Johan George Sager (or Seger) left Germany in 1737, boarded the Townshead and arrived in Philadelphia, then settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania later that year and married Anna Maria Clotin (or Kloeter) in 1739 in a German community known as Brickerville, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. (Brickerville remains rural today. It sits between Harrisburg and Reading, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania turnpike.) George Sager was born in 1744 and a sister named Elizabeth followed.
George Sager married Maria Elizabeth Sheets in 1767. They had 10 children between 1768 and 1787, including Henry Sager. Henry’s son, Newton, studied medicine at Thomas Jefferson School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and practiced in Allen County, Ohio, near Lima. Newton’s son, also Newton, was also a physician there, and delivered a daughter and her four brothers.
George Sager served two enlistments in the Revolutionary War. He first enlisted on January 3, 1776, when Colonel Robert McGraw formed the Fifth Pennsylvania Regiment, Continental Line. On January 5, 1776, the muster roll of Captain John Miller’s Company includes Private George Sager. He was captured by the British either in Germantown in 1776, or at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. The British sent Private Sager to New York where it is believed he served time on a Prisoner of War ship in New York’s harbor. It is there that he may have learned medical procedures. He later was paroled. It is unknown if he took a loyalty oath, but he next enlisted as a Private in the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania militia in 1779.
The Sager family lived in several places in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia before pulling up stakes and moving to the Ohio wilderness. George and his family and others founded Union County, Ohio, northwest of Columbus around 1805. There, he purchased 100 acres and turned the wilderness into a farm near today’s Unionville Center, Ohio, on the banks of Big Darby Creek. By then George was a practicing physician. His son, Samuel, ran the farm while Dr. Sager made house calls.
Dr. George Sager died in Ohio in 1824 and was among the first buried in what is now Darby Township Cemetery.