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“If they did not have the money, an American citizen could pay it provided the Hessian agreed to be indentured for three years.”

This is not PA-related (I assume), but it makes me think what I found in CT may have been due to this.

As a graveyard- as well as RevWar-lover, I spent many weekends hunting out old graveyards in CT when I lived there. Many touching RevWar-related graves (in those days, they told stories more than now).

Wondering a graveyard I saw a stone with a copper cap “protecting” it - it was a plain squared stone so easy to do. The squaring was unusual for the period, too.

The grave was for a “Hessian” soldier who stayed on, living with the family who hosted him until his death in the early 1800s. Never married, apparently. Makes me wonder (and perhaps it was on the stone; I don’t recall all details 15 years later) if he was 1 of those indentured.

So touching to see these graves.

Thanks for that story...and yes, it indeed sounds like what you suggest. The numbers I have seen in some of the books that I've read is that about 30,000 Germans came here (half were actually from Hesse-Kassel, thus were called "Hessians"), one-third went home, one-third were killed, and one-third stayed on here. Wikipedia differes a bit on the stats:

"27,839 served in the Americas and after the war ended in 1783, some 17,313 Hessian soldiers returned to their German homelands. Of the 12,526 who did not return, about 7,700 had died. Some 1,200 were killed in action and 6,354 died from illness or accidents, mostly the latter.[citation needed] Approximately 5,000 Hessians settled in North America, both in the United States and Canada."

I have also read that many of these German boys were quite taken with the land and the beautiful American women, and saw much more opportunity here rather than back in Europe.