Foreword to the Reissue

In May 1828 the Reverend Christoph Bergmann, pastor of Ebenezer’s Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Georgia, wrote to the Francke Foundations in Halle, Germany, to inquire about possible records in the archives that would shed light on the history of the Ebenezer community. Almost a century had passed since Ebenezer’s founding near the banks of the Savannah River in 1734 by a small group of Protestant exiles from the Catholic territory of Salzburg. With the passage of time, the community had grown, briefly thrived, spread, and eventually declined. The American Revolutionary War had devastated the community physically. Internal dissension had strained