The “Salzburgers” in Ebenezer, Georgia, 1734–
In 1732, Firmian, the Archbishop of Salzburg, expelled some 16,000 Protestants, practicing their religion clandestinely, from his Pongau district. One group of 25 miners and peasants from the Gastein Valley emigrated to the new British colony of Georgia and arrived in Savannah in 1734, starting the first community of “Austrians” in the American colonies (the Archbishopric of Salzburg became part of the Habsburg lands in 1803 and Salzburg became a state of Austria in November 1918).
Two more groups of “Salzburgers” came subsequently. Altogether about 150 “Salzburgers” settled in Georgia while some 16,000 went to East Prussia. The Pietist “Francke Foundations” of Halle (Prussia) and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (London) sponsored them and sent two pastors along to Georgia.
Pastor Boltzius held the new Ebenezer community north of Savannah together, constructing a metaphor of an exile exodus of an exceptional group of Pietists seeking salvation in the frontier wilderness. They survived on subsistence farming and prospered by building corn and lumber mills; the women grew silk.
A member of the Ebenezer community Johann Adam Treutlen, who came as an indentured servant from the Palatinate, was elected to Georgia’s first Commons House in 1764. As a leading supporter of American independence in the Georgia colony, he became the first governor of Georgia in 1777. During the American Revolution Ebenenzer was (re-)occupied by rebels and royalists four times and suffered from destruction and decline.
Source: James Van Horn Melton. Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.