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John Lederer
NC-39, Townsville,
NC,
USA
Latitude & Longitude:
36° 29' 39.8256",
-78° 25' 23.394"
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North Carolina State
Historical Marker |
Marker Text: "Pioneer German explorer traveled into Piedmont 1670 with Indian guide. Recorded observation of landscape & inhabitants. Entered colony nearby." John Lederer was an early explorer of the Carolina Piedmont who was largely dismissed in his own time. Born Johann Lederer around 1640 in Germany, he attended the Hamburg Academic Gymnasium and trained as a physician. Lederer arrived in Virginia in 1669 and was commissioned by Governor William Berkeley to search for the Pacific Ocean, believed to be just beyond the western settlements. It was the first of three journeys he would make into the backcountry. In May 1670 Lederer’s second expedition brought him into what is now North Carolina. His march included twenty-one militiamen and a Susquehanna Indian guide. Afraid of getting lost, the group pursued a straight compass course, ignoring several known Indian paths and encountering many natural obstacles. After twelve days of laborious path-cutting, the militiamen turned back, leaving Lederer and the guide to continue alone. Historian Alan V. Briceland wrote of the mission, “it was John Lederer who singlehandedly dispelled the English terror of the interior. On his Carolina journey, he survived alone for two months amidst wilderness and natives, proving that a European could survive by entrusting his life to the natives.” Lederer demonstrated that large, armed parties were not necessary for exploring the backcountry.
The militiamen who deserted Lederer spread stories that served to discredit the explorer. Claims related to his journey were doubted and scorned. Lederer, in shame, moved to Maryland, where his reputation preceded him. Sir William Talbot, secretary of the province of Maryland, initially distrusted Lederer, but soon found him to be “a modest ingenious person, and a pretty scholar.” Talbot translated Lederer’s Latin notes from his expeditions and published a day-by-day account of his expeditions. The resulting book was ridiculed as being a fabrication, then was essentially forgotten for 200 years. Francis Hawks was the first to study and attempt to interpret Lederer’s accounts. It has, since, been studied by cartographers, historians, and Indian ethnologists in order to try to make sense of his observations of people and places. There have been at least eight distinct interpretations of Lederer’s 1670 expedition advanced by scholars. While William Cumming and Douglas Rights believed that Lederer traveled into the very far north of what is now South Carolina, Briceland, using geographical and geological data more so than Lederer’s accounts of mileage, tracks a more modest route into central and eastern North Carolina.
References:
William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (revised edition, 1998)
Alan V. Briceland, Westward from Virginia: Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier, 1650-1710 (1987)
John Lederer, The Discoveries of John Lederer (reprint, 1958), available online from the UNC-Chapel Hill Research Laboratories of Archaeology: http://rla.unc.edu/Archives/accounts/Lederer/Lederer.html
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John Lederer Historical Marker Location Map, Townsville, North Carolina
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