LANCASTER COUNTY. 207 



To close this chapter, we have mtroduced a brief 

 sicetch of the pubhc services of our old father^ David 

 Dieffenderffer, residing at Hew Holland. 



David Dieffenderffer, was born, February 9th, 

 1752, near New Holland; before he had reached his 

 tenth year, his father, Michael Dieffenderffer, moved to 

 Lancaster. David, when in his eleventh, saw a sight in 

 Lancaster, "too horrible to relate," to use his own 

 language, the massacred Indians in their gore, and one 

 in the agonies of death, menacing revenge by the motion 

 oi ^'his dying hands." 



At the age of twenty-five, he sternly advocated the 

 suffering cause of his bleeding country, by actual and 

 personal services; first in the character of a militia man? 

 after the expiration of his tour, he served as an enlisted 

 volunteer of Colonel Houssacker's* regiment, under 

 Captain David Wilbert, of Philadelphia, and Lieut. Col. 

 George Strieker, father of General Strieker, late of 

 Baltimore. 



He was in many important engagements. He was 

 engaged in the taking of the Hessians at Trenton, where 

 Colonel Rahl, the Hessian commander, and a gallant 

 officer, was mortally wounded, besides six other 

 officers, and between twenty and thirty privates, of the 

 enemy, were killed, Decembsr 26, 1776, and twenty- 

 three officers, and rising of nine hundred privates, were 

 taken prisoners by the Americans, who lost only four 



*Houssacker, who afterwards deserted the Americans, and 

 surrendered twenty or more of his men, at Princeton, had 

 been originally commissioned a ma.jor of Wayne's battalion. 

 *' He had," says Graydon, ^'if I mistake not, been an adjutant 

 of the Royal Americans; and was considered a capable dis- 

 ciplinarian. He was a German, or rather a man of no country 

 or any country ; a citizen of the world, a soldier of fortune, 

 and a true mercenary." — Graydon's Mem. 218. 



