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 ...

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