"The Tulpehocken" originally referred to an area rather than a singletown. The area lay along the Tulpehocken Creek that drains a valley west of present-day Reading, Berks Co., PA. This small stream has its headwaters a few miles west of Myerstown and runs eastward to Womelsdorf. It was in the upper reaches of this stream that the first German settlers made their homes in The Tulpehocken in the 1720s. At Womelsdorf the stream turns sharply north 4.5 miles, then runs eastward again for about 2 miles, and then flows southeast for about 12 miles to its confluence with the Schuylkill River at Reading.
The settlers who came into The Tulpehocken in the 1720s were in the majority Lutherans and in the minority German Reformed. They, or their parents, had emigrated from the Palatinate in SW Germany, had been settled first in the Hudson Valley of New York, and were resettled for a time at Schoharie, New York. In 1723 the first group from Schoharie used the Susquehanna River to travel as far south as present-day Middletown. There they travelled up the Swatara Creek to its headwaters and then crossed over the ridge and down into the upper Tulpehocken.
For some three decades Womelsdorf served as a primary point for social, cultural, and commercial activity in The Tulpehocken. Since the days of its founding in 1748, Reading has become a larger center of population and activity for this area, so that one will sometimes see it stated that Tulpehocken was "in Reading" or "at Reading." In general terms this is true, but in precise terms "The Tulpehocken" lay in a valley defined by the Tulpehocken Creek and extended as far as 15 or 20 miles west of Reading. Actually the upper reaches of The Tulpehocken lie across the county line in Lebanon Co.
The course of the Tulpehocken Creek is shown by the red dots on the map at this Website: http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/MapMultPoint?id=1189912.
If you are seeking records on ancestors in The Tulpehocken before 1740 you will probably have to rely mainly on the private ledgers of individual ministers. For later dates you may have better luck searching parish records, tax records, land records, or other civil records.
The earliest ministers in this area were:
Lutheran:
John Bernard van Dieren
Anthony Jacob Henkel
John Valentine Kraft
Casper Leitbecker
(John) Caspar Stoever the Younger
Nicholas Kurtz
Reformed:
John Philip Boehm
Peter Miller
Henry Goetschy
Dominicus Bartholomae
Caspar Schnorr
Contributed by: Nelson Sulouff.
Last Modified