Johann Eberhard Riehm
Johann Eberhard Riehm was born in Germany in 1687. In 1711 he married Elizabeth Schwab, and in 1717 he brought his young family to Pennsylvania. That year brought one of the first large companies of Germans from the Palatinate to Pennsylvania. The Palatinate was the Rhine country around Heidelberg, which the armies of Louis XIV of France had burned over again and again. He settled in the Conestoga country of what became Lancaster County, on the Muddy Creek in Cocalico Township.
A family genealogy printed in 1939 traces him to Leimen, a wine village just south of Heidelberg. It makes him a son of Hans Andreas Riem, a butcher, vintager and mayor of Leimen, who died there on 19 February 1719 at seventy seven, and it prints a petition Andreas Rihm wrote in July 1678 asking the Elector's cellar master to repair the lordship's wine press, because the village church had been burned by soldiers and the congregation was worshipping in the press house. That chain rests on a German researcher's study of the Leimen church books and vineyard records in 1935. The tie between the two men is that researcher's conclusion, and the genealogy prints no entry naming Eberhard as a son of Andreas.
By the 1740s he was one of the large landholders of the Muddy Creek settlement, with a tract of seven hundred acres. When Count Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian Brethren, travelled through the German settlements of Pennsylvania in 1742, he preached at Eberhard Riehm's house, and on his advice the Brethren chose the Muddy Creek settlement for a mission. Riehm offered to build them a meeting house on his own farm. When they turned the offer down he took offence. By 1748 he had joined the movement against them, and spoke openly of making his seven hundred acres the seat of a religious community like the Moravians' own town of Bethlehem. As he pointed out, he owned two hundred acres more than the Brethren did. In 1749 his sons Nicholas and John Eberhard were counted among the people of the Muddy Creek who were attached to the Brethren.
His wife Elizabeth died on 4 March 1761. He lived another eighteen years, among a family that kept growing around him. His son Tobias laid out the town that still carries the family's name, Reamstown. He died on 22 August 1779 at ninety two and was buried in the family ground at Reamstown. His stone, carved in German, calls him a very honest dear old grandfather. It says he was born in 1687 in Europe, married Elizabeth Schwab in 1711 and came to America in 1717, "where his family of ten children increased to 150 souls."
Children
Sources
If Johann Eberhard Riehm is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Johann Eberhard Riehm (1687-1779)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/johann-eberhard-riehm-1687-1779-bc522c.