A Day in Le Fevre Country

We arrived in south central Pennsylvania and established our base camp in Bowmansville just outside Lancaster. We are about midway between Gettysburg and Valley Forge in the heart of Dutch country PA and the Amish country. Great spot to camp on the top of Yellowhill as the leaves desperately try to cling to the branches and preserve the colors for another week.




My distant relative, Isaac Le Fevre arrived here outside Lancaster in 1708 and settled 2000 acres of land that William Penn had gifted him. His family all being killed as martyrs back in Strasbourg, France, young Isaac made the journey alone. Mary Ferree looked out for him and years later he took as his wife, Catherine Ferree, Mary’s daughter. Isaac settled on this land on Pequea Creek just outside Paradise, PA. Here he raised his family and began the long line of U.S. LeFevers that eventually became LaFavers and eventually bequeathed Margaret Georgine La Faver Slining, my mother.



We spent a couple hours at the Lancaster County Historical Society in Lancaster doing research on the LeFevers and on General Reynolds whom we had followed the previous day at the battle of Gettysburg some 60 miles away.



The Historical Society holds the famous LeFevre Family Bible that was printed in 1608 in Geneva in French and which Isaac brought to Pennsylvania when he came over in 1708. There is a story about how Isaac baked the Bible into a loaf of bread to smuggle it out of France as the Hugeunots were being killed when caught with the Bible.



The history behind this story only goes back into the 1930’s and it is presumed that it is just that, a great story. One of the reasons the story doesn’t hold water was evidenced by the size of the Bible. It would take a HUGE loaf of bread to hide this bible. We were shown the Bible by the archivist at the Society, a great gal named Heather who donned her white gloves and showed us the Bible, in its leather cover, and its pages of cotton or linen paper. Heather shows it to any La Faver family that comes by and apparently many of them make the pilgrimage. She knows the history of the Bible by heart and all the interesting footnotes inscribed as well. Heather even showed us where someone had written in English the recipe for a flu tonic. She had made the tonic herself for one of the Ferree family reunions and kept a bottle in the refrigerator at the Society. She brought it out and gave Suzy and me an eye dropper full of this alcohol, honey, vinegar and spice tonic. Suzy and I thought it didn’t taste bad and maybe our secret defense against the H1N1.



Armed with all the new found family history we headed for the pastures around Paradise and Strasbourg Pennsylvania in search of the cemeteries and land of the LeFevres. We found the Le Fevre cemetery outside Paradise next to an Amish school. An old one room school house was just letting out, and the horse carriages were pulling up in the rain and picking up the bonneted girls and straw hat boys after their day of class. The play yard at the school abuts the cemetery. Actually the boy’s outhouse is connected to the fence surrounding the cemetery. Only LeFevres can be buried in this cemetery as evidenced by the headstones, many going back to Isaacs’s sons. There was on recent headstone of a teen age LeFever buried in 2004.



We found Isaacs gravesite in the old Carpenter cemetery near Strasbourg next to the rail road tracks. A steam engine came by as we were arriving; full of tourists and then two minutes later a couple of Amish horse drawn carriages came along. All of this served to put us in the proper historical perspective. Isaac is buried next to his mother in law, Mary Ferree. Couldn’t find his wife, Catherine’s grave.