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It is October 1683. In a temporary cave-dwelling on the high banks of the Delaware, a German Mennonite family and several German Quaker families cast lots for parcels of land. The settlement they are founding—Germantown—will play a crucial role in the early history of the American Anabaptists.

A wave of German immigrants began landing at the port city of Philadelphia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. William Penn, the colony's Quaker proprietor, did not intend to establish a Quaker commonwealth in the New World. Rather Pennsylvania—"Penn's Woods"—his "holy experiment," was open to all people of Christian faiths.

Penn's agents combed Germany's Rhine Valley for potential colonists, and German immigrants flocked to Pennsylvania by the thousands. These immigrants were mostly Lutheran and Reformed, and a few were Catholic—these were the legal, state-supported faiths of the German territories. In Penn's vision, however, dissenting and persecuted Anabaptist and Pietist groups were welcome as well. These included German Quakers, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, Mennonites, Brethren (Dunkers), and Amish. English residents soon labeled all of these groups "Pennsylvania Dutch." Gradually the Pennsylvania German settlers developed their own dialect and perpetuated their own folkways and traditions that clearly set them apart from their English-speaking neighbors.

Germantown, the first intentional German-speaking community in America, was laid out in 1683, a mile-long section of an Indian trail some six miles northwest from Philadelphia. The first German settlers—13 families—arrived that October on the ship Concord. They were greeted at the Philadelphia wharf by William Penn and one of his land agents, a young German lawyer named Francis Daniel Pastorius. They met in the cave-like dwelling he had constructed at Germantown and cast lots for land.

The new village was an economic success from the beginning. The first winter they dug cellars for shelter. The first log homes appeared the next spring along a wide main street on lots 180 feet wide by 800 feet deep, but these were soon replaced by larger dwellings made of native stone. Cemeteries were laid out at both ends of the village, which also contained a central market. Outlying fields were cleared for crops and nearby creeks supplied power for mills. The settlers planted flax (for linen), fruit trees, and vineyards. Germantown incorporated in 1689, with Pastorius as its first mayor.

Initially Germantown was a Quaker enterprise; by the late 1680s they were planning for their first meetinghouse, and in 1689 they issued the first formal protest against slavery in America. Continued immigration from Germany, however, allowed a Mennonite congregation to develop. By the early 1690s Mennonites were meeting together for worship, but they did not organize a congregation until 1698. Shortly after the turn of the century, they built a log meetinghouse on Germantown Avenue. It was replaced in 1770 by a fieldstone building, still used by the congregation today.

Penn advised new immigrants to live in towns where they could then clear and work the outlying fields, as had long been done in England. However, the lure of inexpensive, fertile land to the north and west—perceived as the key to wealth and economic independence—proved too powerful. From Germantown, clusters of Mennonite families could soon be found at "Skippack," to the northwest in what is today Montgomery County, and at the "Swamp" to the north in Bucks County. Shortly after 1710 Mennonites also moved to the back country, to "Conestoga" in what is now Lancaster County.

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