Johann Christian Lander

1782 - 1867  (84 years)

• Name	Johann Christian Lander
  Birth	17 May 1782	Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany
  Gender	Male
  Immigrant	May 1834	Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, France
  	Ship: Sully Arrived: 14 Jul 1834 New York City
  	On the same ship and voyage with John A. Sutter (later known for the California Gold Rush - Sutter's Mill) During the 1 Oct 1832 crossing Captain Robert H. Pell’s cabin conversations about Oersted’s and Faraday’s experiments inspired fellow-passenger Samuel F. B. Morse to sketch the first workable electromagnetic telegraph and dot-and-dash code in his notebook—an epiphany Morse later swore “was born on the Sully.”
  Death	1 May 1867	Dansville, Steuben County, New York, USA
  Burial	St.Peter's Cemetery, Wayland, Steuben Co., New York, USA
  Notes	Johann Christian Lander came into the world on 17 May 1782 in the small Saar valley town of Wiebelskirchen—then part of the principality of Nassau-Saarbrücken but already feeling the tremors of the French Revolution just across the Rhine. When the armies of the new French Republic swept through in 1793, the teenage Christian suddenly found himself a French citizen, his hometown renamed “Wiebelskirchen-sur-Sarre” and governed under the metric system. He grew to manhood during the Napoleonic Wars: watching local lads conscripted into the Grande Armée, learning to count coal output in kilograms instead of pounds, and hearing village elders grumble that borders meant little when the king in Paris—or later the emperor—could redraw them overnight. Peace did not bring stability. After Napoleon fell in 1815, the Congress of Vienna handed most of the Saar to Prussia. Overnight Christian became a Prussian subject, obliged to pay new tariffs that made it harder to sell the iron-tinged coal his family mined from shallow pits on the hill above town. Marrying Maria Margarethe Koch in 1804, he tried to raise seven children on soil now scarred by fifteen years of war and wracked by post-war recession. By the early 1830s the Rhine-Palatinate was in the grip of “Auswanderungsfieber”—emigration fever—and pamphlets circulated through Bierstuben promising cheap land beyond the Atlantic and canals that carried wheat straight to global markets. In the spring of 1834 Christian sold his cramped cottage and, with Maria and six of their children, reached Le Havre just in time to book steerage on the American packet-ship *Sully*. Their crossing lasted fifty-nine days, a blur of seasickness below and salt-stung winds above. Among the steerage passengers was a wiry Swiss adventurer named Johann August Sutter who passed evenings sketching dreams of empire on the Sacramento River. Deckside gossip told of an earlier eastbound *Sully* voyage in which a New-York professor named Samuel Morse had conceived an “electric telegraph.” Christian listened politely, too busy calming children and bailing rainwater from their bunks to imagine how those sparks of genius would someday report battles and crop prices faster than any horse. The Landers made landfall at New York on 14 July 1834, hiring a Hudson River sloop and then a rickety Erie Canal packet to reach Steuben County, in western New York. There, freshly cleared forest and canal-side warehouses testified to a new America where wheat, hops, and lumber could float east for a fraction of their Old-World cost. Christian filed his intention to become a citizen in 1836 and bought eighty rolling acres near Dansville—land so cheap that he half-suspected a swindle until his first wheat crop fetched hard cash within months. The children grew into the industrial age as surely as their father had grown into the age of revolutions. Johann Frederick, the eldest, kept the homestead and sent grain to Albany on the very ditch the family had ridden west. Johann Christian Jr. married Sophia Wagner, another Saar emigrant, and in 1863 watched their sons draw Union draft numbers from a lacquered drum—their family’s third brush with war in three generations, but this time for a new flag they had chosen themselves. Peter, restless like Sutter, followed the Ohio & Mississippi corridor to Yazoo County, Mississippi, where he mended shoes for both Union soldiers and bewildered freedmen during the wartime occupation of 1863. The twins, Jakob and Maria Catharina, remained in the Genesee Valley: Jakob turned mill-wright just as water-powered flour mills peaked, then learned the hard lessons of technological change when railroads and Chicago grain silos undermined his craft. Meanwhile the inventions once outlined on *Sully*’s deck transformed Christian’s twilight years. In 1844 a telegraph line finally reached Rochester; by 1848 he could read almost-instant dispatches about European revolutions shaking the Rhineland he had left only fourteen years before. When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill that same winter, Christian’s children marveled that the bearded Swiss who shared their crowded berth had sparked a stampede that would wrench the nation westward. Christian died on 1 May 1867, aged eighty-four, carried by rail—another wonder undreamed of in Napoleonic Saarland—to St. Peter’s Cemetery in Wayland. He had lived under three sovereigns without ever leaving his valley, then crossed an ocean to watch a fourth nation tear itself apart and heal again. His story threads the great nineteenth-century currents: the clash of empires, the mass German emigration, the canal and telegraph revolutions, the Gold Rush, and the crucible of America’s Civil War. Through it all, the Landers’ private milestones—births in a French département, a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing, a daughter’s wedding beside a boom-time canal, a grandson’s muster into Union blue—echoed the public events that reshaped continents and stitched together the modern world.
  Person ID	I156	OurNorthernRoots | Andrew's Ancestor
  Last Modified	6 Jul 2025

  
  

  Father	Johann Nikolaus Lander,   b. 27 Jun 1751, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 18 Mar 1811, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany (Age 59 years)
  Mother	Maria Elisabetha Zwalla,   b. 9 Sep 1753, Ottweiler, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 7 May 1811, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany (Age 57 years)
  Marriage	29 Oct 1771	Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany
  Family ID	F1892	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Maria Margarethe Koch,   b. 20 Feb 1784, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. Abt 1856, Dansville, Steuben County, New York, USA (Age 71 years)
  Marriage	3 Oct 1804	Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany
  Children	> 1. Johann Frederick Lander,   b. 4 Feb 1805, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 1860, Dansville, Steuben County, New York, USA (Age 54 years) + 2. Johann Christian Lander, Jr.,   b. 11 Mar 1806, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 19 Nov 1882, Dansville, Steuben County, New York, USA (Age 76 years)   3. Johann Joste Lander,   b. 27 Aug 1807, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany + 4. Peter Lander,   b. 18 Nov 1814, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 11 Feb 1880, Yazoo, Yazoo Co., Mississippi, USA (Age 65 years) + 5. Johann Jakob Lander,   b. 01 May 1817, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 19 Sep 1884, Wayland, Steuben Co., New York, USA (Age 67 years) + 6. Maria Catharina Lander,   b. 01 May 1817, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany d. 23 May 1854, Wayland, Steuben Co., New York, USA (Age 37 years) > 7. Anna Margaretha Lander,   b. 18 Jun 1820, Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany
  Family ID	F328	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	13 Feb 2021

  
  

• Event Map		Birth - 17 May 1782 - Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany Marriage - 3 Oct 1804 - Wiebelskirchen, Neunkirchen, Saarland, Germany Immigrant - Ship: Sully Arrived: 14 Jul 1834 New York City - May 1834 - Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, France Death - 1 May 1867 - Dansville, Steuben County, New York, USA Burial - - St.Peter's Cemetery, Wayland, Steuben Co., New York, USA  = Link to Google Earth
  Pin Legend	: Address       : Location       : City/Town       : County/Shire       : State/Province       : Country       : Not Set