John Arbo (213)

John Arbo (6 January 1713–11 December 1772) was a religious administrator and civil engineer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born in Soerup near Flensburg on the Baltic Sea, he was appointed head of a local school by age eighteen. Six years later, in 1737, he became an instructor in the German writing and arithmetic school of the Marienkirche in Flensburg. By 1742, however, he had left this position and travelled to Herrnhut, where he committed himself to the Moravian Brotherhood. Arbo served the church as a clerk and bookkeeper at Marienborn and Lindheim, taught at Hennersdorf, and in 1756 became secretary of the Administrations-Collegium in Herrnhut before being called to America. In 1760 he immigrated to Pennsylvania, where he was ordained a deacon. He then took on a major administrative role in Bethlehem, assisting in the expansion of the town’s waterworks and helping to design and erect a larger oil mill. His work in hydraulics solicited the approval of John Adams while his experiments in the extraction of oil from sunflower, laurel, and peach seeds were encouraged by the APS. Arbo served as an agent for the missionaries of the United Brethren among the Indians and as steward of the Moravian Brethren’s House at Bethlehem. He was naturalized as a British subject in 1768 and died in 1772, leaving behind a sizeable library containing works on mathematics, mineralogy, medicine, history, religion, geography, and engineering. (PI)