Person:Harmen Van Borkelo (1)

  When he was 21  years old, Harmen Harmens Van Berckeloo joined the Labadist movement. In 1683 we find him at Bohemia Manor in Maryland, where even today there is Burkelow Creek as a reminder of the family. The site of the Labadist settlement was a tract of land consisting of some 3750 acres  in the south-eastern part of Bohemia Manor, which was one of the four estates of Augustine Herman. It had been conveyed by him on Aug.11, 1684, to Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, Labadist Missionaries; Peter Bayard of New York; John Mill a Dutchman; and Arnold de la Grange a Frenchman, the latter two residents of Delaware.  On Oct. 15, 1694, at a meeting of the Maryland Assembly, he was ordered to take the prescribed oath instead of the Oath of Allegiance; this he did on Feb. 27, 1695-96, before the Council. He was a brewer by trade.

Exerpts from, "Maryland. A Middle Temperament. 1634-1980" by Robert J. Brugger. Johns Hopkins University Press 1988

Page 799. Chronology

    1660  Lord Proprietary's writ proves earlier creation of Baltimore County:

Augustine Hermann, first naturalized citizen of Maryland (1663), establishes Bohemia Manor.

page 30-31

    Besides religious minorities like Catholics and Puritans and growing

congregations of Presbyterians and Friends, odder nonconformists found a home in Maryland.. In 1680 a small group of Labadists, a Dutch independent sect, sent Jaspar Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter to America in search of a refuge from religious persecution. The two agents landed at Manhattan, where apparently by happenstance they met and converted the eldest son of a large Maryland landholder, Augustine Herrman.

    Herrman, a German-born merchant, first had entered the province twenty

years earlier. He arrived as a diplomatic representative of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Netherland, whose government and the Calvert family alike claimed the Atlantic coast below Delaware Bay and the defeated settlement of New Sweden. By then Herrman had sensed the decline of Dutch power in America and also grown tired of the turmoil in New Amsterdam. Educated, ambitious, and a man of means, he found the Calvert plan of manors and nobility highly attractive. He offered to draw a map of Maryland that would help Lord Baltimore establish the proper boundaries of his grant, an offer (Herrman made a complementary one to Stuyvesant) that Cecil Calvert quickly accepted. In 1660 Herrman moved to Maryland and took up lands in the northeastern part of the province, naming his seat Bohemia Manor. Between 1660 and 1670 he drew and redrew the map-a work of cartographic art whose accuracy made it essential in Calvert's boundary struggles. In 1663 the assembly naturalized Herrman. Baltimore gave him the title of lord and a special seal with baronial powers. By 1674, when the governor created Cecil County, Herrman's twenty thousand acres or more made him the largest private landholder in America. Bohemia Manor, its lands sloping down to the Bohemia River and Chesapeake Bay, became well known for its size, Dutch grooming, and beautiful location. In finding Ephraim Herrman, Danckaerts and Sluyter must have felt guided by the hand of Providence.

    Ephraim brought the two Dutchmen home to Bohemia Manor, where the elder

Herrman greeted them sympathetically. Much to their delight-they noted in their journal that "Maryland is considered the most fertile portion of America"-Herrman invited them to take up land on his manor. In 1683 a hundred or so Labadists settled there, growing corn, tobacco, flax, and hemp and manufacturing linen. The order adhered to the communal Christian teaching of Jean de Labadie, a Jesuit- turned-Calvinist reformer who pointed his followers down a straight and narrow road to salvation. Avoiding all luxury, the Labadists spurned sinful trappings like winter fires. They kept to themselves, owned property in common, and ate meals in silence. They slept in monastic simplicity-men and women separate. Though like the Quakers they dressed plainly, they had no kind words for the Friends, whom the Indians, according to Danckaerts and Sluyter, hated "very much on account of their deceit and covetousness." Local Quakers suspected the same of Sluyter, who became the Labadist bishop and ruled like an Old Testament patriarch. He also alienated many members of his flock, whose lean asceticism won few converts. Eventually the community dispersed.

So, we have this side of the family who were lords of the manor of many

thousands of acres in Maryland, and our side that had a house where the New York Stock Exchange stood, and a farm in Brooklyn. Why didn't we hold on to all that real estate? Always moving west: westward, ho! Later, love, Doug