Pennsylvania Militia Massacres Christian Lenape at the Moravian Mission of Gnadenhutten

Eleven years after Moravian missionaries founded Nain in Labrador in 1771, already recorded here, and one hundred three years before Moravian missionaries founded the Bethel Mission in Alaska in 1885, also recorded here, the Moravian Church's Ohio mission suffered the deadliest single attack any of its converted communities endured in North America. Gnadenhutten, Ohio, settled in 1772 by the missionary David Zeisberger among Christian Lenape and Mahican converts, held nearly a hundred residents who had laid down arms and adopted the Moravians' pacifist Christianity. On 8 March 1782, a Pennsylvania militia under Colonel David Williamson, seeking revenge for raids the Gnadenhutten Lenape had played no part in, disarmed the community under a pretense of friendship and killed ninety six men, women and children the following morning. The Ohio History Connection's own archival record of the massacre documents the killings and the community's later efforts, including an annual Day of Remembrance still held with the Delaware Nation each March, to keep the history from being forgotten. Earl P. Olmstead's academic biography of Zeisberger, drawing on his diaries and correspondence, describes the mission villages Zeisberger had built as left in ruins, their converts scattered or dead, a setback the Moravian mission in North America spent years recovering from before its later westward and Alaskan expansion.