March 8, 1782

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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

with 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

Captive 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

his 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,

women 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.

Outside 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

into 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

at 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,

here 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.

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