Moon Day 8
Starts Jun 2, 2025 12:34 PM
Ends Jun 3, 2025 01:36 PM |
| Confluence of Flaugherty Creek (left) and the Casselman River at Meyersdale. GAPers traveling towards Pittsburgh will already have crossed Flaugherty Creek ten times since the Continental Divide. |
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| Casselman River below Meyersdale |
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| Casselman River below Meyersdale |
. . . a hunter named Jacob Castleman had his camp somewhere along the river on one of the Sayler farms . . . in full view of [what became] Meyersdale . . . It is from this hunter that the Castleman’s [Casselman’s] river takes its present name; we say present name, because in the early days it was also known as the Little Youghiogheny . . . He must have disappeared from these parts as soon as the settlers began to come.
Surveyor-Savants Mason and Dixon crossed the river named supposedly named after Jacob Casselman during their 1767 survey of the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, but Mason in his journal consistently refers to it as the “little Yochio Geni [Youghiogheny]”, never once mentioning the Casselman River, which leads to the conclusion that the toponym Casselman River was not commonly in use by that time.
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Mason and Dixon’s official survey map (courtesy of the Library of Congress). The Casselman River is far left, unnamed. In his journal Mason called it the “little Yochio Geni (Youghiogheny)”. The tributary of the Casselman (unnamed) which Mason and and Dixon crossed first, is Piney Run. Note here that Big Savage Mountain is called Allegheny Mount. |
Jacob Casselman’s camp, frequented by hunters, traders, and settlers moving between the Potomac River Watershed and the Ohio River Basin, served only as a way-station and he apparently never settled any ground. We do know that on September 24, 1757, Jacob was paid £2.7.6 for horses hired by a regiment commanded by George Washington. His name is also connected with Negro Mountain, which the GAP passes through north of Garrett. He was said to have a Black servant:
This servant was almost as expert a woodsman as was his master. On one occasion, with a neighboring hunter, he was sent on an errand to the Turkeyfoot settlement. The hunter returned and reported that while on their return home they fell in with a small band of Indians, who pursued them; that to baffle the pursuit they had separated the negro taking up the mountain and the white man toward the river. The negro was never heard of-—whether he was killed, captured or ran away, and that it was this circumstance from which Negro mountain takes its name. That it does take its name from some adventure on it in which a negro had a part would seem certain, but there are four or five traditions relating to the origin of this name, all of which assign a different owner to this negro. We give this account here because this tradition is connected with this locality.
Jacob Casselman was one of many Germans whose families came from Kassel in Hesse, Germany. They became known as Kasselmänner (people from Kassel) and later as Kasselmen or Casselmen. Individual families eventually took on the name Casselman (with the variant spelling of Castleman). The Kasselmänner were part of the larger Palatinate Migration from the Rhenish Palatinate in Germany. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), a conflict between the Catholic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire (famously dismissed by the French philosopher Voltaire as “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”) and Protestants in Germany, had laid waste to much of central Europe, with anywhere from four to eight million soldiers and civilians killed and the population of some parts of Germany reduced by 50%. As strict Lutherans the Kasselmänner were especially hard hit. Then came the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), during which King Louis xiv of France led an army across the Rhine in an attempt to seize territories from the Holy Roman Empire led by Leopold I, devastating much of central Europe, including the towns of the Kasselmänner, in the process. That was followed by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), when French armies under Louis XIV invaded Germany again, this time targeting the Palatinate’s Lutheran-majority villages in an attempt to destroy Protestant strongholds. Lutheran churches were burned down and the Lutheran-dominated countryside subjected to scorched earth tactics. The final blow came in the winter of 1708–1709, one of the worst during the Little Ice Age in Europe. During what was said to be the coldest winter in 200 years crops failed and livestock perished, resulting in a widespread famine in the Palatinate. According to one Palatine, Conrad Weiser, who survived the winter and later ended up in America, "Birds perished on the wing, beasts in their lairs, and mortals fell dead in the way." Facing starvation, 13,000 to 15,000 residents of the region fled to England, Ireland, and North America.
Hans Dietrich Casselman (1662–1744) was among a group of 1,193 Palatines that arrived in England on May 29, 1709. His ultimate goal was the New World. On April 12, 1710, Casselman, described as a Lutheran farmer and vineyard keeper with a wife, Anna, two sons (including Andreas Ludwig), and three daughters (nineteen, thirteen, and one month) set sail for New York on the Midfort, one of many passenger ships carrying Palatines to the New World. Of the first wave of 2,227 emigrants, 470 died on the voyages across the Atlantic, victims of malnutrition and disease, including typhus. Hans Dietrich’s thirteen-year-old daughter Elisabeth Greta transmigrated on the trip, but the rest of the family survived. They arrived in New York on June 14, 1710, after a perilous voyage of over ten weeks. Hans Dietrich eventually moved on to the Schoharie Valley, in what is now New York state, where he acquired land from the local Mohawks. Others were attracted to Pennsylvania, where the Penn family was actively recruiting settlers, and many settled in Berks County, north of Philadelphia, and in the Susquehanna Valley.
Andreas Ludwig Casselman (1698-1789), the son of Hans Dietrich Casselman, first lived near his father in the Schoharie Valley. It was here that his son Jacob Casselman was born in 1728. His mother may have been Mary Bush Wallace Hancock, whose first two husbands were killed in skirmishes with Native Americans, but the record is unclear on this. Later Andreas Ludwig moved to Pennsylvania and eventually ended up near Bedford, Pennsylvania, thirty-five miles northeast of Meyersdale, where he cleared and improved 400 acres of land. We can only assume that his son Jacob accompanied him. At some point Jacob set out on his own. Perhaps he crossed the crest of the Alleghenies west of Bedford into what became known as the Stonycreek Glades and then followed the Stonycreek River to its source at the current-day town of Berlin. From there he could have followed a tiny stream down to Buffalo Creek, which flows into the Casselman River at the current-day GAP town of Garrett. He would have then followed the river named after him a few miles to its confluence with Flaugherty Creek, nearby where he established his hunting camp that became a way-station for travelers in the region.
As we have seen, he didn't stay here long. He soon proceeded to the South Branch of the Potomac where he bought land and settled for a few years. By 1782 he had moved on to what became Tennessee, where he bought Lot #5 in a newly laid out town that would soon be called Nashville. In Nashville he served on juries, on commissions to lay out new roads, and, according to court records, bought a slave girl from one James Hoggatt. On July 1, 1793, his son Joseph was killed by Native Americans in a skirmish near Hayes Station, South Carolina. The man who allegedly gave his name to the Casselman River perished at the age of seventy-five after a fall from a horse and was buried fourteen miles from Nashville. His grandson Sylvanus Casselman drifted on to what became the state of Missouri and in 1821 moved still further to Texas, where on July 7, 1824, he received one of the very first land grants in the new colony. Later he reportedly “‘became deranged and committed suicide’ by slitting his own throat,” probably in 1831.
Jacob Casselman’s father, Andreas Ludwig Casselman, lived to the ripe old age of ninety and was buried in Bedford. His grandfather, Hans Dietrich Casselman, the original immigrant from Germany, died in 1744 in the town of Stone Arabia, near Schenectady, New York, where he is buried. His peripatetic descendants have spread out all over North America and are now said to number over 100,000.
Henry Casselman, the other contender for the source of the toponym Casselman River, was also presumably part of the Palatine Migration, although his name is curiously absent from the voluminous family trees of Casselmans. According to one account he built a stockade just across the river from the current-day fairgrounds in Meyersdale. The account adds: “Henry Casselman was known to his descendants as an Indian fighter. The sight of one eye was ruined from a shot from an encounter with Indians.” By 1759 he had moved on to Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania, where his son Henry Jr. was born. Like many Casselmans the Henry Casselman clan was peripatetic; they eventually moved on to Ohio and still later to Iowa. Curiously, there does not appear to be any Casselmans left in southern Somerset County. Only the river remains as a marker of their passage.
