{"id":3777,"date":"2020-04-03T21:03:28","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T21:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2020-04-03T21:03:28","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T21:03:28","slug":"hessian-soldiers-in-lovettsville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/hessian-soldiers-in-lovettsville\/","title":{"rendered":"Hessian Soldiers in Lovettsville"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hessian Soldiers in Lovettsville<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u00a0By Edward Spannaus<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Hessian<\/a>
Hessian Jaeger (riflemen)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During the American Revolution, tens of thousands of German soldiers were sent by their rulers to fight against the American colonists on behalf of the British crown. Thousands of them defected and stayed in America \u00a0to build a better life.\u00a0 Some of them came to the German Settlement in Loudoun County, to the area now known as Lovettsville.<\/p>\n

Among the dozen or more Hessian soldiers who settled here and raised families, are names familiar to us today, such as Abel, Arnold, Barnhouse, Dinges, and possibly Rickard.<\/p>\n

There have been many stories over the years about Hessians and Loudoun County. There are stories about Hessians captured at the Battle of Saratoga being marched south through Loudoun, \u00a0that some worked on local farms, and even that they were camped at Noland\u2019s Ferry and built the brick warehouse there. Others have claimed, improbably, that Hessians were key in founding the \u201cGerman Settlement.\u201d\u00a0 Here, we will confine ourselves to what can be reasonably documented about those Hessian prisoners who actually settled here, a story that, to our knowledge, has never been told.<\/p>\n

Who were the \u201cHessians\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, to clear one thing up:\u00a0 these Germans were not \u201cmercenaries,\u201d that is, soldiers-of-fortune who hired themselves out for money.\u00a0 They are better called \u201cauxiliaries\u201d or \u201csubsidy troops,\u201d since they were part of standing, regular armies in continental Europe whose existence was subsidized by the British monarchy in lieu of maintaining a large standing army at home.<\/p>\n

As was the practice at the time, Britain, France, and other imperial powers made treaty arrangements with the rulers of a number of the states or principalities in central Europe, known at the time as the Holy Roman Empire (or, officially, the \u201cHoly Roman Empire of the German Nation).\u00a0 As Voltaire famously quipped, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.\u00a0 Nor, we could add, was Germany a nation at the time.<\/p>\n

The majority of the German auxiliaries were from the principality of Hesse-Kassel, whose army was among the best-trained and largest in continental Europe.\u00a0 Of the almost 38,000 German troops who fought for the British in North America, about 26,000 were from Hesse-Kassel. Together with another 2,000 or so from Hesse-Hanau, it\u2019s easy to see why all the German subsidy soldiers were lumped together as \u201cHessians.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rulers of the principalities which sent troops to North America under treaty arrangements with the British, were (listed in roughly north-to-south order in present-day Germany):<\/p>\n