136. William Penn, the founder of the colony, played a central part in the arrival of the Germans, as he created the conditions for the transatlantic immigration of Protestants. The first Germans who settled permanently were religious refugees from Palatinate who arrived in Germantown (a part of Philadelphia) in 1683. William Penn, the English Quaker missionary, had traveled around Germany in 1671 and 1677, notably in Rhineland, and had encouraged the Germans to immigrate to America. This interested Quakers, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Pietists, groups which the government looked upon with disapproval, since only Catholic, Lutheran, and Protestant churches were authorized. The British government, which owed William Penn’s father, Admiral Penn, £16,000, paid back this debt by granting Penn the land of Pennsylvania. Penn published a brochure to attract immigrants, which was translated into German and captured the attention of the Frankfurt Pietists. Assembled in a “Frankfurt Company”, they bought up thousands of acres of virgin terrain, but not one member of this company actually immigrated to America. Only their agent, Franz Daniel Pastorius, born near Würzburg in 1651, a legal expert who studied in Altdorf, Strasbourg, and Jena, a distinguished member of the Pietist circle in Frankfurt, emigrated. He arrived on August 20, 1683 in Pennsylvania. Pastorius then organized the arrival of 13 Quaker and Mennonite families originally from Krefeld and Kriegsheim (near Worms) 6 weeks later, on October 6, 1683. The arrival of these 33 people (a child died during the crossing that lasted 75 days, and another was born) on October 6, 1683, is the date selected as the beginning of the history of German emigration in America. The event is elevated to the level of a founding myth for German-Americans who made it the equivalent of the Mayflower. These new settlers founded a town 6 miles from Philadelphia that they named Deutschstadt, Germantown. In 1689, Germantown became a town in its own right, and Pastorius its mayor. There, books and newspapers were printed in German: Germantown was the center of the social and cultural life for the Germans who passed through before settling in neighbouring counties or colonies. Around 1710, Swiss Mennonites arrived there, followed by Dunkers around 1719-1720, the figurehead of whom was Johann Christopher Sauer, the author of a very popular newspaper, Der Hoch Deutsche Pennsylvanische Geschichtsschreiber, which was published in German from 1739 on and was later called Germantauner Zeitung. Sauer also published a German Bible, the first work published in a European language (around 1750, there were 200 different publications in German). Even though religious divisions were multiplying, driving Conrad Beissel, one of the Dunkers, to lay the foundations of the Seventh Day Baptists’ society and to found the Ephrata Cloister, the majority of the population remained Protestant or Lutheran. The head of the Lutherans was Heinrich Mühlenberg, who studied in Göttingen, and had the Church of Sion built: the largest church in Philadelphia, it was consecrated in 1769 and George Washington’s funeral was held there in 1799. In 1728, the New York Palatines migrated toward the Tulpehocken district and also settled in inland areas of Pennsylvania. There were more than 50,000 Germans in 1750, due to the large wave of German migration that reached Philadelphia between 1749 and 1754: 37,000 Germans arrived, on an average of 6,000 each autumn, in a city which, in 1756, was estimated to be home to 17,000 inhabitants. The German-speaking cultural life was in full swing in Philadelphia: 5 newspapers were successfully published in German before the Revolution, and Henry Miller, another printer, boasted of being the first to have printed the Declaration of Independence in German typography on July 5, 1776. All the Protestant denominations established their own schools, like the seminary in Bethlehem founded by the Moravians in 1749. The Academy of Germantown was founded in 1761 by Lutherans and Protestants. In 1790, it was estimated that a third of the population of Pennsylvania, or 141,000 individuals, was of German descent. Flohr’s remarks about the number of Germans and German-speakers he met in this colony are therefore hardly surprising.