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David Zeisberger (April 11, 1721 – November 17, 1808) was a Moravian Church and missionary among the Native American tribes who resided in the Thirteen Colonies. He established communities of Christian Munsee (Lenape) converts to Christianity in the valley of the Muskingum River in Ohio; and for a time, near modern-day Amherstburg, Ontario.
In 1739, Zeisberger was influential in the development of a Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and was there at its dedication on Christmas Eve 1741. Four years later, at the invitation of Hendrick Theyanoguin, he came to live among the Mohawk Nation. He became fluent in the Onondaga language and assisted Conrad Weiser in negotiating an alliance between the Thirteen Colonies and the Iroquois in Onondaga (near present-day Syracuse, New York). Zeisberger also produced dictionaries and religious works in Iroquoian and Algonquian,Eben Horsford (editor) (1887) Zeisberger's Indian Dictionary : English, German, Iroquois, Algonquin, Cambridge Massachusetts making him the father of Lenape writing
|350px]]Zeisberger began as a missionary to Native American peoples following his ordination as a Moravian minister in 1749. He worked in Kuskusky among the Lenape of Pennsylvania, focusing his efforts on converting as many Indians as possible to Christianity. He was the senior missionary of the United Brethren (as the Moravians sometimes referred to themselves) among the Indians. His relations with the British took a turn for the worse during the American Revolutionary War (as they suspected he was providing aid to the American patriots, and in 1781 he was and Prison at Fort Detroit. While he was detained, ninety-six of his Native converts in Gnadenhutten, Ohio were brutally murdered by Pennsylvania militiamen, an event known as the Gnadenhutten Massacre.
After Zeisberger was released, violent conflicts with other Native tribes and the expansion of white settlement forced many Moravian Christian settlements to relocate to present-day Michigan and Ontario. A large group of Munsee moved there in 1782, but Zeisberger later returned to live the rest of his life among the Native converts remaining near the village of Goshen (in present Goshen Township, Tuscarawas County, Ohio). Zeisberger spent a period of 62 years, excepting a few short intervals, as a missionary among the Indians. He died on November 17, 1808, at Goshen, Ohio, on the river Tuscarawas, at the age of 87. Zeisberger is buried in Goshen.
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