In May 1831, emigrants from Germany’s Odenwald region began a 400 mile journey through Darmstadt and Kassel to Bremen, where they sailed for America in late July aboard the British vessel Famous Dove, bound for Baltimore, Maryland. The families included Arras, Beach, Bosse, Essinger, Gossman, Heilman, Luniak, Price, Traucht, Wilch, and others. Aside from poor food, the usual hardships of ocean travel, and the burial at sea of two children, including an infant, the voyage was uneventful until a northwest storm struck when they were near America. The ship was blown off course, lost its mast and then its rudder, and on September 16 began taking on water faster than the sailors could pump it out. Around midnight, with all on the upper deck and the ship sinking in darkness, the captain, who had been under the influence of liquor since leaving Bremen, ordered a lifeboat launched so he could escape. Johann Adam Tracht, leader of the emigrants and a veteran of Napoleon’s campaigns, armed six men with guns he had brought to America for hunting and prevented anyone from abandoning the passengers. During the crisis, fourteen-year-old Margaret Arras spoke of Christ stilling the waves and began singing a hymn; the emigrants soon joined her, along with most of the sailors. The ship sank no further, the waves diminished, and at daylight they discovered they had drifted onto a sand bar off the Virginia coast east of Norfolk near Cape Henry. The unmarried men stayed aboard until the children and parents had landed, and Tracht was the last to leave the wreck. On shore, Black people gathered to help, the first such people the immigrants had ever seen, and many of the survivors knelt in gratitude for their deliverance. They vowed that each year on that day they would hold a Schiffbrunchsgottesdienst, or shipwreck thanksgiving festival, in remembrance of their terror and rescue, and the observance continued. In 1832, passengers from the wreck settled in this area and helped establish Trinity, Jenera, and St. Paul’s, Jenera; St. Paul’s later developed Good Hope, Arlington, and St. John’s, Dola. Shipwreck Sunday honors the conviction of these early settlers as they worked to establish life and witness in this new world.