Dating the Dietz Massacre:Correcting Two CenturiesOf Confusion and ErrorHarold H. Miller is descended from Johannes Dietz
and two of his siblings. Born in East Berne
, he is retired from the National Park Service and lives in
ATE one Saturday afternoon during the Revolutionary War,
the wife of militia Capt. William Deitz
, his four young children, aged parents, and a servant girl were killed and scalped by Indians
led by Tories
.
[1]
They lived in the Details of the Deitz
massacre are known because there were two survivors besides Captain Deitz. One was John Brice
, a thirteen-year-old lad from Rensselaerville
who was working on the Dietz farm. The other was Brice’s younger brother Robert, who unfortunately stopped to spend the night with his brother on his way home from a trip to the Weidman
gristmill
in what is now the hamlet of Following the massacre and burning of the Dietz
homestead, Captain Deitz
and the Brice
boys were taken to western Robert Brice
’s experiences are told in depth in an account he gave to Josiah Priest
when Brice was about sixty-three years old. Priest published it in 1838 as a chapter in his Stories of the Revolution. The date of the massacre is given as about four years into the Revolution.
[3]
Little more than fifty years after the event, even a survivor had apparently forgotten the exact date and year. William L. Stone
, in his 1838 Life of Joseph Brant,
[4]
dates the massacre at 1777. George Howell
and Jonathan Tenney
say in their 1886 History of Albany County that the year was 1780.
[5]
Amansa Parker
’s 1897 Landmarks of Albany County also gives the year as 1780.
[6]
Henry Van Gelder
, in an 1899 letter to the editor of the Altamont Enterprise, said it was in 1778.
[7]
* * * Priest
’s Stories of the Revolution was one of the sources used by Jeptha R. Simms
for the massacre account in his histories, in which he dates the massacre as spring of 1782.
[8]
Simms relates an interview with George Warner
, Historian William E. Roscoe confused Capt. William Deitz of the Beaver Dam with an uncle of the same name who was an early Schoharie settler. Roscoe writes in his 1882 History of Schoharie County [10] that William Dietz of Schoharie was originally from the Beaver Dam and was the son of Johannes Dietz who was massacred in 1782. He reports that William was a blacksmith, and in chapter XXII goes on to tell how successful all of his children were. Although Roscoe says William Dietz of Schoharie was the son of the massacred Johannes , he does not say that he was a captain in the Revolution or that his wife and children were massacred. Roscoe was correct that William of Schoharie had moved there from the Beaver Dam and was a blacksmith. In fact, as a prominent and respected citizen during the war, he was elected and re-elected to the Schoharie Committee of Safety . [11] Before the end of the war he became a justice of the peace. [12] However, since he was born in 1720, [13] he was much too old to have been a captain in the Revolution. Why Were So Many Writers Wrong? Roscoe
did not realize that there was also a William Deitz
of the Beaver Dam
who was the real son of Johannes. In More Palatine Families, Henry Z. Jones
provides information from baptismal records found in the Lutheran church at When the Dietz family arrived from By 1774, Capt. William Deitz was married to Maria Magdalena Cregeler . [16] In 1781 he and his wife had four young children, all less than ten years old, and were living on his parents’ Switzkill farm when the family was massacred. Since the baptism of Johannes’s
son William
was recorded in Columbia County
rather than Schoharie,
[17]
neither Roscoe
nor later Dietz
family researchers realized that during the Revolutionary War
there were three men in the area named William Dietz: the elder and his son William Jr. in Schoharie, and his nephew William Deitz
– who had been baptized in Germantown
– in the Beaver Dam
. Historical papers published after Priest
, Stone
, Simms
and Roscoe
wrote provide plentiful evidence of the existence of the William Deitz
at the Beaver Dam
.
·
Capt. William Deitz
headed the third company in Col. Peter Vrooman’s 15th Regiment
of the
·
When in July of 1780 Capt. Jacob Van Arnum
learned that about 100 Tories were at “Pasick
” (Basic Creek
, near Westerlo
), he and his troops spent the night at Capt. William Deitz
’s house and the next day went in pursuit.
[19]
It seems obvious that Captain Deitz was not living in Schoharie, but rather a few miles south of Basic Creek on the Switzkill Valley
farm which the following year became the site of the Dietz
massacre. · The index in Minutes of the Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies lists “William Dietz , farmer, of the Helderbergs .” The wording differentiates him from the other William Dietz in the index, who lived in Schoharie and was on the Committee of Safety . · Capt. William Deitz of the Beaver Dam , in the Helderbergs, was a farmer first and a part-time captain in the militia second as were all of the men under his command. * * * In Old Hellebergh, published in 1936, Arthur B. Gregg wrote: “None of these authors [Stone , George Howell or Jonathan Tenney ] had perhaps ever seen document 3969 of the Gov. Clinton Papers dated September [7th] 1781, which says reporting to Governor Clinton – ‘A party of the Enemy consisting of 15 Tories & Indians murdered Capt. Dietz ’s Father & Mother, his wife and four children with one Scotch Girl and took himself off, after having Exhibited to his View this horrid scene; the house and barn was burned.’” [20] Former town of Berne
historian Euretha Stapleton
, writing in Our Heritage, a 1977 history of the town of Berne, states that the Indians
struck the Dietz
family in 1780.
[21]
She then paraphrased the above September 1781 letter taken from Gregg
’s massacre account in Old Hellebergh, but omitted the date of the letter which made it clear the massacre was is September 1781, not 1780. Based on the September 1781 letter [22] to Governor Clinton, George F. Dietz , in his 1956 manuscript The Dietz Family, deduced the date of the massacre to have been September 4, 1781. George Dietz was unaware of an earlier letter to Governor Clinton written on September 4, 1781. [23] It reported, “…the murder of Capt. Teets [an English misspelling of the German name Dietz ] who lived at the Beaver Dam and was taken prisoner last Saturday night… The rest of Capt. Teets family, consisting of his old Father and seven other persons were most inhumanly Murdered, and his house and barn burnt.” Thus, the massacre actually occurred on Saturday, September 1, 1781. Stanton L. Deitz
, in his 1959 Appendix to The Dietz Family, decided that the 1781 massacre date had to be wrong because of the 1782 Schoharie will of William Dietz of Schoharie. Misled by Roscoe
’s insistence that William of Schoharie was the son of Johannes
, Stanton mistakenly assumed that the will was that of Capt. William Deitz
, and that he must have written it while in captivity at Fort Niagara
and had it witnessed by fellow prisoners, one of whom must have brought it back to Schoharie to be recorded and later probated on June 6, 1782. This, despite the fact the will gave no evidence of having been written by a man in prison, nor was any witness ever a prisoner. Stanton disregarded the primary evidence of the date of the massacre given in the September 7, 1781, letter to Governor Clinton
.
* * * Perhaps misled by Roscoe ’s mistakenly identifying William of Schoharie as the son of the massacred Johannes, the Daughters of the American Revolution has in the past approved membership to descendants of William of Schoharie under the belief he was Capt. William Deitz . Fortunately, the descendants of William Dietz of Schoharie are eligible for membership in the DAR based on his wartime service on the Schoharie Committee of Safety , [24] a more prestigious appointment than that of captain in the militia . Obviously, there are no descendants of Capt. William Deitz of the Beaver Dam |
