Person:Henry Hunsicker (43)

From A Genealogical History of the Hunsicker Family:

REV. HENRY HUNSICKER

Henry Hunsicker, youngest child of Valentine Hunsicker, was born in the old Homestead, in Skippack Township, 7 March, 1752. Like his older brothers, Jacob and Isaac, he was brought up a farmer. With tastes and aptitudes early evinced, combined with determined will and rare force of character, he acquired a fair education, so that he spoke and wrote well, both in German and English. Added to these natural gifts, he inherited strong constitutional vigor from both parents, blending the fire of Swiss blood and indomitable will power of the Van Sinterns and De Vossens on his grandmother's side.

At the age of thirty, he was ordained a Mennonite minister, and was soon after made the ruling Bishop of the district. He was an eminently practical man, possessing knowledge beyond that of most men among the Pennsylvania Germans of his time. Gifted by nature with a warm heart and a ready hand to assist, he became popular, influential, and useful both in the church and in the community. He was much sought and consulted, both in worldly and spiritual matters, being endowed with with excellent common sense and judgment. He was much employed in settling estates and appointed guardian of orphans. He was social, generous, and candid, not austere or rigorous, not inclined to the prevailing prejudices of the denomination to which he belonged, whose undue partiality for ancient forms and customs almost approached veneration. He claimed that he always gained in every argument; if his own was the weaker, he endorsed that of his opponent. He was quick-witted and abounded with repartee.

During his ministerial age travel was on horseback. He was contemporary with Bishop Matthias Pennypacker of Chester County, the great-grandfather of Ex-Governor Pennypacker of Schwenksville, Pa. The two rode horseback side by side many times in their ministerial visits to churches, and on numerous occasions met in general conferences at the mother Mennonite Church in Germantown.

It was the custom among the Mennonites then, and still is to some extent, not to pay their ministers for their services. A rich parishioner of his one day remarked, "I don't see how you can afford to give your time and services gratuitously." He curtly replied, "Why, then, don't you pay me?"

The writer (then in his eleventh year) has a distinct personal recollection of Grandfather Hunsicker, who gave him a present (having been named for him), two Spanish silver dollars, some six or seven years before his death. He was fond of children and disposed to playfully tease them. He always kept a cup of mint drops in a little wall-closet near where he sat, which was invariably brought out when children came around. In offering the mint drop, he first demanded a kiss.

The writer remembers well the place in which he sat in the long oldfashioned pulpit in the old meeting-house in Skippack, that stood near the wall in the northwest side of the present cemetery or graveyard.

He was married to Esther Detweiler, 6 December, 1772. She was born 13 March, 1751; died 18 August, 1829. She was the daughter of John Detweiler and came from an old, respectable, and substantial family in Skippack Township.

Henry and Esther Hunsicker had ten children (nine of them married and had families), six sons and four daughters, born in the following order: John, Elizabeth, Anna, Catherine, Henry, Jacob, Garret, Abraham (died less than a month old), Sarah, Abraham 2d.

Henry Hunsicker served faithfully in th ministry about fifty-four years and did 8 June, 1836, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. The writer remembers well the day of his death, being then nearly eleven years old. He lies interred side by side with the the partner of his joys and sorrows in the cemetery belonging to the old Mennonite Church in Skippack, which he served so long. Tombstones mark the place.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Hunsicker, Henry A, and Horace Mann Hunsicker. A genealogical history of the Hunsicker family. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1911)
   21-23, 1911.