The Second Germanna Settlement and Their Vaught Neighbors

The Second Germanna Colony in Virginia had a large number of "escapees" from their original settlement after their indentured servitude to Governor Spotswood expired.  This group of Germans who had traveled across the Atlantic together and toiled together for years, on attaining freedom, picked up stakes and moved as a block towards the Robinson River.

Coincidentally, Deep Run, the little stream that our ancestor, John Paul Vaught settled along, is a tributary of the Robinson River.  Because of the location of the Hebron Lutheran Church (a few miles southwest of the Vaught homsetead and just on the eastern border of the new Germanna colonists), I knew the Vaughts and the Germanna settlers were in the same neighborhood, but the for the longest time, I hadn’t been able to figure out how they fit together.

When I discovered that John Paul Vaught's daughter Mary Catherine had married Christopher Moyer (son of Germanna colonists George and Barbara Moyer) I knew the connection was deeper than a shared faith and a shared church.

Then I discovered in my files a map drawn in 1940 by a man named D. R. Carpenter, to whom I will be forever grateful.  The map was in a small booklet, a facebook of sorts for a Germanna colony reunion in the middle part of the last century.  The Map was of the settlement of the Germanna “survivors” on the banks of the Robinson River in 1740.

This wonderful map had on it a few roads that were still in existence, namely Highway 29 and State Road 609.  These roads were also present in the maps I had of the Vaught lands at that time.  I found a third map online and using Photoshop, combined the three to extend the Carpenter map into my Vaught map.  I added color to outline better the Germanna and Vaught/Clements settlements, plus Deep Run and the Robinson River.  Presto change-o and we have a combined map of the Germanna and Vaught settlements in 1740, complete with modern roads for reference (should anyone want to visit today as I did in 1998).

Seeing all these families so close together really put things in perspective for me.  The Vaughts weren’t just out in the wilderness---they had neighbors, lots of them, and they were all German and likely from the same (or relatively close) areas back in the Old Country.  It suddenly made all the sense in the world that the Moyers and Vaughts would link their families through marriage---they were neighbors!