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![]() Johannes Leinbach (1712-1766) house in Wachovia. |
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The Road to Wachovia |
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The Planters Farming in North Carolina has always had its limitations. The relatively mild climate we enjoy even today placed North Carolina on the warm, southern edge of the tobacco belt and on the cool, northern edge of the region producing the big cash crops of cotton, rice, indigo, and sugar cane. Before the modern-day system of farm-to-market roads, geography had an equally limiting role. The shallow rivers made intrastate transportation of bulky crops difficult and the Outer Banks made entering North Carolina ports risky. In the early days, any farm produce that could be sold for cash money usually had to be hauled many miles to distant markets in Virginia and South Carolina. Once there, the farmer was at the mercy of the merchants. Because few were willing to travel all those miles by horse and wagon only to return home with unsold crops, the North Carolina farmer was usually compelled to sell his produce in a low-priced buyer's market. As a result, the goal of the early farmer in North Carolina was more likely to be the sustenance of life on a family farm rather than the accumulation of wealth on a plantation. Indeed, Freideric Marshall had observed early on that: "... the man who has a larger farm than he can work with the aid of wife and children cannot expect to profit by it." The five sons of Johannes Leinbach who came to North Carolina clearly faced that reality. Each son took a wife, raised a family, and made farming his means of livelihood. While some fared better than others, none could be said to have prospered. Johann Gottlieb "There is ... a contract between John Leinbach and Jacob Dietz, dated September 4, 1775, which arranges for the exchange of the lands owned by the two parties John Leinbach sold Dietz his 400 acre tract on Muddy Creek, two miles above Bethania, valued at £400 lawful money of North Carolina. In exchange Dietz sold Leinbach the tract on which he was living, on Ellis Creek, valued at Lb 115: together with certain "cattles and sheeps," which "two honest men" were to appraise after Dietz had cared for them over winter, also a black mare, six years old, also one iron stove, and the remainder was to be paid on time." Four years later, after collecting the money still owed by the Dietz family for the original 400-acre tract he had sold to John Dietz, Johann Gottlieb resold the Dietz land to Phillip Schneider for the same £115 he had paid for it. The following day, on July 14, 1781, the Bethania diary notes: "John Leinbach, who came to town with his family this evening and who is on his way to Pennsylvania, offered to take letters." Nothing more was ever recorded in the Moravian records about him or his family. Ludwig Apparently no more a farmer at heart than his older brother, Ludwig sold half his acreage to his brother-in-law John Schaub in 1775 and the balance (including the homeplace he and his brothers had helped their father build) to his brother Benjamin in 1776. Four years later he purchased 220 acres of land on Stuart's Branch between Bethania and Bethabara. But in another four years he moved "into the neighborhood of Bethabara" where he may have helped out in the tavern operated there by John Schaub. His boys were drawn to the successful new Moravian town of Salem where they learned trades: Johannes became a shoemaker; Joseph, a shoemaker, saw-miller, and cabinetmaker; Christian, a papermiller; and Peter, the youngest, a coppersmith. By the time of his death in 1800, Ludwig's land holdings apparently had dwindled to a mere 27 acres. It remained for Jacob Noll, the neighbor who married his widow in 1803, to repay the debt to the congregational diaconie that he had accumulated. Indeed, farming hardly proved profitable to Ludwig. Abraham Benjamin Joseph ![]() Whether the sons ever really shared their father's dream is doubtful. After a single generation the individual "plantations" were all but gone. As they made their ways through the difficult times of our country's early years, many of Johannes's children and grandchildren drifted away from Wachovia and the Brethren. But in the end it was these early Leinbach planters and their children who endured the hardships of life in the remote and largely agrarian community of Wachovia to become the forefathers of the many successive generations of Leinbach descendants in North Carolina. |
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The Road To Wachovia Prologue |