What do you know.
There was, however, even an earlier American settling in.
In this book, we learn about
Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.
After her disappointment in a failed prophecy that the End of Days would take place in October 1844, Mrs. Minor determined that the Holy Land was not yet adequately prepared for such an event and decided that it would be her mission to teach the poverty-stricken Jews of Palestine to work the soil. In this very American story, Mrs. Minor, like so many other pioneers of her day, looked to the land as her future.
Minor had a
belief that "she was Esther, summoned by God to go to Mount Zion and 'make ready the land of Israel for the King's return'" (p. 17).
She set sail for Palestine in 1849, and, until her death six years later, she was involved in two agricultural projects whose purpose was to hasten the Second Coming.
The first project at Atras, south of Bethlehem, was in partnership with John Meshullam, a Jewish convert to Christianity. The project had limited success. An extremely complex series of events leading up to and following the dissolution of the partnership involved the British consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, and the American consul in Beirut, J. Horsford Smith, and continued through the diplomatic hierarchy to the American Department of State and British Foreign Office.
The vicinity of Jaffa was the second venue for Minor's attempt at agriculture. The short-lived Mount Hope farm waned after Clorinda Minor's death from dysentery in 1855, closing its doors in 1858 following a Bedouin attack.
A Bedouin "attack"?
On that incident there at Jaffa:
From this book.