Nederlanders and Germans fleeing religious persecution began settling in the colony of Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn, in 1683. German Quaker, and Mennonite
immigrant families founded Germantown on October 6, 1683, marking the first major immigration of German people to America.
The settlement was inhabited by fifty-four German families who had accompanied Johan Printz to the Swedish settlement on the Delaware several years earlier and had resettled themselves.
Germantown was the birthplace of the American antislavery movement. The first anti-slavery petition in the New World was drafted in the home of Thönes Kunders of Germantown in April 1688. Kunders hosted the early Germantown Quaker meetings and the Christian group were already prominent in their condemnation of this inhuman trade, with the society's founder, George Fox, speaking strongly against it.
 |
| Thones Kunders's house at 5109 Germantown Avenue |
The founding of Germantown on October 6, 1683 was later to provide the date for German-American Day, a holiday in the United States, observed annually on October 6.