Baron de Graffenried, Marker C-10
Posted by: 
showbizkid
N 35° 06.465 W 077° 02.130
18S E 314487 N 3886887
Von Graffenried's American experience was typical of that of many early colonists. Setting out in 1710 with great hopes, he led a group of Swiss and German religious refugees to North Carolina to found a New Bern in the New World. Three years later he left America forever, deeply in debt, many of his colonists dead, his dreams shattered. New Bern would shine, though, in later years.
Waymark Code: WMGVA
Location: North Carolina, United States
Date Posted: 07/09/2006
Views: 34
Baron Christoph Von Graffenried came from a well-known patrician family of comfortable means, and as a young man had sought his fortune in both France and England. But his father kept him on a short rein, and obliged him to return to Switzerland, where he took up public office in Yverdon. But when he ran into debt his thoughts turned towards America.
It was just at this time that the Canton of Bern was looking for a way to buy land in one of the English colonies, and settle a few hundred "undesirables" – paupers and religious dissidents – there. Graffenried's plans and those of Bern came together. An advance party of Germans went on ahead, and the first hundred Swiss settlers left Bern in March 1710 and arrived in America in September.
Von Graffenried laid out a town, his "New Bern", on a triangle of land between the rivers Neuse and Trent. He built a line of fortifications from one bank to the other and defenses on the shore line as well. He also built a water mill for grinding grain.
It started off so well that people in Virginia and Pennsylvania also bought lots there. But political unrest in the English colonies undermined the prosperity of the little town, with different English factions battling each other and alternatively cajoling or threatening von Graffenried to try to make him take sides. Added to this was the Indian uprising: many of the settlers regarded them as inferior savages and thought nothing of cheating and enslaving them. But the tribes could and did attack outlying farmsteads, keeping the people in a state of fear, destroying their crops and preventing supplies from reaching them.
Von Graffenried himself tried to behave honorably, but he was faced with a combination of events that could not but cause trouble. He tried to keep his little colony neutral, and for a time was the one person able to mediate between settlers and Indians, but he ended up being mistrusted by both sides, and was unable to prevent bloody raids and equally bloody reprisals which left hundreds dead and stoked up fear and hatred. Many of his colonists deserted him, arguing that he had shown himself unable to protect them.
In the end, von Graffenried was forced to return to Bern. In a letter he wrote to his father he described himself as “the returning prodigal son”. But despite his disappointments, he held his head up high: “Although I have grieved you… I have served my bailiwick with honor…and have committed nothing atrocious which might have done you dishonor,” he wrote.
And yet in later years the town he founded rose from the ashes. New settlers arrived from other colonies. He did not live to see it, but in 1765 New Bern was made the capital of North Carolina, a status it held for 25 years. Today it is a flourishing town with a population of about 23,000, famous not only as an early settlement, but as the birthplace of Pepsi Cola.
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