Page:Mennonite Handbook of Information 1925.djvu/85

 heat, they crawled out by the lower window and at once were taken captive. The mother was stabbed to death while a son and the daughter were tomahawked and scalped. The others were carried off captives. After living for seven years with the Indians, they were released and permitted to return to their home in Pennsylvania.

In 1763 the colony of Mennonites located in the Shenandoah Valley, in Page county, Virginia (where were settled the families of Michael Kauffman, Abram Heistand, Peter Blausser, Abram Strickler, John Rhodes and others) were all obliged to flee from Massanutten on the Shenandoah river to a place of safety east of the Blue Ridge mountains on account of a general Indian outbreak. In course of time these families all returned and reoccupied their homes.

On the last of August in the following year (1764) when the corn and hemp fields were grown to full length, eight Indians led by a white man suddenly appeared at the home of John Rhodes, a minister in the Mennonite Church, and the greater number of the family were surprised and massacred and their scalps taken.

Those who were killed were Bro Rhodes, who was shot while standing in the doorway of his home, his wife and one son, who were killed in the yard. Of two sons who were out in the corn field, one was shot out of a pear tree (into which he had climbed to see what all the noise x at^ the house meant), the other was shot and killed in the river while attempting to cross to a place of safety. While the awful work of taking the lives of her father,