Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
Living back in the mighty Shenandoah
Article of October 7, 1999
As an early fall air begins to make its sweep across the blue hills of the land of the Shenandoah, so too do I sweep in and take up residence once more in the place that I have always called home. After 10 years of service in the Navy, I have joined the staff of the Frontier Culture museum in Staunton. So then, as an added inspiration in writing these articles, I now have as the most perfect surroundings in my work environment. Just within sight of my office window weaves a magnificent chestnut split rail fence, which, in fact, is just in front of the American homestead that portrays the sythesis of the three cultures that helped to make-up the Valley - the Germans, Scotch-Irish and English.
But before I ramble on, I thought it appropriate to give a brief description of the area from whence a large part of Page County's Germanic ancestry immigrated, The Palatinate.
Known best as German PFALZ, The Palatinate area included the lands that lay on both sides of the Middle Rhine River between its Main and Neckar tributaries. Once the land of the County Palatine (a title held by a leading seculiar prince of the Holy Roman Empire), the land was actually divided between two small territorial clusters: the Rhenish, or Lower Palatinate, and the Upper Palatinate.
Overseen by Hermann I, as the first Count Palatine in 945, The Palatinate was continuosly ruled by his descendants until after 1155. The title "Count Palatine" was not a hereditary one, so following the line of Hermann I, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs took over as ruling Count Palatine. In 1356, the Count Palatine was made an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire with the Golden or papal bull (an official document from the Pope and sealed with the official Papal seal called a Bulla). But during the Reformation, the Palatinate accepted Protestantism and became the foremost Calvinist region in Germany.
Following the publication of Martin Luther's 95 Theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, many Lutherans immediately fell under severe religious persecution for their beliefs and concentrated as a people of one belief in The Palatinate. In addition to those people relocated from within Germany, the population of The Palatinate also swelled with new groups of Lutherans from Holland and Switzerland.
In 1619, the Protestant Elector Palatine Frederick V (1596-1632), also known as the "Winter King," became King of Bohemia and the clash between Catholics and Protestants in Germany escalated with the Thirty Years War. While not the exact cause of the war, Frederick's ascension to the throne was the "straw that broke the camel's back" in the long-running political and religious hatreds established over the years. Frederick was driven from Bohemia in 1623 and deposed as Elector Palatine, but the war continued through 1648 and devastated the Palatine country and other parts of Germany. As the warring armies rolled across The Palatinate, the residents suffered immeasurably, not only from constant pillaging and plundering by the French army, but also at the hands of desperate and unpaid "friendly" armies.
Though the Thirty-Years War drew to a close, the citizens of The Palatinate were yet to see a real peace as the War of the League of Augsburg (1688) and the War of the Grand Alliance (1689) loomed on the horizon, both lasting until 1697. More to follow in another article.
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