Thirteen German families landed at Philadelphia on October 6, 1683, and within weeks they had begun clearing land six miles north of the town for a settlement they called Germantown. They came from Krefeld on the Rhine, sailing on the Concord. Most were Quakers or Mennonites. Their agent, Francis Daniel Pastorius, had crossed ahead of them and bought about 15,000 acres from William Penn's Frankfurt Land Company, and he picked the ground himself: a ridge of good soil with a stream running past it.
The reason was straightforward. Krefeld tolerated Quakers and Mennonites better than most German states did, but the families had been fined and jailed for refusing to swear oaths or carry arms, and some faced the loss of property their children would otherwise have inherited. Penn's colony offered something none of them had at home, which was toleration written into the frame of government, cheap land, and a say in making the laws. The settlers took up narrow house lots along a single road with their fields running out behind them, the pattern they had known along the Rhine.
They were weavers by trade. Linen came first, then paper and printing, and by the 1740s Germantown was turning out books in German for readers across the colonies. The settlement also produced one document that outlasted its linen trade. In 1688 four residents, among them Pastorius, sent a petition against slavery to their Quaker meeting. The meeting passed it up to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which declined to act, and the paper stayed in a drawer for more than a century.
It was found again in the 1840s by abolitionists looking for precedents, and it is still the earliest known statement against slavery written in North America. Germantown stopped being a separate town in 1854, when it was swallowed by the city of Philadelphia. Its main street still runs along the same road the Krefeld families laid out.