March 8, 1782

0:00Most people would rather assemble a 300-piece cabinet than search for insurance. That's why the zebra searches for you, comparing over 100 insurance companies to find savings no one else can, compared today at TheZera.com. Ohio Country March 8, 1782 The name meant Huts of Grace. By sundown every hut would be ash. The village sat in the Tuscarawa's River Valley about 90 miles south of where Cleveland stands today. A quiet place, log cabins, a Cooper shop, cornfield stretching toward the tree line. Ten years earlier, a Moravian missionary named David Ziesberger had founded Nadenhutton. As a Christian settlement for Lenape and Mohican converts who had traded the old ways for hymns, plowed fields, and pacifism. They dressed in European clothing. They married white settlers. They baptized their children

1:04with German names. They would not pick up a weapon, not for the British, not for the Americans, not for anyone. In the winter of 1781, that neutrality became a death sentence. The American Revolution had turned the Ohio frontier into a killing ground. British agents out of Detroit armed Shawnee, Wyandotte, and Delaware war parties to raid settlements in western Pennsylvania and Kentucky. American militia retaliated with expeditions into Indian country that made no distinction between hostile warriors and peaceful farmers. The Moravian villages along the Tuscarawa's sat in the middle of it all, and both sides viewed them with suspicion. The British suspected the Moravians of passing intelligence to the Americans. The Americans suspected them of harboring raiders. Neither accusation was true, but truth was scarce currency on the frontier in 1782. That fall, British Allied warriors had forced the Moravians from their villages at gunpoint, marching them north to a place called

2:06Captive Town on the Sandusky River. The rations there were thin. By February, children were dying of starvation. When the British finally allowed more than 100 Moravians to return to their old villages to harvest the corn they had left in the fields. The families walked south through the frozen woods with empty bellies and high hopes. They were still gathering crops on March 4th, when 160 mounted Pennsylvania militiamen rode into the Tuscarawa's valley under the command of Lieutenant Colonel David Williamson. The militia had mustered at Mingo Bottom on the Ohio River south of present-day Stubenville. Their stated mission was to destroy the abandoned Moravian villages that hostile rating parties had been using as stopover points. What they found instead were living breathing Indians in the corn fields. The first man they encountered was Joseph Shibosh, a young Moravian Christian, son of a Welsh father and a Muncie mother. He pleaded for his life. They killed him on the trail and left

3:10his body where it fell. Then the militia changed tactics. They approached the Moravians at Naden Hutton with smiles and handshakes and a promise. They would escort the Indians to Fort Pit, where they would be safe from both the British and the war parties. The Moravians, who had been raised on the gospel of turning the other cheek, believed them. They handed over their hunting rifles and hatchets without a fight. Some militiamen rode to the neighboring settlement of Salem and convinced those families to come to Naden Hutton too. More handshakes, more promises. Once the Indians were disarmed and gathered, the smiles disappeared. The militia accused the Moravians of participating in raids on Pennsylvania settlements. The evidence was stolen property found in the cabins, horses, pewter, t-sets, farm tools. The Moravians protested that the items were their own. They had lived here for a decade. They had never raised a hand against anyone. The militia was unmoved. They bound the prisoners and separated them. Men in one cabin,

4:13women and children in the other, about thirty men, more than sixty women and children, then the soldiers held a vote. The question was simple. Kill them or take them to Fort Pit as prisoners. All but eighteen voted to kill. The dissenters asked Williamson for permission to leave. He granted it, provided they camped ten miles back and rejoined the column on its return. They rode out that evening. What followed was not their doing. The Moravians were told the result. They asked for time to prepare for death. The militia granted them the night. What happened in those two cabins over the next several hours belongs to a category of human experience that resists narration. Ninety-six men, women and children, bound and condemned, who had been promise safety and given slaughter, spent their final hours on earth singing hymns to the God they believed had saved them. Mothers held their children. Husbands called out to wives they could not see through the cabin walls. The singing carried across the frozen cornfields and into the timber.

5:18Outside some of the militia men passed the time drinking communion wine they had looted from the mission stores. At dawn on March 8th the killing began. A militia man named Nathan Rollins found a heavy wooden mallet in the Cooper's shop. The prisoners were brought in two at a time. Rollins swung the mallet, stunning the victim. Another man slit the throat. A third took the scalp. It was the same method used to dispatch livestock in the slaughterhouses of the period. And the men who performed it knew the procedure well. The cabins where the killing took place would later be called the slaughterhouses. Rollins swung the Cooper's mallet fourteen times before his arm gave out. Then he sat down and wept. He told the men around him that the killing had not eased his grief for his father and uncle. Both lost to Indian raids. It was no satisfaction, he said, none at all. The killing continued without him. Twenty-eight men, twenty-nine women, thirty-nine children, ninety-six and all. Two boys survived, one slipped through a trapped door

6:21into the root cellar beneath the cabin. The other, already scalped and left for dead, crawled into the woods. Both lived to tell what happened. When it was over the militia dragged the bodies into the cabins and set fire to the village. They burned not-and-hutton, salam, and shun broon. Before striking the match, they looted everything of value. It took eighty horses to carry the plunder back to Pennsylvania. At Fort Pitt, there were no consequences. General William Irvine, who arrived to take command weeks after the massacre, expressed displeasure but did nothing. He needed the militia for the defense of the fort. He reported the matter to General Washington without recommendation. Congress opened an investigation, then closed it. The official reason, pursuing the matter might produce a confusion and ill will amongst the people. The Lenape did not forget. Three months later, when another Pennsylvania expedition under Colonel William Crawford rode into Ohio, Delaware warriors routed them at the Battle of Sandusky. Crawford was captured. He had not been

7:26at Nadenhutton, but that distinction was lost on the men who tied him to a post and burned him alive over the course of two hours. The fire was payment, they said. For the Moravians, David Williamson survived Crawford's expedition. He spent the next three decades in obscurity and died in poverty in 1814. Captain Charles Bilderbach, another Gnadenhutton veteran, was captured by Lenape in 1789. They did not grant him the mercy of a mallet. In 1810, nearly thirty years after the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tacumsa stood before William Henry Harrison and delivered a reminder that still echoes. You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delaware's lived near the Americans and had confidence in their promises of friendship and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus. A 37-foot monument stands in Gnadenhutton today. The inscription at its base reads,

8:29here triumphed in death 90 Christian Indians March 8, 1782. Beneath it lies the burial mound where John Hekowelder, a Moravian missionary, gathered what remained of the dead and laid them to rest. The village name still means Huts of Grace. The population is about 1200. It is the oldest existing European settlement in the state of Ohio. The Cooper's shop has been reconstructed. The mound is maintained. The names of the dead are listed on a plaque at the entrance, and on the second Sunday of every March, the descendants still come. Dark History Today is a personal service of true crime historian. Most people would rather remove a nest of irate hornets than search for auto and home insurance. That's why the zebra searches for you, comparing over 100 insurance companies to find savings no one else can,

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