Ancestors

Peter Hammond

Peter Hammond was born at Hummelstown, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, about 1775. Frederick Hummel had laid out the town in 1762, about nine miles east of Harrisburg. His father, also named Peter Hammond, was a native of Germany and one of its first settlers.

Peter grew up at Hummelstown and married there. His wife's name was Sarah. Shortly after the wedding he was obliged to sell his property to pay a bail that had been forfeited. He had friends in Franklin County, so he moved his family and goods there in wagons and settled near Strasburg. In Dauphin County he had farmed. A sketch of his son printed in 1897 calls him "a ready workman" who "could succeed in almost anything he undertook," and says that in Franklin County his work was varied.

Peter and Sarah were still at Hummelstown in 1813, when their daughter Mary Ann was born. She was christened there in 1814 at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, the town's German Lutheran congregation, with her parents entered as Peter Hammon and Sarah. The congregation still worshipped in its first church, a log building dedicated in May 1766 on two town lots that Frederick Hummel had deeded to it. John Henry Vanhoff was its pastor from 1811. The next spring, on 15 May 1815, the congregation laid the cornerstone of a limestone church to replace the log one, and dedicated it in August 1816.

By 1820 the family was in Franklin County. That year Peter Hammon headed a household of ten in Letterkenny Township, the township that holds Strasburg. In 1830 Peter Hammond was living in Fannett Township, the upper end of Path Valley. He was then in his fifties. Under his roof were a woman in her forties, two young men between fifteen and twenty, a boy between five and ten, and three girls between five and twenty. The household listed just before his was that of Martin Hammons, a man in his twenties with a young wife.

He enlisted for the War of 1812, and had started out to join his regiment when peace was declared.

Two of his sons are named. Peter, the elder, bought a farm in Cromwell Township, Huntingdon County, and took his younger brother Jacob there at eleven. Jacob, born near Strasburg, became a large landowner in Huntingdon County. Sarah died about 1836, when Jacob was twelve.

Peter died in Path Valley, Franklin County, about 1850, aged about seventy five.

If Peter Hammond is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Peter Hammond (1775-1850)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/peter-hammond-1775-1850-baeff4.