Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Gnadenhutten, OH

Gnadenhutten is a village on the Tuscarawas River in Tuscarawas County whose German name means 'Huts of Grace' (or 'Tents of Grace').

Gnadenhutten was founded on October 9, 1772, when the Mohican convert and mission leader Joshua led Mohican and Munsee Christians downriver from Schoenbrunn to settle it under Moravian missionary David Zeisberger.

Gnadenhutten is Ohio's oldest existing European-founded settlement, and by 1775 it had grown to an estimated 200 inhabitants.

In 1781, British-allied Wyandot and Delaware forces forcibly removed Gnadenhutten's Christian Indian residents to Captives' Town on the Sandusky River because the British suspected them of aiding the Americans.

On March 8, 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen murdered about 90 of the Christian Indians — men, women, and children who had returned to Gnadenhutten to harvest their abandoned crops — in the Gnadenhutten massacre, one of the darkest episodes of the Revolutionary War frontier; only two young boys are known to have escaped.

At the centennial of its founding in 1872, Gnadenhutten erected a monument over the martyrs' burial mound inscribed 'Here Triumphed in Death Ninety Christian Indians, March 8, 1782.'

The village established a museum at the massacre site in 1963, and excavations in the 1970s were followed by reconstructions of the Mission House and the cooper's shop at what is now Gnadenhutten Historical Park.

Moravian missionary John Heckewelder built the first house of the re-established town in 1798, and the Moravians rebuilt their church in 1903 as a memorial to him.

The later village prospered as a Tuscarawas County trading hub with the arrival of the Ohio and Erie Canal in the 1820s and 1830s and a railroad stop in the 1850s.

Gnadenhutten had 1,240 residents at the 2020 census and is part of the New Philadelphia–Dover micropolitan area.