The Mystery of Maxatawny Reformed Church and the Grave of Elisabeth Kroll
By Brendan D. Strasser
Note: This article originally appeared in slightly different form in a January 2005 issue of the Kutztown Patriot.
Situated between Wilson Manor and Saucony Meadows in Maxatawny Twp. about 200 yards southeast of the Willow St.-Kohler Road intersection is a single grave that has intrigued local historians for quite some time. It is still being marked, inexplicably, as a Revolutionary War grave. The east-facing side of the well-worn sandstone, barely legible, reads, “Elisabeth / Crollin ist / gebohrene __ / August 1765[?] / und ist ges / torbene 5[?] Hornung” [remainder obscured]. The westward side does not appear to contain any names but is so badly eroded as to be unreadable. While the year of birth is uncertain and that of death unknown, Elisabeth Croll does not appear among readily available genealogical data for early Maxatawny settlers, and we can best assume that she died as an infant or young girl, possibly in her sixth month, Hornung (Hanning in the dialect) being a mostly obsolete German word for February. At the very least, the “in” suffix indicates that she was unmarried upon her death.
While further documentation remains elusive, Elisabeth is indisputably connected to the Croll family that had settled in the township by 1752, the year that Maxatawny was formally established, when Philip Croul appears in tax lists as a single taxpayer. In 1759, Philip and Jacob Kraul are listed as married taxpayers. (Through this era, the surname was spelled variously as Kroll, Grauel, and even Crowell.) The first published Croll genealogy (1887) incorrectly states that Philip was the original immigrant who settled in Montgomery Co. prior to 1750. Actually, this Philip was born in York Co. in 1734, a son of Ringersahn, Germany, native Christian Croll (1707-1758), who may be listed as Christian Kropf upon arriving at Philadelphia aboard the Allen in 1729 and who settled in York Co. (To confuse things further, another Christian Croll arrived in Philadelphia, also in 1729, aboard the Mortonhouse.) Philip seems to have later relocated to Montgomery Co. and may be the same fellow who shows up in the Maxatawny tax lists. In any event, the Crolls secured the first patent for the township land southeast of Kutztown that became associated with the name, and Philip fathered at least two children who remained in the area: Michael, said to have relocated from Montgomery Co. to Greenwich Twp. after his marriage, circa 1790-93, and Anna Maria (1767-1851), familiarly known as Polly, who married Jacob Esser (1758-1845), and resided in Kutztown, where both are buried in St. John’s churchyard. After Philip died, his widow, Maria Eva, remarried to Abraham Zimmerman (1735-1807), whose stone residence still stands on the northeast corner of Rt. 222 and Long Lane. Members of the Croll family also settled the hamlet of Grimsville (originally known as Crollsville), and a George Crowl had migrated north into Brunswick Twp. (now Schuylkill Co.) by Berks County’s founding in 1752.
Exactly when the Croll ownership of the Bowers Road tract passed is a bit sketchy, but it was still associated with the family as late as 1852, when future Reverend P. C. Croll, Philip’s great-great-grandson, was born to John and Catherine (DeLong) Croll “one mile southeast of Kutztown.” The 1854 Berks Co. Atlas shows it as the “Goll” farm, and the 1862 as “Swayer”; by 1876, Dr. Edward Hottenstein owned it. Eventually, for most practical purposes, the tillable land was annexed to the farm immediately west, known to succeeding generations as Levan, Nicks, and finally Baldwin. (Former KSC football coach George Baldwin lived in the nearby Victorian farmhouse that was razed in 2002.) For some time now, the Borough of Kutztown has owned the Croll farm, where its wells are sited, renting the farmhouse and leasing adjacent acreage for the cultivation of crops.
In 1951, Edgar Kramer fashioned a surround of limestone and discarded brick to protect the Croll grave, and more recently, Bill Fox acted as its caretaker, clearing it of weeds prior to the construction of the retirement village that now occupies the surrounding land. Whether this lone remaining grave was once part of a larger cemetery, however, remains a mystery. Some have speculated, using early Reformed church records as evidence, that the location was the original site of the Maxatawny Reformed congregation, organized about 1736 and said by tradition to have erected its first stone house of worship in 1755 on five acres of Daniel Levan’s land proximate to the Saucony. In 1759, when the congregation experienced a schism for reasons that remain obscure, some of the worshipers combined with settlers attending Mertz Church at Stony Point (now Dryville), Rockland Twp., to found a new congregation, according to Kutztown’s Centennial History, “about two miles farther south along the Saucony Creek,” which became known as DeLong’s (Bowers) in honor of the family that donated the land. This measure, while imprecise, would put the first church south and east of the original Kutztown borough line in the general vicinity of the end of Willow St.
Epitaphs: Handbook of Historic Family Graveyards, Berks County, Pennsylvania, compiled by Jacqueline B. Nein, Joan Texter, and Cynthia Jimenez in 1999 for the Berks County Association for Graveyard Preservation, claims that the Croll gravesite, which looks like a single plot measuring about 10’ square, is actually part of a larger tract “at least 100’ x 100’ -- possibly 200 burials. This most likely is the graveyard for the very first Reformed church in the area.” The larger tract referred to here seems to be the gently sloping meadow immediately behind Wilson Manor, which would have abutted the dirt extension of Willow St. south of Normal Ave. that once connected near Swoyer’s Crossing to the Bowers Road. To the contrary, however, no evidence of other graves was located in a site survey conducted prior to building the twin manors--though this survey probably did not extend beyond the actual building site into the adjacent field. Typically, while human remains, fabric, and plain wood coffins would all have rotted away in 250 years, and most early pioneers wore no jewelry into the grave for modern metal detectors to locate, trained archaeologists can still detect old gravesites by such methods as analyzing soil composition and dowsing. Additionally, land records indicate that this parcel, while adjacent to the Levan tract that bounded both sides of the Saucony, was under Croll ownership by 1752 and so would not have been eligible for the Levans to donate.
Elisabeth Croll’s marker is a sad reminder of an era of primitive living conditions, when medicine had yet to provide practical remedies for high infant mortality rates. More than likely, however, it is the sole remaining remnant only of the original family graveyard, not of the fabled Maxatawny Reformed congregation’s first house of worship, the foundations of which may still lie buried along the east side of the Saucony somewhere east of the Kutztown Area Elementary School.
On-line genealogy sites maintained by Robert W. Crull (Edmund, OK) and Thomas Moore (Upper Darby, PA), and the St. John’s cemetery reading by Larry Haines contributed information to this article, as did Jay Druckenmiller, Bill Fox, and the Rev. Willis K. Heckler.
