Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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of her window at the nursing home, and she looked at the pictures of her grandsons and thought of all of the things they might someday accomplish in life. And she talked with my dad and me on the phone, many conversations both joyful and heartbreaking. And then, she lost even those things. She was no longer able to make a phone call, and the narcotics she had been given to ease the pain of two broken legs took away her mind. At the very end, she returned to the place she had always loved—in her mind she came back to her home. When I visited her and sat by her bedside at the nursing home, her thoughts were far away at the edge of the Moshannon and the Moravian.
As my mother’s life ebbed away, I struggled to finish this book. The gradual loss of my mother coupled with the loss of the farm that I had also deeply loved made the prospect of writing an academic book seem remote and almost unimaginable. On March 17, 2017, I made the painful decision to sell the farm. The rights to use that land passed to a new family. And, on June 10, my mother passed away quietly in her sleep. As I struggled to cope with what seemed like interminable loss and little gain, I wondered how I could possibly write this book. Surprisingly, I found that creating the book became an unforeseen journey of healing and discovery—the telling of two stories, separate but intimately intertwined. Through the writings of my Moravian ancestor, Johann Jacob Eyerly, and other songs, diaries, maps, and community records kept and maintained by the Moravian Church since the eighteenth century, I gained the historical perspective necessary to craft the narrative of this book. What I did not sense was that in crafting that narrative, in studying those documents, in seeking to hear those sounds again, I would also come to a deeper understanding of the history of my own family and the very place that my mother and I had both loved. In telling that history, I discovered my own.
Writing this book has also challenged me to consider how my own family participated in the history of the Moravian missions in the eighteenth century. It has challenged me to consider what it means to be a descendant of a European Moravian. History is never objective. It is dependent on personal experience, and individual and collective interpretations of written and musical sources, material culture, land usage and property rights, and the legacy of human encounters over many generations. Understanding the legacy of my own ancestors involved getting out into Pennsylvania’s places and understanding them as place-worlds that held meaning in the present and in the past. It involved learning about historic musical traditions, songs, and soundscapes, and why those sounds had mattered to the people who made or heard them. It involved coming to terms with stories of heartbreak, terrible pain, and loss, and acknowledging stories of hope and survivance. In the process, I learned the many histories of the place my family called “home.”
Every farm, every community, every town and city in Pennsylvania is built on indigenous lands. Pennsylvania’s places have long and complex living histories embedded with relationships and networks, memories, sounds, and ideas. It was important to me to consider how I would deal with these histories as a scholar descended from European settlers. How would I address the legacies of colonialism in the history of Pennsylvania, in my own home community, and indeed within my own family? The work we do as historians can have ramifications that may affect Native communities who have a stake in these histories. We are all bound by relationships and networks, by territories, by treaties, and by the actions of the past. I have been especially inspired by the work of Lisa Brooks and Daniel Heath Justice to create a new narrative of Pennsylvania’s history, and indeed of Pennsylvania’s soundscapes, that acknowledges past legacies and traumas, and that moves forward to chart new stories that are inclusive and honest. I cannot claim to have absolutely accomplished that task in this book, but as Justice has argued, the process of scholarship is permissive of many paths of inquiry and allows for a process of “becoming” rather than simply “arriving.”9 This book is not a final answer, but a journey to understand Pennsylvania in the past and the present through the auditory experience of sound.
The journey of writing the book has also simultaneously been a process of coming to terms with the grief of losing my mother and the childhood home that we shared. My mother and I were not the first to love the land at the confluence of the Moravian and the Moshannon, and we would not be the last. With that knowledge came the first signs of healing. Rather than a final end to the story of my own family’s relationship with this place, I sensed a narrative that stretched compellingly into the past and into the present and future—a narrative that was embedded within the many stories and songs that had been and would be told in this place. Where I hoped to perceive traces of soundscapes long lost, I found instead the ongoing and ever-changing soundscapes of the Pennsylvania Wilds.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the complex network of trails that Eyerly followed, see Paul A. W. Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2005).
2. Johann Jacob Eyerly, Jr., “Ein Bericht von der Reise der Brüder Jacob Eyerly jun. und Johann Heckewälder zur Ausmessung des Landes am Lake Erie, welches von der General Assembly in Pensylvanien der Societät der Brüder zur Ausbreitung des Evangelii unter den Heyden geschenkt worde, im May und Juny 1794 [A report of a trip taken by Brothers Jacob Eyerly, Jr. and Johann Heckewälder to survey the lands on Lake Erie which the Pennsylvania General Assembly gave the Society of Brethren to spread the gospel among the heathen, in May and June of 1794],” Records of the Moravian Missions to the American Indians (hereafter cited as MissInd) 213.10, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem (hereafter cited as MAB). Translated as Wallace, “Jacob Eyerly’s Journal, 1794: The Survey of Moravian Lands in the Erie Triangle,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 45, no. 1 (March 1962): 5–23.
3. Wallace, “Jacob Eyerly’s Journal, 1794,” 21.
4. Wallace, “Jacob Eyerly’s Journal, 1794,” 19.
5. Wallace, “Jacob Eyerly’s Journal, 1794,” 20–21.
6. Pennsylvania WILDS, www.pawilds.com, accessed May 1, 2017.
7. The modern name of Moshannon Creek is likely a derivative form of an earlier Delaware name, Mos-hanna-nk (Elk River Place).
8. Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau On Birds: Notes on New England Birds from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Francis H. Allen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 429.
9. Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), 33–41.
Sounding New Histories of the Moravian Missions
| Denk an sie und ihre müh, Heiland, | Think of them and their efforts, O Lord, |
| sie haben den rechten paß. | For they have the true knowledge. |
| Wo sie gehn, laß gnade wehn, | Wherever they go, let your mercy flow, |
| und der verklä[r]ger verliere was. | And those who complain will lose. |
| In sankt Thomas und Barbies, | In Saint Thomas and Barbados, |
| Capo, Ceylon, Acra, Crüs, | Capo, Ceylon, Accra, St. Croix, |
| Pensilvanien, Algier, Grönland, | Pennsylvania, Algiers, Greenland, |
| Surinam, und hier.1 | Suriname, and here. |
THE WINTER OF 1782 WAS PARTICULARLY BITTER. AT the Moravian mission of Gnadenhütten along the Tuscarawas River in the Ohio Country, little remained of the carefully planted corn crops from the previous summer. Wind blew incessantly through the missions’ abandoned fields and homes, flattening the cornstalks and whistling