Christoph von Graffenried

Christoph von Graffenried (1661-1743) led a group of Swiss and Palatine Germans to North Carolina in 1710, and later authored Relation, an account of this unsuccessful attempt to settle in the New World.

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Graffenried was born November 15, 1661 in Bern, a German-speaking Canton of Switzerland, the eldest son of Anton von Graffenried (1639-1730) and Katharina Jenner (? -1669). The Graffenried family lived in Bern, Switzerland; they were a well-to-do, noble family.

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In April of 1684, Graffenried married Regina Tscharner (1665-1731). Regina came from a very ancient and noble family. In twenty years, Regina and Christoph had four sons and seven daughters. Graffenried had a hard time keeping his family fed, so in 1702, when he was 41 years old, he acquired the position as bailiff of Yverton. He did not enjoy his job very much.

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After a few weeks, Graffenried met Franz Ludwig Michel who had discovered silver mines in Virginia and owned land in the New World. He told Graffenried what glorious places North Carolina and Virginia were and he advised him to move to North Carolina. With the idea of paying off his debts and making money on the cheap land in North Carolina, Graffenried left his debts to his father and secretly departed for London so that he could see this New World.

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When in London, Graffenried had met with John Lawson who was publishing a book entitled "A Voyage to Carolina". Lawson was the Surveyor General of North Carolina. Lawson promised to show Graffenried and his settlers a perfect place to establish a community. Graffenried then met the proprietors who gave him the title Baron of Bernberg, after the settlement he was supposed to found. Consequently, Graffenried gathered a group of Germans from the Palatine region and Swiss immigrants. They had faced hardships in their own countries and wanted to start over in North Carolina. He sailed to North Carolina in 1710. On the sea, the settlers were attacked by Turkish pirates who stripped them of everything they brought. They took tools, building materials, clothes, food, and even their second ship.

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Once in the New World, the settlers sold everything that remained, except the clothes on their backs. John Lawson took them to a site at the junction of the Trent and Neuse Rivers, which they named New Bern. The first season, the settler's crops did not do well. Graffenried returned to Europe to get supplies and additional settlers. He returned to the colony unscathed.

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In addition to a lack of food and supplies, there was great tension between the settlers and the Tuscarora Indians of the Neuse River Region. Unknown to the settlers, their new settlement was on the site of an old Tuscarora Indian village. In 1711, Graffenried and the settlers evicted a group of Tuscarora from nearby lands without payment, and Graffenried assumed the title "Landgrave of Carolina." Retaliatory raids by the Tuscarora, under a leader named Hancock, led to deaths and damage to the settlement.

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During the summer of 1711, Graffenried, along with John Lawson, took a trip up the Neuse River. Graffenried wanted to crossbreed European grapes with wild, native grapes and start a vineyard. The Tuscarora Indians took Graffenried and John Lawson (as well as the slaves carrying the baggage) captive. While in captivity, John Lawson and Graffenried were given three separate trials, each in a different Tuscaroran village. One found the men not guilty; the other two pronounced them guilty of wrongful crimes against the Native Americans. The Tuscaroras decided to kill them, but the elders talked and decided Graffenried would be released. He wore such fine clothes they mistook him for the governor of North Carolina. They thought if they let the "governor" go, the colony would let the incident pass. They informed him they were planning an attack on all the settlements in North Carolina (this came to be known as the Tuscarora Indian War). The next day, Lawson was killed and Graffenried was allowed to return to his settlement, which he found abandoned and in flames.

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Graffenried had lost his fortune and returned to Bern, Switzerland in 1714. Graffenried was penniless and owed a great deal of money to the people of North Carolina. He sold his part in the North Carolina town to Thomas Pollock for 800 pounds. In an attempt to pay off his debts, Graffenried soon wrote a book entitled "Relation" as an apology and explanation as to why his settlement failed. He included several documents, among them a letter written to the governor of North Carolina and a layout of the settlement of New Bern. An artist, he included sketches of early colonial North Carolina. Graffenried also talked about how Lawson brought his death upon himself. He said that Lawson was a money grubbing land speculator and that he thought Lawson wanted the colony to fail because he was the one that told them about the land. Graffenried died unhappy and in debt in 1743.

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New World: "The New World" is one of the names used for the American continents and adjacent islands collectively, in use since the 16th century. The Americas were at that time new to the Europeans, who previously thought of the world as consisting only of Europe, Asia, and Africa (the Old World). The term "Ne...

Bern: The city of Bern or Berne (, ; ; ; ; Bernese German: Bärn ) is the Bundesstadt (federal city, de facto capital) of Switzerland, and, with about 130,000 people , the fourth most populous city in Switzerland. The Bern agglomeration, which includes 43 municipalities, has a population of 349,000. B...

Canton: A canton is:...

Christoph von Graffenried related Images and Photos (experimental)

Portrait of Count Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel	Gluck (Christoph Willibald Von Knight) (1714-1787)	Portrait of Christoph Willibald Von Gluck 1777	Kat Von D
Max von Sydow	Dita Von Teese	T.T. von Bern c.1938	Johann Christoph Friedrich German Writer
Ernst Von Schuch	Eric Von Stroheim	Christoph Wilibald Gluck at the Spinet 1775	Eleonora Von Toledo