(Editor’s note: As the Chestnut Hill Local this month will celebrate the start of its 68th year, we bring you the story of one of the area’s first newspapers, founded by an ambitious businessman who came to Philadelphia 300 years ago.)

The 13 American colonies had just declared independence from England. Newspapers throughout Philadelphia enthusiastically rallied around the cause of freedom.

All except one. Die Germantowner Zeitung — in English, The Germantown Newspaper.

Die Germantowner Zeitung was either pacifist in its outlook or outright loyalist. Maybe it was a bit of both. Regardless, and given the times, those views were far from popular. Here’s how Johann Christoph Sauer Jr. and his son Christoph 3d, wealthy publishers of Germantown’s longtime newspaper of record, paid a steep price for swimming against the rising tide of rebellion.

In Germantown, the members of the Sauer family had been highly esteemed for many years. Christoph Jr. inherited Die Germantowner Zeitung from his enterprising father, who migrated to the colonies in 1724. Christoph Sr. was a tailor back in his hometown of Ladenberg, Germany, but once here, he reinvented himself in a big way.

He and his wife and son settled in Germantown, and he set about making clocks and repairing pots and pans, according to Sattler College historian Hans Leaman, who has written about the Sauer family. As the years passed, Leaman says, Sauer added to his enterprising skillset, including cabinet maker, bookbinder — even opening an apothecary shop, performing surgeries and bloodletting.

That might have been enough for most, but Sauer Sr. had one more trick up his sleeve. He built his own printing press, made his own ink powder and began publishing a German language Bible — the first European language Bible printed in the colonial United States, Leaman says — along with religious broadsides, an ABC book, an almanac, and most ambitious of all, a newspaper. He purchased the paper it was printed on from another enterprising publisher by the name of Benjamin Franklin.

“Some of the other biographers I’ve read seem kind of amazed that he was able to convince folks that he could be successful with it,” Leaman said. “He had to import the very expensive type (the Fraktur font, which German audiences were used to reading), and he needed to borrow money for that. Ben Franklin had earlier tried to produce a German paper, but with his own Antique type. That’s one reason why it didn’t take off.”

Whatever skills Sauer Sr. might have possessed, naming a newspaper was not one of them.

It was called Der Hoch-Deutsch Pensylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber, oder Sammlung Wichtiger Nachrichten aus der Natur und Kirchen-Reich. Translation: High German Pennsylvania Recorder of Events, or Collection of Important News from the Realms of Nature and the Church. Not a name that rolls trippingly across the tongue.

His son Christoph Jr. inherited the newspaper upon his father’s death in 1758 and published it under the much more manageable, if not particularly original name of Germantowner Zeitung. Christoph Jr. was at least as entrepreneurial as his father. He built his own paper mill along the banks of the Schuylkill. He was also, by that point, one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania, and board president of Germantown Academy, which was founded in 1759.

Over the years, the newspaper became a roaring success for its time, with a respectable circulation of 4,000.

Christoph Jr. was, unlike his father, a member of the Church of the Brethren and a pacifist, according to Brethren Historical Library and Archives.

All went well until the colonies threw off the yoke of British colonialism and declared independence.

By this time, Christoph Jr. had been joined in the publishing business by his son Christoph 3d. Christoph Jr. had warned against the violence and horrors of war, but Christoph 3d was a devout British loyalist, Leaman said.

Christoph Jr., he adds, harbored complex beliefs.

“Anabaptists (Christoph Jr.’s faith) and Mennonites would have talked about there being two kingdoms,” Leaman said. “Their prime loyalty is to a kingdom of God that cannot be seen. That transcends all national boundaries. At the same time, they do find themselves coincidentally citizens of particular nations, nations here on earth. It was not their role to influence that. For Christoph Jr., he wasn’t trying to change the government that there was. As long as the king was head of state, his conscience would be that he shouldn’t assist in overthrowing him.”

Christoph 3d harbored far more radical views. In this, among the German-speaking population, he might not have been alone.

On the one hand, he might have perceived his father as having come in for mistreatment for his beliefs by the continentals, Leaman said. On the other hand, the political allegiances of many German settlers were suspect, perhaps because King George was only three generations removed from his German forebears.

“The Germans were thought to be loyalists in that they came from the same line as their rulers and that they were afraid of an independent government in the New World,” Leaman explained.

(That said, plenty of other German settlers were active in the American Revolution. John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, for example, served as a military officer in the Continental Army.)

By Leaman’s accounting, the Sauers’ loyalty to the crown wasn’t confined to words only. When the British army captured Germantown, Christoph 3d and his brother Peter published loyalist propaganda for the local Germans and Hessians.

When the British were driven out, Christoph 3d made his escape with the British army to New York. He consequently emigrated to England after the war. He was named a royal printer and moved to the Canadian maritime province of New Brunswick, where he published two newspapers. Peter made for the West Indies, where he became a physician.

Christoph Jr. stayed behind and eventually he was left holding the bag.

A detailed Sauer family history takes it from here.

Christoph Sauer Jr. was arrested on the night of May 25, 1778, and marched off to take an oath of loyalty at a nearby military encampment. He refused on religious grounds.

By his own account, he was treated badly.

Again, the family history picks up the narrative:

“They frequently struck me in the back with their bayonets till they brought me to Bastian Miller’s barn, where they kept me till next morning. Then they strip’d me naked to the skin and gave me an old shirt and breeches so much torn that I could hardly cover my private parts, then cut my beard and hair, and painted me with oil colors red and black, and led me along barefooted and bareheaded on a very hot, sunshiny day.”

This mistreatment eventually caught the notice of Gen. Muhlenberg, who suggested that Sauer petition Gen. Washington for release, which he did. He was set free on May 29.

But Sauer Jr.’s sad story was far from over. According to the family history, while in captivity he missed a public notice of demand that he appear to take an “Oath to the States.” Consequently, all of his properties were confiscated and sold at an auction. He was allowed to keep only his glasses. This once wealthy civic leader of Germantown lived out his remaining days in poverty.

Christoph Sauer Jr. died August 26, 1784.