Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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its significance: Moravian Run. I wondered about the name. Perhaps it was simply named after immigrants from the region of Moravia, as were many mining communities and places in the area that retained traces of their ethnically segregated roots. But I puzzled over its parallel with the name of the Moravian Church, the German church community that had founded Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz, Pennsylvania, in the eighteenth century. There were no Moravian churches around my home, so the connection seemed highly unlikely. Still, it was a mystery that continued to intrigue me.
Less mysterious perhaps was a beautiful, secluded island in the Moshannon Creek about one mile further east of Peale. My mother called it Post’s Island, and often recounted stories of my Swedish grandfather, Morton Erickson, who loved to spear fish from the island and hunt in the forests along the Moshannon. In the late nineteenth century, when the first Swedish settlers came into the area, the waters around Post’s Island were exceedingly clear and teeming with fish, otters, water striders, and mink. White-tailed deer and elk roamed the river’s edge, and bears haunted the deeper parts of the forest. The acoustic ecology of the Moshannon forests was vibrant with animals, plants, insects, and the geophony of weather, water, soil, and rock. My grandfather was a good singer. I imagined him singing the latest gospel hymns while sitting on the banks of Post’s Island hoping to lure a fish. That was before the days of Peale and other mining communities that caused the Moshannon to run red with sulphur.
I never wondered about the naming of Post’s Island. It seemed unremarkable and rather ordinary. But many years later, I would learn about the man Post and the journey that had taken him, like me and my grandfather, along the Moshannon. I would learn of another grave that lay under the remains of Peale, never marked by a stone, which also carried the history of human settlement and passage in that place at the confluence of the Moravian and the Moshannon. It was a time when the island and the creek had received their names and when the riparian forests had echoed with the songs of even more ancient ancestors. But these were mysteries that would take many years to solve.
| Ein GOttes närrgen | God’s little fool |
| ist schon so imaginatif | Is so beautifully imaginative |
| ins Lämmleins seine Pleura tief: | Inside the little Lamb’s side-hole deep: |
| kein fischgen schwimmt, | No little fishes swim, |
| kein vöglein singt, | no little birds sing, |
| kein bäumgen blüht, | No little trees bloom, |
| kein hirschgen springt | no little deer spring |
| so applicirts das selgen | So applies the soul itself to thee, |
| auf sich unds wunden-höhlgen.1 | And to your little wounds-hole. |
THE FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND RIVER VALLEYS OF PENNSYLVANIA had been named and mapped by Native American cultures for thousands of years before the colonial era.2 Long before Pennsylvania became a territory ceded by Charles II of England to Admiral William Penn to discharge his debts, this was a landscape that had been traversed and interpreted, worshipped, storied, and sung by the people who lived there. Native places on the land and water were often endowed with names that carried mnemonic, descriptive qualities: Ahkokwesink (The Place of Mushrooms) or Ahsenesink (The Place of Rocks). The acoustic environments of forests, fields, and streams were also remembered with names that spoke of their sounds: Chekhonesink (The Place Where There Is a Gentle Sound) or Oniska (The Ringing Rocks). These place names were sounded metaphors that embedded generations of memories of animals and birds, the natural topography, or the sounds of falling water and lithophonic rocks. They were charted and mapped in rock cairns and painted trees, bark scrolls and songs. Places became intertwined with their names. To sound them was to honor and remember the ancestors who had once claimed that ancient landscape with words.
In the eighteenth century, this familiar landscape became a liminal space, wedged between the competing land claims of France, Great Britain, and the Six Nations. It would be claimed under a new name, Penn’s Woods, or “muni khikhakan eheluwensink Pennsylvania (This State Which Is Called Pennsylvania].” In this renamed landscape, both settlers and Native peoples sought to construct new and changing identities in response to each other and to rapid changes in their natural, political, and cultural environments. Along with an influx of immigrants from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, seeking new opportunities in Penn’s Colony, the first Moravian missionaries arrived in Pennsylvania in 1740. Within two years, they had established communities in the region around the Lechewuekink (Lehigh) and Lenapei Sipu (Delaware) Rivers.
Confronted with new and unfamiliar landscapes, European settlers, including Moravian missionaries, often fell back on familiar patterns of naming and claiming space that would transform Native country into a European-inflected landscape.3
Hearing the Forest
The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals.
Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle
Our interactions with the natural environment are framed by the maps we draw, the stories we tell, and the songs we sing. As historian Simon Schama has argued, “landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.”4 Whether those landscapes are forest, grassland, mountain, sea coast, or other setting, the natural environment is the most fundamental place that we inhabit. It is in these environments that we develop our understandings of the world: attachments, connections, meanings, experiences, belongings, and exclusions.5 These simultaneously imagined and physical landscapes constitute the reality of our human experience on