The Leinbach Legacy

Descendants of a peasant weaver help a Christian movement establish itself
in the New World, become leaders of industry and commerce, and help settle the West.

The first threads

THE VILLAGERS OF GERTERODE were not happy. Ludwigseck Castle was in ruins, following the Thirty Years' War. Reconstruction was slow-going, and the ruling family -- the Riedesels -- had been living on a farm for almost 20 years, ever since they fled during an attack by foreign troops. More recently, one of the Riedesel heirs had accidentally killed a townsman during a drunken argument. Many villagers were willing to listen to entreaties by the rulers of an adjoining land. Many of them shifted their allegiances from the Riedesels to them. A list of households was made to determine those allegiances. One of those villagers was Abraham Leimbach.


Gerterode, a small town in the Ludwigsau district. It had 217 inhabitants in 1783, and 300 in 2001. [ZOOM]

Abraham's world

For most of his life, Abraham had known war. Central Europe had been ravaged during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which had started as a conflict between the Catholics and Protestants and evolved into an excuse for some rulers to seize territory. Armies criss-crossed the land, leaving ruin and devastation in their wake. Most of the fighting occurred in Germany, which lost between 16 million and 20 million people.[1]

(Germany at this time was not a sovereign nation with a central government. Rather, it was a loose confederation of kingdoms, states, duchies and counties forming the largest part of the Holy Roman Empire. The people owed their allegiances to the barons and princes who ruled the lands they lived in. In return, these local rulers were supposed to protect the people during times of war.)

In 1637, Croatian troops sacked Ludwigseck Castle. The Riedesels fled and took up residence at Hof Trunsbach -- a farm -- while the castle was in disrepair. (The castle was not rebuilt until 1680.) The retreat probably didn't sit well with the people. And neither did a scandal involving the young heir to the title several years later (see The Donkey Rider). Finally, in 1656, many householders in the territory pledged their loyalty to two sons of the Landgrave of Thuringia.[2] The record of these pledges, the Huldigungslist, includes the name Abraham Leimbach.

Abraham was, according to that record, the only head of household in Gerterode named Leimbach. In parish records from nearby Beenhausen, home of the "Mother Church" for the entire valley, he is listed as the father of nine children who were baptized there. One of Abraham's sons was named Henrich, born in 1648. The first record we have of Henrich is his confirmation in 1661.

Chapter 2

Notes

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (2006) "Germany." www.britannica.com/eb/article-58165
2. This is how Lin Garber heard the tale. My research shows that the ruling Thuringians had died out long before.

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