The Mickley brothers survived a massacre and saved the Liberty Bell. The incredible true story
Few stories are as dramatic as that of the Mickley brothers. John Peter was an early settler of Bedminster in Central Bucks. Both he and older brother Jacob grew up on a farm in Whitehall near the Lehigh River just above Allentown. John Peter survived an Indian massacre and fought in the American Revolution. Jacob saved the Liberty Bell.
The boys’ father John Jacques came from Alsace-Lorraine in France to escape religious persecution. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1733, he married Elisabeth Burkhalter and bought the Whitehall farm where she would bear him six sons and four daughters.
Descendant Joseph J. Mickley in 1833 described the difficulty of farming in Whitehall. “Families were living without protection in a wilderness, deprived of almost every comfort, exposed to attacks from wild beasts and reptiles, and the danger of being murdered and have their property destroyed by hostile Indians. The Indians kept them constantly in such fear that members of the families bade each other farewell in the evening before retiring, being under the impression they might not meet again on the next morning.”
William Penn’s sons started the trouble. They swindled Lenape Indians out of their Lehigh Valley homeland through the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737. The boys capitalized by selling the land to immigrants who inherited deadly backlash from a tribe pushed around and brutalized for years.
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Tragedy would reach the Mickley neighborhood on Oct. 8, 1763.
That morning a farmer working on his barn roof saw a dozen Lenape warriors wading across the Lehigh River and disappearing into woods rimming the Mickley farm. John Peter, 11, was in a field gathering chestnuts with his brother Henry, 9, and sister Barbary, 7.
“On seeing the Indians, they began to run away,” Joe Mickley recounted. “The little girl was overtaken not far from the tree by an Indian, who knocked her down with a tomahawk. Henry had reached the fence, and, while in the act of climbing it, an Indian threw a tomahawk at his back which, it is supposed, instantly killed him. Both children were scalped. The little girl, in an insensible state, lived until the following morning. Peter having reached the woods hid himself between two large trees surrounded by brushwood. He remained quietly concealed there, not daring to move for fear of being discovered. When he heard the screams of the Schneider family, he knew the Indians were at that place and that his way was clear. Unhurt, he ran with all his might to his brother John Jacob Mickley.”
The warriors chose not to attack the home of the boys’ father because of a particularly ferocious guard dog. Rather they raided other farms in Whitehall, setting them afire. Among those killed were the Schneiders and two of their children. Two sisters survived injuries, one scalped. A third was taken captive.
The massacres were part of a widespread tribal uprising fanned by France which opposed British rule on the Pennsylvania frontier. The Brits ultimately won the French and Indian War and expelled native tribes. Though peace prevailed for a decade, the American Revolution changed everything.
By that time John Peter, 25, a fifer in the state militia, joined George Washington’s army. Jacob, 40, helped organize support. He made frequent trips to Philadelphia in his horse-drawn wagon loaded with produce. While he was in town in September 1777, 15,000 British soldiers defeated Washington’s army at the Battle of Brandywine 26 miles south and marched on the capital.
Defenseless city leaders worried church bells would be captured and smelted into ammunition. Ten were removed from belfries and placed aboard farm wagons for transit to distant Allentown. Congress commissioned Jacob Mickley to transport the precious State House Bell known as the Liberty Bell for its use at the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Handlers lowered the 2,000-pound dulcimer onto Jacob’s wagon and covered it with potato sacks, manure and hay from city stables. Jacob then rendezvoused with other bell-toting wagons that departed Philadelphia on Sept. 17 under guard by 200 horse soldiers. The trek west would take a week over rough roads.
The wagons stopped overnight on Sept. 23 in Quakertown before moving on to Bethlehem. There Jacob’s wagon broke down. Jacob’s friend Frederick Leaser in his wagon carried the Liberty Bell the rest of the way to Zion Reformed Church. The icon was hidden in the basement until the following year when it returned to Philadelphia.
With the end of the Revolution, John Peter bought a Bedminster farm where he and wife Anna Koch raised five daughters. He lived to age 75. Brother Jacob remained in Whitehall and died at work in his field at age 70 when a tree fell on him.
The story of the patriotic brothers continues to be told and retold through the centuries.
Sources include “A Liberty Bell Shrine”, Congressional Record, May 1960, page 9751; “The genealogy of the Mickley family in America” archived at Cornell University published in 1893 and “Scenes of Lehigh’s Only Indian Massacre” published in the Allentown Morning Call on Aug. 2, 1931.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Why the Liberty Bell made stops in Quakertown and Allentown
