Germantown, North Carolina
Germantown is an unincorporated community in Hyde County, North Carolina. It is at the intersection of Swindell Rd. (NC-1141) and NC-1140. Germantown is approximately 52.66 miles east-southeast of Greenville, North Carolina, 44 miles southeast of Williamston, North Carolina, and 240.4 miles south-southeast of Washington, D.C., at an elevation of 1 meter. Germantown is also known for having a lot of German Americans.
Pennsylvania Dutch
The devastation of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and the wars between
the German principalities and France caused some of the immigration of Germans to America from the Rhine area. Members of this group founded the borough of Germantown, in northwest Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, in 1683. They settled on land sold to them by William Penn. Germantown included not only Mennonites but also Quakers.
This group of Mennonites was organized by Francis Daniel Pastorius, an agent for a land purchasing company based in Frankfurt am Main. None of the Frankfurt Company ever came to Pennsylvania except Pastorius himself, but 13 Krefeld German (Dutch-speaking) Mennonite families arrived on October 6, 1683, in Philadelphia. They were joined by eight more Dutch-speaking families from Hamburg-Altona in 1700 and five German-speaking families from the Palatinate in 1707.