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HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

and extracts from his letters to Laurens were printed at Rotterdam in 1685.[1] About 1692 he appears to have published a paper in the controversy with George Keith charging the latter with “impious blasphemy and denying the Lord that bought him.”[2] He was one of the first burgesses of Germantown, the most extensive landholder there, and promised to give ground enough for the erection of a market house, a promise which we will presume he fulfilled. In 1698 he went to London, where he was living as a merchant as late as 1712, and from there in 1709 he wrote to Rotterdam concerning the miseries of some emigrants, six of whom were Mennonites from the Palatinate, who had gone that far on their journey, and were unable to proceed. “The English Friends who are called Quakers,” he says had given material assistance.[3] Doubtless European research would throw much light on his career. He was baptized at the Mennonite church in Amsterdam March 29th, 1665. His only child Susanna married Albertus Brandt, a merchant of Germantown and Philadelphia, and after the death of her first husband in 1701 she married David Williams.[4] After deducting the land laid out in Germantown, and the 2000 acres sold to the Op den Graeffs, the bulk of his 5000 acres was taken up on the Skippack, in a track for many years known as “Telner's Township.”[5]

In 1684 also came Jan Willemse Bockenogen, a Quaker cooper from Haarlem.[6]

  1. The Treatise is described by Pastorius in the enumeration of his library. MS. Hist. Society.
  2. A true Account of the Sence and Advice of the People called Quakers.
  3. Dr. Scheffer's paper in the Penn'a Magazine, vol. ii. p. 122.
  4. Exemp. Record, vol. vii. p. 208.
  5. Exemp. Record, vol. viii. p. 360.
  6. Among his descendants was Henry Armitt Brown, the orator. The Bockenogens were Mennonite weavers, who fled to Haarlem because of persecution about 1578.