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Updated: May 17, 2025


On his way he was plundered by pirates; in England he was thrown into a sponging house on account of debts. After regaining his liberty, he was compelled to return to Schoharie broken in health and without accomplishing his purpose. The result was that 33 families left Schoharie and settled in Tulpehocken, Pa., in 1723. Among those who remained in West Camp was Pastor Kocherthal.

A disappointed man he went to New Jersey, where he served the congregations at Raritan, Muehlstein, Rockaway, and other points, and from 1724 to 1725 also the settlements which Kocherthal had served along the Hudson. Owing to his increasing mental weakness, Daniel Falckner, in 1731, resigned his field in favor of J. A. Wolff. He died at Raritan ten years later.

The London constitution was the on which the congregations founded by Kocherthal at East and West Camp, Rhinebeck, Newburg, Schoharie, and those which grew out of them all along the Hudson and Mohawk rested, modified by the influence of the previously existing organizations, based on the Amsterdam constitution.

In the winter of 1708 Pastor Kocherthal arrived with the first company of Palatine exiles. In succeeding years many others followed, most of them settling on the upper Hudson and in the Mohawk Valley, but some of them remaining in New York. The inhuman treatment which they received during the voyage, followed by hunger and disease, decimated their ranks.

In July, 1709, Kocherthal, entrusting his congregation to the care of Falckner, whose acquaintance he had made during the winter in New York, returned to London to obtain, through a personal interview with the Queen, grants of money which were needed to supply the utterly destitute colonists with the necessary means of subsistence until the land was made arable.

Joshua Kocherthal, Lutheran pastor at Landau in Bavaria, was the leader of the emigrants from the Palatinate. In 1704 he went to London to make the necessary arrangements. Two years later he published a booklet on the proposed emigration.

They were familiar with the congregational organizations in New York under Kocherthal and Falckner, which were formed under the counsel of Court Preacher Boehm, probably after the similitude of the Savoy Church in London, and under the influence of the long established Dutch Lutheran constitution in New York, based on that at Amsterdam.

His diocese included Hackensack, Raritan, Ramapo and Constable Hook in the south, and Albany, Loonenburg and West Camp in the north. After the death of Kocherthal he visited regularly, not only the Dutch congregations of Claverack, Coxackie and Kinderhook, but also such German settlements as East Camp, Rhinebeck, and Schoharie. New York itself was not neglected during these missionary journeys.

Because of the side light which it throws upon history we permit it to interrupt for a moment the course of our story. It harks back to the refugees from the Palatinate who emigrated to the west coast of Ireland at the same time that their fellow countrymen under Kocherthal came to New York.

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