OF WASHINGTON COUNTY, MARYLAND.
 

59
 

CHAPTER V
 

^HE brief era of peace from the close of the
Indian War to the beginning of the war of
the American Revolution, witnessed a re¬
markable development of the Valley. Dur¬
ing these ten or fifteen years, immigrants poured
into the County from all sides, but more es¬
pecially from Germany, attracted by the mag¬
nificent soil, healthful and invigorating cli¬
mate, pure and wholesome water and the in¬
ducements offered by Lord Baltimore, which
have already been set forth. Mills were built
along the banks of the Antietam and Conoco¬
cheague. Small factories of various kinds, were
started in different parts of the County. Barn¬
abas Hughes, the ancestor of the Hughes family,
had emigrated from Ireland, and built the Mt.
Aetna iron furnace at the foot of South Mountain.
Roads were laid out, the streams were spanned by
bridges and there was general prosperity.

The principal event of this period was the
laying out of the town of Hagerstown in Septem¬
 

ber, 17G1, by Jonathan Ilager on his tract called
'"New Work." Jonathan Hager,* as has been
already stated, was born in Germany.

About the year 1730 he emigrated to America
and after a short stay in Pennsylvania, came to
the Valley yvhere his memory is perpetuated by
the town which bears his name, probably in 1737
or 1738. In the patent for two hundred acres
of land which he received from Lord Baltimore in
1739, "a bounded white oak standing on the side
of a hill within fifty yards of said Hagar's dwell¬
ing-house," is mentioned in one of the lines. He
was married in 1740 to Elizabeth Kershner, or
Grischner, and by her had two children, a daugh¬
ter, Rosina, born April 21st, 1752, and a son,
Jonathan, born in 1756. To his wife, Elizabeth,
Hagar was tenderly attached. Upon her death he
w-rote in his family Bible in the German language,
''We lived together until the IGth of April, 1765,
P'hen it pleased the Lord to call her, after severe
suffering, out of this w-orld.    What God does is
 

*The Heger family is of old Saxon origin; the
very name denotes Its source and its antiquity. The
"Heger" was one of the "sworn and knowing free¬
men," called "Vierherren," holding the Folkmoete ir ,
Thing, which was legislature, divlne-servlce and court
of justice combined. The mystic-square of the
Thing, on which sat or stood the officers, was called
"Die Hegung," and one of the Vierherren, who had to
look . to It that no uninitiated person overstepped
the boundaries of the square, was the Heger; after¬
wards, the representative of the Count or Graf, when
holding court, was calio'i  Heger,

Such offices-in very early times became heredi¬
tary; if the father was a Vierherr, his oldest son
would be Initiated in due time, and generally receive
or inherit the same office. Family names were only
to be found with the princes (athelings).   Gradually,
 

the nobility began to take the name of their place of
residence, or of their office, and it is obvious that the
office of Heger very early furnished the names for a
family connected with the same for several gener¬
ations.

That the Heger family had the name for the old
Saxon Thing, is distinctly told us in a quaint old
chronicle of the sixteenth century, entitled "Dassel-
sche und Elnbecksche Chronica, v. Johann Setzner
um Hardesslanum, Erfurt, 1594," Page 171, we read:
"The noble men of Pleger held from olden time as a
fief a free-field-court from the Imperial Abbey of
Corvey and derive a hereditary revenue from the
same and today there are under their ausjpices in
Strothhagn two sessions of the free-field-court annu¬
ally."