fathers had long carried on the business of manufacturing paper at Arnheim, and in 1690 he built the first papermill in America on a branch of the Wissahickon Creek. There he made the paper used by William Bradford, the earliest printer in the middle colonies. It appears from a letter in the Mennonite Archives at Amsterdam that he endeavored to have the Confession of Faith translated into English and printed by Bradford, and that he died in 1708 aged sixty-four years.[1] The erection of the paper-mill is likely to keep his memory green for many generations to come, and its value was fully appreciated by his contemporaries. In a Description of Pennsylvania in verse by Richard Frame in 1692 we are told, “A paper-mill near Germantown does stand,” and says the quaint Gabriel Thomas, six years later, “all sorts of very good paper are made in the German town.”
About 1687 came Jan Duplouvys, a Dutch baker, who was married by Friends ceremony to Weyntie Van Sanen in the presence of Telner and Bom, on the 3d of 3 mo. of that year; and Dirck Keyser, a silk merchant of Amsterdam, and a Mennonite, connected by family ties with the leading Mennonites of that city, arrived in Germantown in 1688 by way of New York. If we can rely on tradition the latter was a descendant of that Leonard Keyser who was burned to death at Scharding in 1527, and who, according to Ten Cate, was one of the Waldenses.[2]
There was a rustic murmur in the little burgh that year,
- ↑ Jones's Notes to Thomas on Printing. Barton's Life of David Rittenhouse. Penn. Magazine, vol. ii. p. 120. The Mennonites had their Confession of Faith printed in English in Amsterdam in 1712, and a reprint by Andrew Bradford in 1727, with an appendix, is the first book printed in Pennsylvania for the Germans.
- ↑ See Pennypacker Reunion, p. 13.
