Frederick Bell Sr. was born in Germany in 1715. With his wife, Maria Catherine Bauman, they settled in the nearly unbroken wilderness along the Mohawk River, an area occupied by Indians and an earlier colony of German settlers who came to harvest pine trees that could be sold to the English for masts on their ships. The Bells were one of the 7 original families to settle an area they called Andrustown, near the present day site of Warren, New York. During the French and Indian War, the farmers suffered attacks from Canada by the French and their Indian allies. Despite the heroic fighting these German militiamen did to defend the Mohawk Valley for England, the English did not treat the German settlers fairly afterwards. The English took the German's tax payments, yet reneged on agreements to transfer title to the lands the German colonists had settled. When the Revolutionary War began, most of the German colonists sided with the American rebels seeking independence. Now English tories led Indian attacks on these farmers.
THE ANDRUSTOWN MASSACRE. On July 18, 1778 Frederick Bell Jr. was out working in the fields with his two young sons Richard and Adam, plus his elderly father. A band of Indians, led by English tories, attacked, killing and scalping Frederick Bell Sr, his son Frederick Jr, before burning their home. Richard Bell, age 8, was carried off into captivity and would be adopted by an Indian family in Canada. Adam Bell, age 6, managed to hide in the woods with his mother and get safely to Fort Herkimer. Other settlers homes suffered a similar fate and Andrustown was obliterated.
ADAM & EVE BELL. In 1794, when he was 22 years old, Adam married Anna Eva Bauer a woman of German descent. In historical documents, she is often called Eve. Adam and Eve raised a large American family of 7 children on their Herkimer County farm. Their son Henry Bell b. 1803 would later marry Mary Harwick, the widow of Lovell Bass. Adam & Eve's daughter Elizabeth b. 1811 married a frontiersman named Samuel Reese. Elizabeth Bell Reese would name her first son, Adam b. 1819, in honor of her father.
