Early Years.

Christopher Dock was a Mennonite schoolteacher. Little is known of his geographical origin, family, and date of immigration to America. He was probably from the Rhenish Palatinate but left for America in 1718, having spent four years as a teacher in Germany. After his arrival in Philadelphia he went to Skippack in Montgomery County, an area of German settlements about twenty miles from Germantown. There he opened a Mennonite school, where he taught for ten years before taking up farming. In 1735 he bought one hundred acres in Salford Township and three years later went back to teaching, this time at two schools simultaneously: the school in Skippack and another in Salford. He split a six-day teaching week into three days at one school and three at the other, an arrangement that lasted until his death in 1771. He also spent four summers teaching...