial traditions associating the Hartsfields with Manhattan Island is doubtful, but Cowan’s correspondence with various Hartsfield families did elicit one such affirmation.³

Cowan’s attempt to establish Hartsfield ownership of Manhattan Island property, of course, proved abortive.⁴ In the process of pushing his claim, however, he did stimulate the collection of much Hartsfield data. Unfortunately he produced much fiction as well as some facts. For example, in one of his letters he wrote:

Our ancestor Andrew Hartsfield came to this country from Wales in 1726 and settled on Manhattan Island. His family originally came from the Harz Mountains and the family was named Hartzfelder, but was changed by act of the legislature after he moved from Manhattan Island to Philadelphia.⁵

These assertions are unsubstantiated and, for the most part, are wrong. They are Cowan’s undisciplined guesses, and, although his work was enormously fruitful in stimulating further research, his assumptions diverted attention from the man who is really the key figure in the Hartsfield family picture: Jurian, or as he preferred to sign his name, Georgius Hartsfielder.

By way of partly resolving the puzzles left by Cowan, the chief aim of this paper is that of documenting a few facts about the last thirteen years of Jurian Hartsfielder’s life and of exhibiting other data which establish beyond reasonable doubt that Jurian was the progenitor of all the Hartsfield families of North Carolina who were listed in the First Census of the United States (1790).

One unanticipated result of this study is that it provides a satisfactory explanation of the scarcity of Hartsfield families in the United States. That is, with many of Jurian Hartsfielder’s descendants the family name became stabilized as Hatfield. Evidence supporting this claim is presented in the paper, but Hatfield lines are not traced in detail in this paper.

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