The Land Called Whiskey Mill

In many families, the eldest son remained near the home ground. In the Peterman family, the eldest son crossed the sea.

Hans Peter Petermann was born on 23 December 1720 in Mörzheim, in the German Palatinate, the son of Hans Velten Petermann and Anna Elisabetha. He was baptized there six days later, on 29 December 1720, into a village world where identity was held in church books, sponsors, kinship, fields, and faith. His younger brother Hans Velten Petermann, born in 1723, remained in Germany and carried forward the home-country branch of the family. Peter chose another road.

That decision divided the family story into two enduring lines. One branch remained rooted in Mörzheim, in parish records, vineyards, fields, and village life. The other crossed the Atlantic and entered the German-speaking settlement world of Pennsylvania. Peter became the family’s American advance man — the one who arrived first, learned the roads, entered immigrant networks, and found land west of the Susquehanna where the Peterman name could take root.

His story is not merely a side branch beside the later line of Michael Peterman. It is the opening chapter of the Peterman family in America.

By 1748, Pennsylvania had become a powerful magnet for German-speaking families from the Palatinate and nearby regions. The promise was land, religious community, and a chance to build a life less hemmed in by European limitations. The journey was neither simple nor safe. It meant leaving language, church, kin, and familiar soil. It meant entering the Rhine migration route, moving toward Rotterdam, waiting for a ship, and then committing oneself to weeks of Atlantic uncertainty.

The Ship Called Patience

For Peter, the name of the ship was Patience.

The colonial ship Patience arrived at Philadelphia on 16 September 1748. It had sailed from Rotterdam by way of Cowes, the familiar Isle of Wight provisioning stop used by many vessels carrying Palatine immigrants. Its master for this voyage was Captain John Browne, also recorded as John Brown.

The Patience was a 200-ton ship, armed with eight guns and manned by a crew of about sixteen. It was not a romantic vessel of family legend, but a working eighteenth-century Atlantic ship. Its passengers were crowded into a commercial world of freight, risk, disease, weather, and hope. Earlier accounts of the vessel’s history describe its involvement in Atlantic and coastal trade, including a 1747 attack by a Spanish privateer, when Captain Robert Brown was fatally wounded and first mate John Brown lost his left hand. By the following year, the ship was carrying German-speaking immigrants toward Pennsylvania.

The route itself tells part of the story. Rotterdam was one of the great gathering points for emigrants moving down the Rhine from German-speaking lands. Cowes served as the last European stop before the open Atlantic. From there, passengers faced a crossing that might last eight to twelve weeks depending on weather and conditions at sea.

Peter was not alone. The surviving captain’s list for the Patience recorded 122 adult male passengers. These men were only part of the human cargo; women, children, servants, and other dependents were often less visible or absent from the formal lists. Among the adult men was “Peter Peterman,” recorded as age twenty-five.

A clean image of the passenger-list line showing “Peter Peterman, 25” would be one of the best additions to this chapter. For now, the chapter uses the ship image and narrative citation. When the list image is available, it should be placed here, between the description of the passengers and the oath section.

At the Courthouse in Philadelphia

The oath list for the Patience states that on 16 September 1748, at the courthouse in Philadelphia, the “Foreigners” imported in the ship Patience, John Browne, Master, from Rotterdam, last from Cowes, took the usual oaths to the government. The list again includes Peter Peterman.

That moment matters. In Mörzheim, Peter’s identity had been held in a parish world: baptism, sponsors, family, church, and village memory. In Philadelphia, his name entered another documentary world: captain’s lists, oaths, land papers, court records, tax lists, estate files, and township histories.

Migration changed the records that remembered him.

The other names on the list remind us that Peter arrived as part of a community of movement. Around him were Rommels, Leiningers, Haases, Mummas, Millers, Kunckels, Hallers, Beringers, Wengers, Frieses, Shaffers, Kellers, and many more. They were not merely names on paper. They were fellow travelers, future neighbors, church members, workers, tradesmen, farmers, fathers, sons, and husbands. Through such people, immigrants found language, religious familiarity, trust, land, labor, and marriage.

A generation later, the Revolution would overturn the allegiance that Peter had sworn in 1748. His American life began with an oath to the British Crown and ended during the Revolutionary era, when he was serving in local civic office in Windsor Township.

Naturalized in Philadelphia, 1765

Peter’s arrival in 1748 brought him into Pennsylvania, but naturalization gave him a firmer legal place within it.

On 2 July 1765, Peter Peterman, Michael Peterman, and Daniel Peterman traveled from York County to Philadelphia and were naturalized. The journey itself is worth noticing. These were not men merely signing a local paper near home. They left their farms and German-speaking community in York County and went to the colonial capital to secure the legal standing that immigrant landholders needed.

For German-speaking settlers, naturalization mattered deeply. It gave them the same freedom of buying and selling property enjoyed by English subjects. It made transfers of real estate more secure. It strengthened their ability to hold land, pass it to heirs, and participate more fully in public life. Where otherwise qualified, it also gave them the right to vote.

For the Peterman brothers, the 1765 naturalization was a declaration of permanence. They were no longer simply Palatine immigrants who had found their way into Pennsylvania. They were becoming legally recognized landholding men, tying their futures, their children, and their property to the colony.

The date gives Peter’s American life a clear legal rhythm. In 1748, he entered Philadelphia as a foreign-born passenger aboard the ship Patience and took the required oaths to the government. In 1765, he returned to Philadelphia with his brothers Michael and Daniel to secure naturalization. By 1776 and 1778, he was serving Windsor Township as an Overseer of the Poor during the Revolutionary era. His American story moved from immigrant arrival, to legal belonging, to local civic responsibility.

A Reformed Network West of the River

Peter’s successful settlement in Pennsylvania was probably not accidental. German-speaking immigrants rarely survived and prospered in isolation. They moved through networks — kinship, language, religion, occupation, neighborhood, and church. For a man from Mörzheim, the German Reformed world would have offered more than Sunday worship. It could provide information, introductions, marriage ties, baptismal sponsors, land knowledge, and trust.

The Kreutz Creek region of York County was one of the important German Reformed settlement areas west of the Susquehanna. Farther south and west, the congregation associated with Johann Thomas Schley in Frederick, Maryland, belonged to the same broader German Reformed immigrant world. These communities did not sit behind hard boundaries. Families moved, visited, sponsored baptisms, married across neighborhoods, and followed roads connecting Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Peter likely benefited from such networks during his early American years. He had arrived ahead of the wider Peterman family movement and appears to have spent roughly two years learning the land and the people before other family members joined or settled nearby. In family terms, he became an advance man — not merely the first to arrive, but the one who helped make arrival practical for others.

The Peterman connection with neighbor Martin Schultz belongs in this same context. The Schultz neighborhood reminds us that land settlement was never only about acreage. It was about nearby families, shared language, worship, roads, fields, marriages, and mutual dependence. A newcomer needed neighbors who could help him understand where to settle, where to worship, how to buy or lease, how to clear land, and how to enter the local order.

Rev. Jacob Lischy and the Peterman Baptisms

The German Reformed world Peter Peterman entered was not quiet, settled, or fully organized. It was restless. Ministers rode circuits. Congregations met in homes, barns, schoolhouses, and unfinished churches. Families who wanted baptism, communion, preaching, and church order sometimes waited weeks or months for a minister. In that unsettled religious landscape, one of the most vivid figures was Rev. Jacob Lischy.

Lischy was a Swiss-born preacher whose career crossed denominational boundaries. He arrived in Pennsylvania under Moravian influence, preached among Reformed congregations, and became one of the most controversial ministers in colonial Pennsylvania. His circuit included York County, Adams County, and Maryland, and his German pastoral record preserved the names of thousands of people between 1744 and 1769. For families like the Petermans, such a record is not merely church history. It is the kind of source that preserves baptisms, marriages, sponsors, and neighborhood connections otherwise lost.

Peter’s connection to Rev. Lischy was not merely regional. It appears in the baptismal life of the family itself. Maria Barbara Peterman, born in 1754 in York County, daughter of Peter Peterman and Dorothea Kahn/Kann, was baptized by Rev. Jacob Lischy. That baptism places Peter’s household directly within Lischy’s ministry. It was not simply that Peter lived near German Reformed congregations; his child was brought into the sacramental life of that community through one of its best-known itinerant ministers.

Additional Peterman baptisms appear in the same Lischy orbit. On 21 March 1756, Rev. Lischy baptized Johann Adam Peterman, and records also point to the baptism of Johann Georg Peterman in the late 1750s. These entries appear in the York County Reformed circuit connected with congregations such as Canadochly in Lower Windsor Township and Kreutz Creek in Hellam Township, both places associated with Lischy’s pastoral work and with the early Peterman settlement world.

These baptisms matter because they show continuity. Peter did not merely arrive in Pennsylvania, acquire land, and disappear into farm life. His household participated in the German Reformed religious network. Children were baptized. Sponsors stood with families. Ministers rode circuits from congregation to congregation. The Petermans entered a community where faith, language, kinship, and neighborhood trust were woven together.

Through these records, Lischy becomes more than a colorful preacher in the background. He becomes one of the ministers through whom the first American Peterman generation entered church life west of the Susquehanna.

The Ancient Land West of the Susquehanna

The land Peter chose was not empty. It was old land.

West of the Susquehanna, fertile limestone soils, natural springs, streams, wildlife, fish, eels, edible plants, nuts, berries, roots, and medicinal plants had made the region useful and desirable long before European settlers described it as plantations, townships, tracts, and perches. Native peoples had lived in and used the Susquehanna region for thousands of years. The Susquehannock were part of the later recorded Indigenous history of this river country, but the human story of the land long predated European deeds and surveys.

This is one of the central truths of the Peterman land story: settlers often chose the same good land because Native people had already known it was good land.

For Peter and later Petermans, the land promised grain, livestock, orchards, springs, household security, and inheritance. For Indigenous people, the same landscape was part of a much older world of homeland, travel, hunting, fishing, farming, gathering, and memory. A truthful family history must hold both realities together. Peter was an immigrant father seeking a future. He was also part of a colonial movement that transformed Native land into surveyed property.

That complexity does not diminish the Peterman story. It makes it more honest.

“Beginning at the Plantation of Peter Peterman”

Peter’s plantation became a known landmark in York County. George R. Prowell’s 1907 History of York County, Pennsylvania preserves a township boundary description that begins with Peter himself:

The full description ran from Peter Peterman’s plantation along the road to David Hunter’s, toward Shrewsbury Township, along Chanceford to the Susquehanna, up the river to Hellam Township, and along the ridges of hills back to Peter Peterman’s plantation. Presiding Justice Thomas Armor ordered that the newly described township be called Windsor.

A farm used as a boundary point tells us something important. Peter’s place was not hidden or incidental. His plantation stood in the mental map of the neighborhood. It was connected to roads, ridges, the Susquehanna, adjoining townships, and the formation of Windsor itself. The immigrant who had crossed on the Patience had become a landholder whose farm helped define local geography.

The property had a name: Whiskey Mill.

That name gives the land a personality beyond legal acreage. Whether the name came from a mill, a distilling association, a local feature, or neighborhood usage, it anchors Peter’s homestead in memory. “Whiskey Mill” turns the plantation from an abstract tract into a place.

Dorothea, Children, and the Church Web

Around 1754, Peter married Maria Dorothea Kann, also appearing in records as Kahn or similar spellings. Their household grew rapidly and became part of the German-speaking church and family network of York County.

Their fourteen recorded births are listed below; thirteen surviving children were named in the 1782 Orphans’ Court petition:

• Maria Barbara Peterman, born September 1754, York County; baptized by Rev. Jacob Lischy; married Johannes/John Staab on 17 December 1782; living after 1790.
• John Peterman, born about 1756, York County; married Susannah, surname unknown; living after 1830.
• Peter Peterman, born before 21 March 1756, York County; died after 1800, probably Frederick County, Maryland; married Anna Maria, surname unknown, after 1783.
• Daniel Peterman, born 1757 in Windsor Township; died before 23 February 1814 in Manheim Township; married Christina Catherine Staab on 27 August 1786.
• George Michael Peterman, born 28 September 1759, York County; died 21 January 1835 in Reading Township, Adams County; married Mary, surname unknown.
• Margaret Peterman, born 16 May 1762, York County.
• Catherine Peterman, born about 1763, York County.
• Anna Maria Peterman, born 10 October 1765 in Windsor Township; died 24 August 1826 in Smithfield, Huntingdon County; married John Heckendorn about 1795.
• Magdalena Peterman, born 10 October 1765, York County.
• Sophia Peterman, born about 1767, York County; married Nicholas Anthony.
• Henry Peterman, born 23 July 1767, York County; died before 1772.
• Maria Elizabeth Peterman, born 29 September 1770, York County.
• Henry Peterman, born 5 October 1772, York County; died 17 September 1827 in Crawford County, Pennsylvania; married Julia Ann Hart on 20 May 1797.
• Julianna Peterman, born 28 January 1775, York County; died 6 May 1863, York County; married John Shue and was buried in Stone Church Cemetery, Codorus Township.

The repeated name Henry suggests a familiar eighteenth-century practice. When a child died young, the name might be given again to a later child, carrying both grief and hope forward.

The baptismal records do more than name children. They show the social web around the family. Sponsors were not casual witnesses. They were trusted kin, friends, or neighbors who linked households through faith and obligation. In the Peterman family, these sponsor relationships later help solve difficult genealogical questions.

Civic Trust in Revolutionary York County

Peter’s records also place him in public life during the Revolutionary period. At a Court of Special and Private Sessions of the Peace held at York on 25 March 1776, George Allig and Peter Peterman were appointed Overseers of the Poor for Windsor Township. The 1777 Quarter Sessions docket book was lost, but an identical entry appears again for 5 March 1778.

This does not make Peter a battlefield soldier. His service was civic rather than military. But it does show that he was recognized by the court and his neighbors as a responsible local man during the Revolutionary era.

The position of Overseer of the Poor was not ornamental. It involved township responsibility for people in need — the aged, sick, widowed, orphaned, disabled, impoverished, or otherwise dependent. In a rural community, this was both practical and moral work. The appointment placed Peter among trusted men charged with preserving local order and community obligation during a time of political upheaval.

It also gives the family a patriot-era connection broader than military service. Peter’s American life began in 1748 with an oath to the British Crown. By 1776 and 1778, he was serving in a township helping govern itself in a revolutionary world.

Books, Bees, and Whiskey Mill

Peter died without a will, but the later inventory of his estate gives us a glimpse into the life that had been built at Whiskey Mill. Inventories can be dry documents, filled with values and objects, but they often preserve what no family story remembers. In Peter’s case, the inventory points beyond acreage. It suggests a working household with tools, goods, books, and beekeeping supplies.

The books are especially important. They do not prove that every member of the household could read, but they do suggest that reading had a place in the family’s life. In a German Reformed household, books might have included religious works, devotional material, hymnals, catechisms, or practical volumes. Their presence fits the world Peter and Dorothea inhabited — a world where parish records, baptismal sponsors, church teaching, land papers, and estate proceedings mattered. The Petermans were people of land, but they were also people whose lives were preserved by written records and whose faith community valued the written word.

The beekeeping supplies are equally revealing. Bees belonged naturally to a farm economy that depended on many small sources of value. Honey offered sweetness in a world before cheap refined sugar. Beeswax could be used for candles, household needs, or trade. Keeping bees required attention, patience, and seasonal knowledge. It suggests that Peter’s plantation was not merely a field of grain or a tract of acreage. It was a diversified household economy, where food, light, labor, and marketable products came from many parts of the farm.

The name Whiskey Mill, the presence of books, and the beekeeping supplies bring Peter’s home into view. Here was a place where land, faith, work, literacy, food, and family came together. The estate record does not tell us how the rooms looked, what Dorothea cooked, what hymns were sung, or who handled the bees. But it opens a narrow door into the household.

Through that door we can see something more human than a deed.

The Plantation Divided

Letters of administration for Peter’s estate were issued to Dorothea Peterman and Jacob Lefever on 15 October 1778. Peter had died intestate, leaving no will to guide the division of his property. His personal inventory was valued at fifteen pounds, four shillings, and five pence. That figure should not be confused with the value of the land itself. Later court proceedings show that the plantation represented the larger wealth of the estate.

On 26 March 1782, John Peterman, eldest son and heir at law of Peter Peterman the elder, petitioned the York County Orphans’ Court. The petition stated that Peter had died owning a plantation and tract of 200 acres and 46 perches, with the usual allowance, adjoining the lands of Michael Peterman, John Strickler, George Bard, Peter Peters, and the heirs of John Marks.

The petition named Peter’s widow, Dorothea, and his lawful children: John, Daniel, Peter, Michael, Henry, Sophia, Barbara, Margaret, Mary, Catharine, Magdalena, Elizabeth, and Juliana.

The plantation was valued at 320 pounds. John, as eldest son, was permitted to take the farm, but he did not receive it free of obligation. He was required to pay his mother a yearly sum and to give the other twelve children their lawful portions.

In this moment, the family story becomes both emotional and legal. A father had died. A widow had to be supported. Thirteen children had claims. The land that represented arrival now had to be turned into inheritance.

The farm did not remain long with John. On 11 March 1783, John Peterman sold the 200 acres and 46 perches to Jacob Lefever and his wife Catherine Peterman Lefever, daughter of Michael Peterman. In that transaction, Peter’s plantation moved through kinship as well as sale. The land that had marked Peter’s American beginning passed into the hands of another household tied to the Peterman family network.

The sale also tied Peter’s line back into Michael’s family. Peter had crossed first and established the American foothold. Michael’s line would carry the direct ancestral story forward through York County, John and Barbara’s move to Ohio, Jacob and Mary Ann’s move to Iowa, and the later Peterman farm generations. The families were not separate threads. They were interwoven by land, marriage, neighborhood, and inheritance.

Dorothea’s Last Years

Dorothea lived on after Peter’s death. She prepared her own will in May 1790, and it was proven on 9 May of that year. She appears to have lived with her daughter Barbara, who had married Johannes Staab. When Dorothea died, she left her property to Barbara.

That final act gives Dorothea a presence of her own. Peter’s records emphasize ship, oath, land, township, civic duty, and estate. Dorothea’s last records bring the story back to household, daughter, care, and memory.

She bore and raised children in the German Reformed world west of the Susquehanna. She outlived her husband, watched the plantation pass through legal division, and ended her life connected to a daughter’s home.

Peter planted the American branch. Dorothea preserved the household after him.

The 1790 Peter Peterman Record

A 1790 census entry for Peter Peterman appears in Chanceford Township, York County, showing one male over sixteen, one male under sixteen, and one female. Because Hans Peter Peterman the elder died before 15 October 1778, this census entry cannot refer to him. It most likely belongs to his son Peter or another related Peter in the York County family network.

This distinction matters because early Peterman records often repeat the same names across generations. Peter, John, Michael, Henry, Anna Maria, Barbara, and Catherine appear again and again. The family historian must move carefully, using dates, spouses, sponsors, land, neighbors, and estate records to separate one person from another.

In this case, the 1790 census is not evidence of Peter the immigrant still living. It is evidence that the name Peter Peterman continued in the region after his death.

Why Peter’s Chapter Matters

Hans Peter Peterman’s story belongs near the beginning of the family book because it explains how the American branch first took root. He was the eldest son who left Mörzheim. His younger brother Hans Velten Petermann remained in Germany. Peter crossed the Atlantic aboard the Patience, entered Philadelphia through a courthouse oath, returned to Philadelphia with his brothers for naturalization, found his way into the German Reformed settlement networks west of the Susquehanna, established the plantation known as Whiskey Mill, served his township during the Revolutionary era, and left a family whose names fill the Orphans’ Court record.

His farm was important enough to help define Windsor Township. His children were baptized into the Reformed church frontier. His inventory was personal enough to show books and bees. His estate was large enough to require legal division among a widow and thirteen children. His family was connected enough that baptismal sponsors, Staab marriages, Heckendorn children, and Lefever land transfers still help prove relationships generations later.

The Peterman story in America begins there: not with an empty wilderness, but with an eldest son, an ancient landscape, a ship called Patience, a courthouse oath, and land west of the Susquehanna.

Michael Peterman would carry the direct ancestral line forward through York County and the Revolutionary generation. John and Barbara would move the family to Ohio. Jacob and Mary Ann would carry it to Iowa. John Pierce and Mary Deliah would root it in the prairie. Elmo and Jessie would carry the farm family into the twentieth century.

But before those later chapters, Peter crossed first.

He was the family’s first American threshold.

Sources and Notes for Final Verification

This draft is designed for website review and includes source-note placeholders. Before final publication, the following sources should be verified, formatted consistently, and, where possible, linked or cited in a source-note section.

• Greg Peterman, Family Group Sheet for Hans Peter Peterman, Family Tree Maker report, 8 pages, generated 16 September 2026.
• Mörzheim baptismal records for Hans Peter Petermann, born 23 December 1720, baptized 29 December 1720.
• Ship Patience passenger and oath lists, Philadelphia, 16 September 1748; Captain John Brown/Browne; Rotterdam, last from Cowes.
• History of the ship Patience, including tonnage, guns, crew, and later/earlier voyages.
• Naturalization record for Peter, Michael, and Daniel Peterman, Philadelphia, 2 July 1765.
• Rev. Jacob Lischy pastoral register and related York County Reformed church records.
• George R. Prowell, History of York County, Pennsylvania, Vol. I, p. 1100, Windsor Township boundary description.
• York County Orphans’ Court Docket E, p. 8, 26 March 1782, petition of John Peterman, eldest son and heir of Peter Peterman the elder.
• York County estate/administration records for Peter Peterman, including letters of administration to Dorothea Peterman and Jacob Lefever, 15 October 1778.
• Records concerning Dorothea Peterman’s 1790 will and daughter Barbara Peterman Staab.
• Research notes on the Anna Maria Peterman / Heckendorn identification and sponsor patterns.