A Pennsylvanian’s Reflection on America’s 250th
America turns 250 this year. Like most milestone anniversaries, it arrives wrapped in debate. We reflect on what we have become, what we have failed to become, and whether the gap between can be closed. These are fair and important debates. But anniversaries also invite a quieter but just as important exercise: reflection. Reflection on what endures beneath the noise. For me, that reflection is genealogically rooted. My family has not watched our history from the outside. They were present for most of it.
Faith Over Fear
In September 1742, Christian Yoder stepped off the St. Francis & Elizabeth at the port of Philadelphia. He led his family to the new world from Canton Bern, Switzerland, where his Anabaptist community had faced persecution, imprisonment, forced military conscription, and martyrdom in rare cases, for the crime of worshipping differently than the state preferred. He was not a refugee in the modern sense, as he had options. But those options required him to abandon his conscience, and that was a trade he was unwilling to make.
While William Penn had passed on over two decades earlier, his promise endured and lured many to Pennsylvania – a place where your conscience was not a liability. For Christian Yoder and Peter Glick (Gluck) who followed in 1748, this promise went beyond political theory. It was a lifeline.
They eventually migrated to the interiors of Pennsylvania, built farms, raised children, and practiced their faith without interference from the state and other religious communities. All they asked of the new world was the freedom to be left alone to build something of their own. America, at its best, honored that request.
Land and Ambition
Not every ancestor came to America fleeing persecution. Johannes Long, and his son, John Long, arrived in America a generation earlier. Around 1710 to 1730, they emigrated to America from Heidelberg, in the Palatine region of Germany. They were not Anabaptists, but likely mainstream German Protestants who had ample religious freedom at home but not enough economic freedom. They lacked land, opportunity, and a future. At the time, the Rhine Valley was overcrowded, and the land exhausted. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, was neither.
This motivation of migration is sometimes viewed as less noble than the faith-driven motivation – an economic calculation compared to a principled sacrifice. I, however, disagree with that framing. The ambition to build a better life for your children and participate in an economy that rewards effort and skill over inheritance is not a lesser motivation, but among the most American motivations imaginable. My Long ancestors did not arrive with theological arguments, but a willingness to work. America made room for them too.
Hunger and Hope
The latest major line to arrive came from farthest away in spirit and miles. In the 1840s, William Hunter departed Prestonpans, a coal and mining town just east of Edinburgh, Scotland. He made the crossing during the Hungry Forties, a grim decade of agricultural depression, industrial volatility, and political unrest that made working-class British life precarious.
The Hunters were Lowland Scots – Protestant, literate, English-speaking. Like the Longs, they were fleeing diminishing returns on a life lived with honesty who had done everything right and still found it insufficient. They arrived in a Pennsylvania and American nation already well-established. After slipping into its rooted communities, William Hunter produced an American-born child who would know no other home.
His son William would be born in Pennsylvania in 1852. By the time of his birth, some branches of my family had already been in America for over a century.
Becoming American
The fact about my ancestry that I find most remarkable is that these three communities – Swiss Anabaptists, Palatine Germans, and Lowland Scots – that would have had little reason to interact in Europe became Pennsylvania neighbors and eventually family. The convergence of these lines occurred through the ordinary mechanisms of American life: shared geography, shared commerce, shared civic institutions, and consistent generations of proximity that these original distinctions gradually dissolved.
As remarkable is the fact that Christian Yoder did not make the crossing of the Atlantic alone. His brother Jacob Yoder and family sailed with him on the St. Francis & Elizabeth, but Jacob would not survive the Atlantic. Jacob Yoder’s line would nevertheless continue. His descendants would find their way to the same Pennsylvania communities and extended families centuries later. One brother made it, but both brothers are still here. A story of persistence through loss, reconvening across generations, and refusal to be finished.
This is what the American identity looks like when you begin to trace it. It is predominately made by each of us. It is assembled across generations from sacrifice, shaped by a particular place, and tested by time. Central Pennsylvania, my longtime home, is where these lines converged and where I continue to build upon. My roots run deep in the Susquehanna Valley where these ancestors settled, farmed, and built to what we see today. The Susquehanna Valley is not incidental to my story but is the story.
The Living Inheritance
I am a tenth-generation American by my oldest line. I am also a first-generation college graduate. I’m the first person in any of my lines that I’m aware of to obtain a doctorate, studying how local institutional effectiveness and design shape economic crisis response. I’m one of the few to serve as an elected official in municipal government – serving a second term on Williamsport City Council and previously serving a four-year tenure as Council President. I’m an alumnus of a national fellowship program though a premier think tank helping address urban American challenges. I am building a small analytics consultancy focused on Pennsylvania communities and economic development organizations.
I say this not to boast but to make a specific point: the inheritance is real, and it is very active. The same impulses that moved Christian Yoder, Peter Glick, Johannes Long, and William Hunter to cross the Atlantic for freedom to build a life on their own terms moves me to build my own life and impact my own community. The scale may be different, the mural may be more modern, but the disposition is very recognizable.
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in the 1830s admires the township as the seedbed of democratic self-governance. It was the place where citizens learned, through direct participation, what it meant to be responsible for their own community. My ancestors, who fled the overarching state authority Tocqueville warned against, would have understood his point intimately. They built townships and showed up, as I do today.
Honest Reckoning
America’s 250th Anniversary arrives during genuinely challenging times. Political polarization is real, institutional trust is diminished, and economic anxiety is tangible and not evenly dispersed. The cultural, geographic, and economic distance between Americans has grown in ways that should concern anyone. These are real, legitimate grievances.
But I am also the descendant of Americans who had seen and lived much worse. My ancestors arrived during wars, depressions, and upheavals that make today’s challenges look manageable. The Switzerland that Christian Yoder and Peter Glick fled was not stable for their religious society. Johannes Long fled much worse economic conditions than what many of us are anxious about today. William Hunter was genuinely hungry compared to many of us today. The Pennsylvania many my ancestors settled was a frontier in the most literal sense, with much of the danger and uncertainty that would imply. Each generation of my family inherited a difficult moment and chose to build anyway.
There is an important distinction between uproar and decline. Uproar is a condition of society working through genuine disagreements about its future. Decline is much different, and I’d argue much more serious – a loss of capacity to have that argument and emerge from it still recognizably ourselves. We are in an uproar, not decline, as the evidence for decline is less convincing than the loudest voices across the political spectrum would have you believe.
The Dream, Evidenced
I’m a tenth-generation American who still believes in the America who accepted my ancestors without question. That belief is not naïve. I recognize the fruits of America were not extended evenly, that Americas promise made to people who looked like my ancestors were denied to others for far too long, and that honest patriotism requires holding both the achievement and failure front and center. But the promise of America – conscience, community, earned prosperity, self-governance – remains the most compelling proposition in the history of political organization.
The American dream, I would argue, is not most alive in the places where it is loudest, but rather places like Williamsport, where I call home. Mid-sized, de-industrialized, unglamorous, populated by people showing up for their neighbors because nobody else is going to. My ancestors did not build Pennsylvania into what it is today by waiting for someone else to do it, and neither are we.
The 250th as a Renewal of the American Covenant
Anniversaries are not celebrations recognizing how perfect we are. They are reflection points to learn from and recommit to what’s possible. Christian Yoder, Peter Glick, Johannes Long, and William Hunter did not arrive to a finished country. They arrived to a proposition that we still hold and can build upon. The proposition that a community of conscience, build by people willing to work and govern themselves, could build their own future and endure. Two hundred and fifty years of evidence suggest that they were all right.
The proposition they arrived to remains unfinished, and it always will be. Each generation inherits an incomplete promise and is obligated to pass it forward in better shape than they received it. That obligation is what my ancestors’ sacrifices, trials, and tribulations mean to me. They are not a comfortable inheritance, but an active and ongoing build.
America at 250 is an invitation. My family has been accepting it for nearly three centuries, and I see no reason to stop now.
