Stoutenberger, John
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Johannes Conrad Stautzenberger (anglicized to John Stoutsenberger) was born on 2 April 1762 in York County, Pennsylvania, to Conrad and Anna Catharina, two German immigrants who likely fled the war-torn Palatinate region of the Rhine River Valley. The forty to fifty thousand Palatine German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century (about sixty percent of Pennsylvania’s population at the time) were termed “Pennsylvania Dutch.”
In 1777, at the age of fifteen, John Stoutsenberger enlisted as a musician in the 4th Battalion of Continental Artillery of the Continental Army. He served for three years and obtained the rank of drum major. After the war, on 30 March 1784, Stoutsenberger married Maria Margaretha Ritschie. They had seven children.
Stoutsenberger moved to the German Settlement (modern-day Lovettsville) in Loudoun County in 1795, after some of his relatives had already established themselves there. Several eighteenth-century log homes still stand in Lovettsville today, including parts of Stoutsenberger’s homestead. He bought his first enslaved person in 1803, and by 1822 owned seven people—a rarity among his German Settlement neighbors. Upon his death on 31 March 1837, he bequeathed six enslaved people to his wife. Stoutsenberger is buried with his wife Maria Margaretha and son Samuel in the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church Cemetery in Lovettsville.
By Andrew Snowman
