Craven County NcArchives Biographies.....Graffenried, Christoph Von 
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Connie Ardrey n/a July 28, 2009, 11:34 pm

Source: "Swiss Roots" Online

Christoph von Graffenried

1661 - 1743 

Capture by native Americans was the most traumatic of many difficult 
experiences faced by the Bernese settler leader, Baron Christoph von 
Graffenried, in his attempt to make his fortune in America - and an experience 
he was lucky to escape from with his life. His companion was killed, and his 
own captivity dragged on for six weeks, before the Indians agreed to release 
him in return for a ransom. 

Von Graffenried's American experience was typical of that of many early 
colonists. Setting out in 1710 with great hopes, lured by promises of silver 
mines and fertile farmland, assured of peaceful relations with the local 
population, he led a group of Swiss and German religious refugees to North 
Carolina to found a New Bern in the New World. 

Three years later he left America for ever, deeply in debt, many of his 
colonists dead, his dreams shattered. He had borrowed beyond his means and his 
backers had let him down. 
 
The colony had suffered poor harvests, was too remote to be easily resupplied, 
and the political situation was one of jealousy and mistrust between the 
English who administered the colonies, the German-speaking settlers and the 
local Indian tribes who had been double-crossed over their land rights and had 
realized that the time had come to resist the incomers. 

And yet in later years the town he founded rose from the ashes. New settlers 
arrived from other colonies. He did not live to see it, but in 1765 New Bern 
was made the capital of North Carolina, a status it held for 25 years. Today 
it is a flourishing town with a population of about 23,000, famous not only as 
an early settlement, but as the birthplace of Pepsi Cola.  

Von Graffenried came from a well-known patrician family of comfortable means, 
and as a young man had sought his fortune in both France and England. But his 
father kept him on a short rein, and obliged him to return to Switzerland, 
where he took up public office in Yverdon. But when he ran into debt his 
thoughts turned towards America. 

It was just at this time that the Canton of Bern was looking for a way to buy 
land in one of the English colonies, and settle a few hundred "undesirables" - 
paupers and religious dissidents - there. Graffenried's plans and those of 
Bern came together. An advance party of Germans went on ahead, and the first 
hundred Swiss settlers left Bern in March 1710 and arrived in America in 
September. 

Von Graffenried laid out a town, his New Bern, on a triangle of land between 
the rivers Neuse and Trent. He built a line of fortifications from one bank to 
the other and defenses on the shore line as well. He also built a water mill 
for grinding grain. 

It started off so well that people in Virginia and Pennsylvania also bought 
lots there. But political unrest in the English colonies undermined the 
prosperity of the little town, with different English factions battling each 
other and alternatively cajoling or threatening von Graffenried to try to make 
him take sides. Added to this was the Indian uprising: many of the settlers 
regarded them as inferior savages and thought nothing of cheating and 
enslaving them. But the tribes could and did attack outlying farmsteads, 
keeping the people in a state of fear, destroying their crops and preventing 
supplies from reaching them. 

Von Graffenried himself tried to behave honorably, but he was faced with a 
combination of events that could not but cause trouble. He tried to keep his 
little colony neutral, and for a time was the one person able to mediate 
between settlers and Indians, but he ended up being mistrusted by both sides, 
and was unable to prevent bloody raids and equally bloody reprisals which left 
hundreds dead and stoked up fear and hatred. Many of his colonists deserted 
him, arguing that he had shown himself unable to protect them. 

In the end, von Graffenried was forced to return to Bern. In a letter he wrote 
to his father he described himself as the returning prodigal son. But despite 
his disappointments, he held his head up high: "Although I have grieved you, I 
have served my bailiwick with honor and have committed nothing atrocious which 
might have done you dishonor," he wrote. 

His begrudging father found him some minor offices, and he lived out the rest 
of his life in a modest and uneventful fashion. He is buried in Worb, just 
outside Bern, the estate which he eventually inherited.


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