Noddenhutton, Ohio Country.

March 8th, 1782.

The name meant huts of grace.

By sundown, every hut would be ash.

The village sat in the Tuscarawas River Valley,

about 90 miles south of where Cleveland stands today.

A quiet place, log cabins, a Cooper's shop, cornfields stretching toward the tree line.

Ten years earlier, a Moravian missionary named David Zysberger had founded Nadenhutton,

as a Christian settlement for Lenape and Mohican converts who had traded

the old ways for hymns, plowed fields, and pacifism. They dressed in European clothing. They married

white settlers. They baptized their children with German names. They would not pick up a weapon,

not for the British, not for the Americans, not for

anyone. In the winter of 1781, that neutrality became a death sentence. The American Revolution

had turned the Ohio frontier into a killing ground. British agents out of Detroit armed Shawnee,

Wyandotte, and Delaware war parties to raid settlements in western

Pennsylvania and Kentucky. American militia retaliated with expeditions into Indian country that made

no distinction between hostile warriors and peaceful farmers. The Moravian villages along the Tuscarawas

sat in the middle of it all, and both sides viewed them with suspicion.

The British suspected the Moravians of passing intelligence to the Americans.

The Americans suspected them of harboring raiders.

Neither accusation was true, but truth was scarce currency on the frontier in 1782.

That fall, British Allied warriors had forced the

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