A Leinbach/Lineback/Linebaugh Genealogy
 
   
   Johannes Leinbach (1712-1766) house in Wachovia.
 
  The Road to Wachovia
 
The Moravians

About the time Johannes came to America, a small band of people belonging to the peculiar religious society called Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Bretheren) left Moravia in hopes of escaping the persecution that had plagued them for nearly three hundred years. At the settlement of Herrnhut that they built in Saxony on the estate of their patron Count Zinzendorf, the Moravians quickly fashioned a new social order as a bastion for their rigidly structured secular and spiritual lives. But in the vast expanses of North America they saw the opportunity to establish new Moravian centers based on the Herrnhut experience. And the aboriginal Indians abounding in America were ideal candidates for their ongoing missionary work among the heathen.

Lead by August Gottlieb Spangenberg, a small group from Herrnhut began a mission in the colony of Georgia in 1735. But England and Spain were soon at war and Georgia lay squarely between the English Carolinas and Spanish Florida. Being conscientious objectors to bearing arms made the Moravians vulnerable. By 1740 the ill-fated Georgia settlement was abandoned and the Moravians moved north to Pennsylvania to built the towns of Nazareth and Bethlehem on land they had bought there.

Shortly thereafter, the Moravians began forming other congregations in neighboring areas. When visiting in the Oley Valley located some thirty miles to the south and west, the Moravian bishop David Nitschmann was a regular guest at the Leinbach home. Never one to let his age be a deterrent, Johannes Leimbach soon joined with them. In 1742, at the age of 68, he was installed as Vorsteher of the Oley Brethren's Congregation by the visiting Count Zinzendorf (shown at left). Just five years later he would be dead but by then his family was thoroughly integrated into the Society of Brethren. And this familial association with the Brethren ultimately would send Leinbachs to North Carolina.


 

The Immigrants The Road To Wachovia The Pennsylvanians
The German-American Collection