Franz Daniel Pastorius was born on 26 September 1651 in Sommerhausen, Bavaria (Germany). Like his father, Pastorius aspired a career as a lawyer and worked in Frankfurt after his legal studies and before embarking on a two-year educational tour through Europe together with a young nobleman. On behalf of a radical-pietist movement he had joined in Frankfurt, Pastorius travelled to America in 1683 to acquire land for the community. When the people in Frankfurt changed their plans, Pastorius made the land he had acquired from William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, available to thirteen German families that had to flee from their home in Krefeld. In late 1683, he founded Germantown, the first German settlement in North America, together with Quakers and Menonnites who had also fled. Pastorius was an active opponent of slavery. His exact date of death (late 1701 - January 1702) is unknown.

Many thanks to Archion researcher falbrecht for the find.

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