Blooming Grove Dunkard Settlement

In eighteen oh five, a group of German colonists made their way into this valley in north-central Pennsylvania, led by a physician named Frederick Haller. They were Dunkards, a name outsiders gave to members of the German Baptist Brethren, a pietist Protestant sect who practiced baptism by full immersion and rejected both war and ostentation. They had come seeking religious freedom, a promise Pennsylvania had extended since William Penn's day.

The families who settled here, among them the Heims, Ulmers, Staigers, Waltzes, and Grosses, cleared land and built a community rooted in plain living and communal faith. Their meeting house, built in eighteen twenty-eight, stands as a modest monument to that original settlement. The Dunkards were among the many dissenting German Protestant groups who found in Pennsylvania a refuge that Europe denied them, shaping the religious fabric of the Pennsylvania backcountry across the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.