Gnadenhutten: The Worst Atrocity of the Revolutionary War
Ohio
Near this point in Tuscarawas County sits a nine-acre memorial park that marks the site of what many historians consider the single worst atrocity of the American Revolutionary War. What happened here on March eighth, seventeen eighty-two, was not a battle. It was a massacre of peaceful people who had done nothing wrong.
Gnadenhutten, whose name means huts of grace in German, was a Moravian mission village established in October of seventeen seventy-two. The Moravian Brethren, a pietist Protestant denomination from central Europe, had been doing missionary work among the Lenape, also called Delaware, for decades. By the early seventeen seventies they had established a community here of Christian converts who farmed, worshipped, and lived largely apart from the violence of the frontier wars swirling around them.
That neutrality made them suspects to everyone. The British and their Native allies believed the Gnadenhutten Lenape were passing information to American forces. American settlers blamed them for raids they had nothing to do with. In September of seventeen eighty-one, British-allied warriors forced the entire community to abandon the village and march to a new location near Lake Erie called Captive Town.
The following February, a group of villagers was permitted to return to Gnadenhutten temporarily to harvest the crops they had left behind and gather food. They were still there in early March when a Pennsylvania militia force of about ninety volunteers arrived under Colonel David Williamson.
The militia disarmed the Lenape by pretending friendship. Then they voted on what to do with the prisoners. The vote went against mercy. On the morning of March eighth, ninety-six men, women, and children were killed with mallets and hatchets. Thirty-nine of the dead were children. The bodies were burned in the mission houses.
No member of the militia was ever punished. The massacre so enraged Native nations throughout the region that it fueled a decade more of warfare on the Ohio frontier.
